Women have yet to get even a quarter of the seats in Congress, but we make up over half the population.

The first Year of the Woman was 1992, when a number of women were elected to the Senate. A lot of elections since then have been dubbed that as well, and the 2010 midterms were supposed to be another female sweep, yet their numbers actually declined slightly in that election.

But taking a step back for a bit, this chart makes it seem a little silly to say that any year has truly been a Year of the Woman for the United States Congress (h/t Andrew Sullivan):

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

The chart comes from a new report by the Congressional Research Service on the demographics of Congress. Note the highest value in the vertical axis of the first chart is just 18 percent. We haven't broken that mark in either the Senate or the House yet, even though women are over half the American population. It's been almost 100 years since the first woman was elected to Congress (not to mention that we've had the vote since 1920), yet we haven't even taken a quarter of the seats yet.

I've discussed the many reasons women don't run for office before. A lot of them are hardwired through socialization into women's heads at a young age. This is a systemic problem that doesn't have many quick fixes. But it's clear that we're doing a pitiful job of making our political representation look like an actual representation of our people.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

If we put women back to work, lifted them out of poverty, and funded social services they rely on, fewer women would turn to abortion.

It seems the cat's finally out of the bag these days: conservatives aren't just concerned with saving the babies from abortions when it comes to reproductive rights. They are now outspoken about being against access to contraception -- and some of them have even come out against non-procreative sex. Women's rights activists have long warned that they were coming for our birth control; now it's hard to deny they were right all along.

One big clue this whole time has been a simple fact: if conservatives are so hell-bent on preventing abortions, one of the best things they can do is support family planning services and access to contraception. Yet the last time we saw an openly pro-family planning Republican was the '80s, when George H.W. Bush was in office. Meanwhile, all Republican 2012 candidates have signed personhood pledges that endanger many forms of contraception, Santorum himself has said birth control is bad, and I've lost track of how many times Republicans have tried to defund Planned Parenthood, which supplies contraception to low-income women. But as Irin Carmon laid out, the connection between increasing access to contraception and lowering abortion rates is very clear.

There's another clue that this isn't about saving the babies. It's the blind eye conservatives have turned to the economic factors that are leading more women to turn to abortion. A new report, "Abortionomics: When Choice is a Necessity," shows that "lower incomes and rising unemployment are affecting Americans' choices about pregnancies," and in the recession abortion rates, particularly among poor women, are on the rise. Stephanie Poggi of the National Network of Abortion Funds says, "A lot of women are... telling us, 'I've already put off paying my rent, my electric bill; I'm cutting back on my food.' They've run through all the options." In lean times, a child can seem like an overwhelming expense.

It's not terribly shocking that when incomes are strapped, millions are out of a job, and many are falling into poverty, women are thinking twice about having a child. Raising a kid in this country is not a cheap undertaking. For a two-parent couple making under $57,600, the USDA estimates the costs of raising a young child to be $10,950 a year. The total cost of taking care of that child until he or she turns 18 averaged $226,920 in 2010, up nearly 40 percent over the last decade. As one woman in the report puts it, "I totally cannot afford another child. I knew immediately [upon learning about her pregnancy] what I had to do."

Those without a job don't have the income to cover these kinds of expenses. Over 12 million people are unemployed right now; almost 6 million of those are women. One unemployed woman in the report who chose abortion says, "At this time I am not working and neither is my partner... We are unable to support a child under our present circumstances." If Republicans are concerned about reversing the rise in abortion rates, they need to focus on putting people back to work making decent pay. Putting women to work in large part means spending money at the state level to keep them on public payrolls.

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

But even after women are back at work, we still have to wrestle with a big factor: the high number of women living in poverty who seek abortions. One study found that 69 percent of women having abortions in 2008 made incomes lower than 200 percent of the poverty line, while women in that income category make up only 35 percent of the overall population. In fact, the report says, "while abortion rates generally have declined over the last 20 years...rates have increased among low-income women." And a lot of women have been falling into that category lately. Recent Census numbers show that women's poverty rate rose to 14.5 percent in 2010, the highest since 1993. Their "extreme poverty rate" -- those whose income is less than half of the federal poverty line -- is at 6.3 percent, the highest on record.

The link between addressing poverty and lowering the abortion rate may be uncomfortable for conservatives like Mitt "I don't care about the very poor" Romney, but it's one of the most important factors. As the report notes, "low income women often have difficulty affording preventive contraception and sometimes address this problem by reducing frequency or dosage use, thereby increasing the risk of unintended pregnancy in the group most likely to decide they are unable to afford to support an additional dependent."

And lastly, the point conservatives may enjoy the least: we need to increase spending on social services. As the report puts it, "As funding for social services declines, more women may be expected to determine that economic constraints make abortion the only viable option." The report is mostly talking about services that provide access to contraception. But there are other services that we're cutting back on that will impact the decision to have a child. For example, 37 states pulled back on child care support in 2010 due to tight budgets. Yet the average cost of full-time care ranges from $3,600 to $18,200 annually. That's a huge part of the cost of raising a child, but we're giving parents less support to pay for it.

Women choose to terminate pregnancies for all sorts of reasons and should be able to access abortion care when they do. Tight budgets aren't the only reason to choose not to have a child. But economic factors that prevent families from having children should be high on conservatives' list. If we ease those families' financial situations, they may not have to turn to terminating a pregnancy. But instead conservatives are fighting access to contraceptives, cutting off funding for services that would make life easier for women living in poverty, and blocking job creation policies.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

Ex-felons -- who are disproportionately African American -- still struggle to find jobs and obtain equal justice.

Every year, Black History Month celebrates the contributions of African Americans that have broken down barriers and made great strides. The civil rights movement in particular has become a large focus, with people reminiscing about civil disobedience, acts of non-violence, and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But many have a distorted image of the progression of African Americans, assuming that civil rights struggles are a thing of the past. Though African Americans have struggled to gain access to full rights as American citizens, a new generation of second-class citizenship has developed. What was once a category based on race has now transformed into a classification associated with those who hold criminal records. And the biggest barrier they face is the ability to get a job after being released.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was the largest full-scale response to decades of Jim Crow laws that limited African American participation as citizens. This system of segregation was designed to ensure that black people would continue to be oppressed after the end of slavery and was reinforced through fear, skewed policies, and force. Although these archaic laws have been removed from the books, today's policies have resulted in a new system of mass incarceration that is replicating the second-class citizenry of the Jim Crow era.

Just as Jim Crow once directly targeted African Americans, mass incarceration continues to fall disproportionately on communities of color. Those arrested and incarcerated due to drug offenses are overwhelming African American. As a result, Africans Americans and other minorities are sentenced to incarceration at rates significantly disproportionate to whites. However, this system doesn't just focus on ethnic background -- it also affects low-income communities across the nation at a similar rate.

Although white-only signs and lynch mobs may no longer strike fear into black communities, these Americans with criminal records are faced with the daily fear of being stopped and frisked by officers and the anxiety that the prison door can re-open repeatedly -- not for committing a crime, but for simply missing an appointment with a parole officer or the failure to pay a court fee. While Jim Crow deliberately disenfranchised blacks through literacy tests, today we openly deny ex-felons the right to participate in the democratic process. Voting rights have yet to be formerly restored for all second-class citizens in America.

But the greatest struggle this oppressed community continues to face is the inability to obtain legitimate work due to the negative stigma of criminal records.

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

With our prison population nearly 2.3 million, the number of Americans with criminal records is large and on the rise. A criminal record eliminates someone's access to jobs, housing, education, social services, and voting rights. Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, explains that mass incarceration operates as the Jim Crow South once did, creating tightly networked systems of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that reinforce a subordinate status. The civil rights movement and the passage of the Civil Rights Act were once signifiers of the advancement of equal opportunity for everyone, no matter race or national origin. Yet today individuals with criminal records continue to live in a state of segregation from the rest of society.

I spoke with a friend of mine who falls into this category and has been turned away from job after job after serving seven months in prison for a drug-related felony. He participated in one of Arizona's rehabilitation programs that help inmates prepare to find a job after being released from prison. Yet he struggles daily with looking for a job, being unable to qualify for basic necessities such as food stamps, and the constant fear of harassment from officers, all due to his drug felony.

He explained that after applying to six jobs last week, he was hired as a chef. He was ecstatic to have finally found a job. But the next day the company told him that corporate said they could not hire him.

Our policies suppress all individuals with criminal records through one application question: Have you ever been arrested or convicted? While most Americans have the privilege of overlooking this question, it creates barriers for all individuals with criminal histories, particularly with no federal law prohibiting employers for discriminating against individuals with criminal records. Instead, the question allows employers to immediately disregard an application for merely answering yes. KG explained that employers "try to tell you that this won't affect you, but I know it does." Therefore the "first thing I look at on an application is if it asks for a felony or something. If yes, I won't bother because I don't get called back." Experiences like KG's have become normalized, promoting unequal social standards.

This month, Americans across the nation will celebrate the progress of African Americans in the United States. But we can't neglect the caste system that continues to disproportionately affect this community. Mass incarceration has diminished the gains accomplished during the civil rights movement and expanded second-class citizenship to 2.3 million people confined in prisons and millions labeled as criminals, ex-offenders, and convicts. As we remain certain about the great strides of the civil rights movement, we must understand that a new subordinate group has been constructed. Policies and social standards once explicitly targeted African Americans on the basis of skin color; today they creates barriers to employment, education, social services, and voting due to criminal histories.

May Mgbolu is the Senior Fellow for Equal Justice at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a senior at the University of Arizona.

By assuming women are default child caretakers, the Census devalues care work, puts pressure on women, and ignores fathers completely.

Anyone who knows me will be shocked to hear that I may agree with Rick Santorum on something. But while he was in the midst of ranting against radical feminists back in 2005, Santorum said this: "We need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America." He even makes a point of saying this "goes for men and women." In my twisted reading of what he was actually trying to say, Santorum may be more progressive on this point than our own government. Because when it comes to the Census Bureau's data collection efforts on child care, its definitions are based on long-held, yet unhelpful, ideas of who does the care work at home. (Hint: it doesn't go for men and women.)

The Census regularly reports who cares for children when parents work in its report "Who's Minding the Kids?" A trove of data on child care arrangements in the U.S., given the lack of support for families with working parents and the dearth of affordable options, is exciting. But it goes about classifying things all wrong. On page one of the most recent report, it lays out some basic terms. And, I quote, "In households where both parents are present, the mother is the designated parent." What is couched in the dressing of scientific term is really a judgment: that women are the default caretakers. Minding Johnny and Susie is only dad's concern if mom's not around. Otherwise it's something that she just does. But then it does away with even this term to say, "In this report, unless otherwise noted, the term parent is used to refer to the designated parent." Dad gets booted from even counting as a parent, not just the designated one. So what is dad then? Just some guy who lives in the same house who sometimes stands in as a child care arrangement.

But it gets worse. If mom's not around to talk to the Census, dad isn't even empowered to know anything about how his kids are cared for. "If the mother is not available for an interview, the father of the child can give proxy responses for her." But he will never be a real source of information on child care duties. Because he's rarely ever going to be doing it: "The survey only asked about child care provided by the father for the time the designated parent was working." What dad would deign to care for his kids if mom's around to do it for him?

The Census claims it is simply trying to collect data based on "gender norms," as Lynda Laughlin of the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch told the New York Times' KJ Dell'Antonia. "Regardless of how much families have changed over the last 50 years women are still primarily responsible for work in the home," she points out. A mother is "not only caring for the child only while Dad works. She's probably caring for the child 24 hours and so Dad is able to go to work regardless."

Laughlin is probably correct in her estimation of the gender norms women face. But why replicate these pernicious ideas? This misconception that women are default caretakers reverberates throughout the entire workforce.

Check out “The 99 Percent Plan,” a new Roosevelt Institute/Salon essay series on the progressive vision for the economy.

In a controversial article riffing off the "opt-out revolution" trend of a few years ago, Linda Hirshman talks about the fact that many college-educated women who hold jobs choose to stay home -- sometimes even before kids arrive on the scene. Whether you may quibble with her data-mining methods, she makes a vital point as to why this might happen: women are still responsible for child care and homemaking, a fact that hasn't really changed even as women have flooded the workforce. The fact that women are thought of as default caretakers -- by their husbands, their workplaces, their society, and even themselves -- plays out in very specific ways. Hirshman writes:

The economic temptation is to assign the cost of child care to the woman's income. If a woman making $50,000 per year whose husband makes $100,000 decides to have a baby, and the cost of a full-time nanny is $30,000, the couple reason that, after paying 40 percent in taxes, she makes $30,000, just enough to pay the nanny. So she might as well stay home. This totally ignores that both adults are in the enterprise together and the demonstrable future loss of income, power, and security for the woman who quits.

Hirsman postulates that this is due to a lack of transformation in the home. But it's also a lack of transformation at work. If by and large women are still being paid less than men for the same work, then it will be easier to think of her lower salary as the most expendable. And her family wouldn't be faced with such stark economic choices if we supported parents who work. There's no such thing as guaranteed maternal leave -- the Census itself recently found that half of mothers don't get any leave at all. We have some family leave policies in place but many workers fall through the cracks. And not to mention that there are few quality, affordable, and accessible child care options for parents who don't rely on family members. We're still making it difficult to be a working parent, let alone a working mother.

The fallout from assuming that one gender just naturally "does" care work goes beyond the family. It devalues care work itself. This is a large part of why domestic workers are still fighting to be protected by national labor laws after having been excluded on the grounds that what they do is "babysitting" or offering "companionship." Because of these exclusions, our 1.7 million home care workers have been excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections. That means employers aren't required to pay them for all of their work hours, reimburse them for costs incurred as part of work, or pay them time-and-a-half for working over 40 hours a week. All of this adds up to pathetic pay: in 2009 the median wage of $9.34 an hour added up to just $20,283 a year. President Obama just nixed this exclusion for home health aides, but child care workers are still working outside labor laws.

It also impacts working women by assuming that they will interrupt or leave their careers to care for children without asking whether men should share that burden. A UC Berkeley study on California's child care system puts it this way: "Workers' careers are disrupted because of child care failure -- care that is unreliable, unaffordable, or just unavailable -- and these workers are usually women." This leads to lower pay and benefits, getting us back into the Catch-22 of the gender wage gap.

The opt-out trend wouldn't be that bad, however, if it weren't weighted to one gender. If a parent wants to stay home with the children, fine by me. But it shouldn't be assumed that women will be the ones to do it. We should see just as many stay-at-home dads as moms. The stereotypes that the Census relied on, however, simply add weight to the pressure on women to be the ones to leave their careers. And this obviously harms fathers as well. Why disqualify the care work they do while mom is at home? Why can't we assume that they would want to stay home?

Parroting outdated notions of the workforce, women's roles, and care work makes these problems worse. All it would take is to change a few words and ask slightly different questions for the Census to stop being part of the problem. Shouldn't be so much to ask given what's at stake.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.