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We are excited to announce that we have awarded $330,000 to our inaugural class of Time’s Up, Measure Up grantees. These research projects will be an integral part of the initiative’s effort to fill in data gaps around how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting women, across their complex and multifaceted identities. This collection of research contains a rich array of topics across various industries, job types, policy areas, and new modes of inquiry to address the structural inequities that have kept women, especially BIPOC women and workers in low-paying jobs, from staying and succeeding at work.

The seven Time’s Up, Measure Up projects are below:

• Let Us Exhale: Advancing an Equitable COVID-19 Recovery by Centering Black Women
  Insight Center for Community Economic Development team: Anne Price, President; Jhumpa Bhattacharya, VP of Programs and Strategies; Andrea Flynn, Senior Fellow
  

This project tackles the pernicious effects of occupational segregation across four major U.S. cities. The study will inform COVID-19 relief efforts by improving labor market outcomes for Black women, which will, in turn, uplift all Americans.

• Exploring The Legal Response to Unpredictable Scheduling Burdens for Women in the Workplace
  Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University team: Lindsay Cloud, Director of the Policy Surveillance Program; Scott Burris, Professor of Law; Sophia Mitchell, Law and Policy Analyst; DeAnna Baumle, Law and Policy Analyst; Katrina Makarova, Finance Manager

To further study the disproportionate impact of unpredictable scheduling for women in the workplace during COVID-19, this project uses the scientific practice of legal epidemiology to analyze trends in these laws as a factor in promoting public health.

• Examining the Exploitation, and Well-being, of the Early Care and Education Workforce
  Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at UC Berkeley team: Lea Austin, Director; Abby Copeman Petig, Research Director; Yoonjeon Kim, Research Associate; Elena Montoya, Research and Policy Associate; Jenna McKnight, Research and Policy Associate

This project leverages large-scale survey data and qualitative data to understand how the pandemic has impacted the well-being of early educators and how conditions may vary among Black, Latinx, Immigrant, and White women in this sector.

• On the Basis of Gender: Inequality in Precarious Working Conditions between Cisgender, Transgender, and Nonbinary Workers during COVID19
  Daniel Schneider, Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Sociology, Harvard University and Co-Principal Investigator, Shift Project; Danya Lagos, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley; Rebecca Wolfe, Graduate student, UC San Francisco; Elaine Zundl, Project Manager, Shift Project, Harvard Kennedy School

Leveraging original data from the Shift Project, this project analyzes the degree of job quality by gender identity and estimates inequities among cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary workers across the retail and food service sectors.

• Wear and Care: The Impact of COVID-19 on Health Care Workers’ Employment Decisions
  University of Minnesota team: Janette Dill, Associate Professor, School of Public Health; Jane VanHeuvelen, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology; Tom VanHeuvelen, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology; Christina Ewig, Professor, Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Director, Center on Women, Gender and Public Policy

This project examines the impact of the pandemic on the employment patterns of direct care workers in the health care sector and how these workers anticipate the pandemic will shape their future labor market decisions.

• Policy, Action, and Emancipation in the Age of Covid: Coworker.org Listening, Healing, and Leadership Development Collectives for BIPOC Women
  Wilneida Negrón, Director of Policy and Research, Coworker.org; Michelle Miller, Co-Director, Coworker.org; Kortni Malone, Director of Leadership Development, Coworker.org; Liaya Arrington, Research co-designer and community leader ; Holiday Simmons, Founder of Southern Soul Wellness

This project seeks to capture holistically the challenges that Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other women of color are facing while navigating the pandemic labor market. Additionally, this project puts forth new methods and metrics for understanding the unpaid labor of many BIPOC women in supporting their families and communities.

• The Gendered Impact of COVID-19 in Hawai‘i
  Amanda Shaw, Lead Researcher; Leela Bilmes Goldstein, Executive Director, Women’s Fund of Hawai‘i

This project sheds a light on the gendered impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hawaiʻi, with a focus on key economic and social issues from an intersectional feminist perspective. Building on existing research, this study utilizes a collaborative approach with gender and economic justice partners with results that will be widely applicable in other states as well.

Funding considerations were based on several standard criteria, including project relevance, originality and potential impact of work, and project feasibility and methodological rigor. Additionally, we prioritized projects that demonstrated a deep understanding of the various forms of structural inequities that impact women and workers in low-paying jobs and projects that were unlikely to receive funding elsewhere.

These seven projects embody the mission of the Time’s Up, Measure Up initiative, a project under TIME’S UP Impact Lab, which was built to measure the gendered and racialized impact of the structural inequities in the workplace. This impressive group of researchers also reflect our commitment to diversity and equity: the majority of the researchers are women, representing a wide range of racial backgrounds, organizations, and geographies across the United States.

Join us in congratulating these researchers and please stay tuned for more information on their work as well as our second request for proposals coming this summer.

This report was made possible with the support of Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company created by Melinda French Gates.