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Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a War on Poverty and enlisted Sargent Shriver to oversee it, the most important social issue of our day is once again the dire economic straits of millions of Americans. 1 in 3 Americans today live in poverty or teeter on the brink. 70 million are women and the children who depend on them. The fragile economic status of millions of American women is the shameful secret of the modern era-yet these women are also our greatest hope for change, and our nation's greatest undervalued asset.
The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Pushes Back from the Brink asks-and answers-big questions. Why are millions of women financially vulnerable when others have made such great progress? Why are millions of women struggling to make ends meet even though they are hard at work? What is it about our nation-government, business, family, and even women themselves-that drives women to the financial brink? And what is at stake?
To answer these questions, we examined in detail three major cultural and economic changes over the past 50 years:
- Women work more outside the home, but still earn less than men.
- Women lead more families on their own.
- Women today need higher education to enter the middle class.
To forge a path forward that recognizes this reality, The Shriver Report brought together a power packed roster of big thinkers and talented contributors, including Hillary Clinton, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Lebron James, and challenged them to collaborate with us to develop fresh thinking around practical solutions. This report's unique combination of academic research, personal reflections, authentic photojournalism, groundbreaking poll results, front line workers, and box office celebrities, is all focused on a single issue of national importance: women and the economy. In The Shriver Report, Davos meets Main Street.
