Women’s Equality Day is held on August 26th and commemorates the anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which gave some, but not all, women the right to vote. Today, more than 100 years later, Women’s Equality Day is still so important because many of the issues that the suffragists fought for – like equal pay and reproductive justice – are still being fought for today. This Women’s Equality Day takes place just 70 days before the 2024 election.

This presidential campaign was unprecedented for many reasons, one of which is that Kamala Harris made history as the first woman of color to accept a major political party’s presidential nomination. But people don’t vote for a president because he’s “first,” they vote because they believe the candidate will help shape policies that will positively impact their lives. This election will especially depend on voter turnout, says Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund.

“There’s been a lot of talk about voters who don’t always turn out to vote because they don’t always hear candidates talking about the issues that really matter to their lives, the things they talk about at the kitchen table with family and friends,” says Goss Graves. “In this election, those issues have been front and center. Voters in this country have made it pretty clear that they overwhelmingly want to see progress on reproductive freedom. They want investments in child care and elder care and disability care and paid leave and safe and inclusive schools.”

Given the previous administration’s restrictions on reproductive rights, policies affecting women and girls have been especially important in this election. Before you exercise your right to vote, read on to learn where Harris and Trump stand on some of the most important policy issues affecting women (and, by extension, all people).

Reproductive rights

The two candidates’ differing views on abortion rights have been clear: Harris said in her Democratic acceptance speech that she would work to codify the federal right to abortion. President Trump, on the other hand, chose the Supreme Court justices who struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion, leading to abortion bans or tightened restrictions in 22 states. In his current campaign, Trump is standing behind his role in overturning Roe v. Wade and believes that abortion rights should be decided by individual states, not the federal government.

“I want people to be clear that reproductive freedom is on the ballot in every corner of this country, whether there’s a formal referendum or not,” says Goss Graves. “Because the question people are going to be asking in the next Congress and for the next president is: Are you going to enable people to access the care they want and need in their communities, or are you going to set us back even further and continue to punish people for accessing basic reproductive health care? Those are the two ways.”

Child tax allowance

Both Vice President Harris and former President Trump’s vice presidential nominee JD Vance have proposed expanding the child tax credit. The current child tax credit is $2,000 per child for single parents earning up to $200,000 a year or for couples earning up to $400,000 a year.

Vance proposed a CTC of $5,000 per child with no income limit. Harris proposed a CTC of $6,000 for the first year of a child’s life because families with young children face higher costs for diapers, car seats, formula, and higher child care fees.

Additionally, Harris proposed reinstating the American Rescue Plan Act’s 2021 changes to the CTC, including making the CTC fully refundable, meaning you’ll get the credit even if you don’t earn enough to owe the full amount of the CTC. This would especially help women, since they make up the majority of the lowest-paid workers. Sydney Petersen, spokesperson for the NWLC Action Fund, says this is important because the 2021 changes have helped families put food on the table, pay their bills, handle unexpected expenses, and work more hours, in addition to leading to a historic reduction in poverty among women and children.

JD Vance did not specify whether his CTC proposal would include these key expansions for 2021. Without including expansions such as a fully reimbursable CTC, female-headed households would be less likely to benefit because women make up the majority of the lowest-paid workers and therefore do not earn enough to qualify for a $5,000 CTC.

Paid vacation

The United States is the only industrialized country without a national paid leave policy, and yet 85% of U.S. voters in swing states support paid family and medical leave. Statistically, women, people of color, and low-income earners are the least likely to have access to paid leave.

When she ran for office in 2019, Harris proposed a six-month federal paid leave policy. and the DNC just passed a 2024 policy platform that includes a plan to “create America’s first full-fledged national paid family and medical leave program. It guarantees every American worker up to 12 weeks of paid leave to care for a newborn child or loved one, to recover from illness, in cases of domestic violence, or during military deployments.”

The Republican platform, on the other hand, makes no mention of paid family and medical leave. In 2020, Donald Trump signed the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act, which provides paid parental leave only to certain categories of federal employees but does not cover sick leave or private sector employees. In 2020, Trump supported a bill that would have given new parents a temporary $5,000 loan to be repaid through reductions in their future CTC benefits. So parents would essentially have borrowed money from their future selves instead of receiving paid leave. The benefit would have only been available to new parents. A paid leave bill that only covers parental leave but not life events like medical issues or caring for aging parents is not truly paid leave for all, Peterson says.

Affordable childcare and care for ageing parents

The 2024 State of Parenting survey found that only about 40% of respondents feel supported by their employer, and a staggering 95% of parents believe the government should provide more support to working parents. The lack of affordable child care costs the U.S. economy $122 billion annually. In addition, there are about 11 million Americans in the “sandwich generation” who care for both children and aging parents.

Harris co-sponsored the Child Care for Working Families Act in 2017, which would have capped childcare costs for certain parents at 7% of household income. As vice president, Harris has pushed several initiatives to support caregivers, including a new rule to reduce childcare costs for more than 100,000 working families who receive federal child care assistance and lowering costs for families by strengthening the federal Child Care Assistance Program. She was also a key proponent of the administration’s Build Back Better Act, which originally proposed a historic $390 billion investment in child care and pre-K. The DNC’s platform proposes creating a universal pre-K program for four-year-olds and “guaranteeing affordable, high-quality child care for millions of working families for less than $10 a day per child.”

In 2018, Trump signed a $2.37 billion increase in federal child care subsidies to states to make it easier for families to afford child care. In 2019, Trump held a summit on child care and paid leave, but it resulted in no new action. His current campaign platform makes no mention of affordable child care or caring for aging parents, and the care economy was not mentioned in his RNC speech. When asked during the debate against President Biden if he wanted to make child care affordable, Trump ignored the issue.

Equal pay

The wage gap has yet to close, and the cost for women, who earn an average of 84 cents on the dollar compared to men, adds up to a loss of nearly $400,000 over the course of a 40-year career. For Latinas, Indigenous women and Black women, the losses amount to about $1 million or more over their lifetime, meaning many women of color would have to work until age 80 or 90 — beyond their life expectancy — to ever catch up.

Although neither candidate has included an official pay equity program in their current 2024 campaign, past actions are good indicators of their stance on future pay discrimination policies. As a senator in the 116th Congress, Harris co-sponsored the Paycheck Fairness Act, which does things like protect workers from being fired if they discuss their pay at work, prohibit employers from asking about pay history so the gender and racial pay gap doesn’t continue, and mandates the EEOC’s collection of pay information to bring pay disparities to light. During her 2020 presidential campaign, Harris released a pay equity plan that would require companies to share data proving they pay workers equal pay for equal work or face fines that would be invested in implementing universal paid family and medical leave.

On the other hand, Trump’s actions so far have set us back in closing the wage gap. Collecting wage data is key to closing the gap because companies can’t change what they don’t know. In 2017, the Trump administration blocked a major equal pay data collection initiative that required large employers to report wage data by race, ethnicity, gender and job category. A federal judge later ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the data collection.

Women’s Equality Day celebrates an amendment that gave some women the right to vote. We cannot take this right for granted as we continue to fight for policy changes that impact women’s daily lives and their ability to provide for themselves and their families, such as equal pay, affordable child care, and paid vacation.