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We work hard to get our efforts noticed by the media and are so proud when this goal comes to fruition. A well informed community is an empowered one as well, so take a look at some of the latest coverage we’ve received below and help spread the word about the
Wyoming Women's Action Network.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | October 12, 2023
Women are driving recent gains in the U.S. labor force and the nation’s record low unemployment. Unfortunately, the same women — women aged 25-29, in particular — are leaving the Equality State. And they’re leaving our state at twice the rate of men the same age.
US News & World Report | August 14, 2023
Wyoming women face a large pay gap, higher-than-average maternal mortality and unequal representation in state government. ... [WWAN Founder Jen] Simon says, “I want this state to be a great place for all of the young women I know who have gone to college to come back and live their lives, raise their families.”
Simon: SF 133 threatens the well-being of all girls in Wyoming
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | February 25, 2023
What we are doing with this legislation — legislation that very specifically targets a tiny number of already vulnerable young people in Wyoming — also sends messages to tens of thousands of girls in Wyoming. ... We are risking the opportunity for all girls to participate in sports.
KUER | May 20, 2022
Female political representation is also low at the municipal level ... “So I want to just emphasize that there's sort of a larger obstacle somewhere in our system here in Wyoming that we're not getting more women in office at any level right now,” Simon said.
KUNC | May 18, 2022
“If you had a paid parental leave policy across the board, you would really be signaling that we do want new moms to be here. We do want parents of young children to be here. And I think that that's whether we're talking about maternal leave or paternal leave,” Simon said.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | April 7, 2022
When it comes to electing women, the Equality State has some work to do. In Wyoming, just 16 of 90 state legislators, 16 of 93 county commissioners and 19 of 99 mayors are women. New data from the Center for American Women and Politics shows that the Equality State trails the national average for women in municipal office by 10 percentage points and ranks 48th overall for women in elected office.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | February 16, 2022
Fairness in women’s sports starts with properly enforcing Title IX and adhering to the local guidelines already in place. It does not start with an unnecessary bill that questions young athletes and their opportunities to participate in youth sports.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | February 10, 2022
We know that Medicaid expansion is vital for all 25,000 Wyomingites who would gain health insurance. But accessing basic health care is especially important for new moms, their babies and working women in Wyoming. We don’t talk about these populations as much as we should. But they deserve our support.
Ms. Magazine | December 17, 2022
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment! Founder of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network, Jen Simon, had a terrific piece in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle about the merits of returning to multi-seat districts and adopting ranked-choice voting to elect more women to office in the state:
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | December 11, 2021
Research shows that women are elected more often in multi-member districts than in single-member districts. Multi-member districts are simply electoral districts that send more than one representative to office. They’re also called multi-winner districts—meaning there is more than one winner—and they confer a lot of benefits for voters.
Casper Star Tribune | November 28, 2021
There are now five female senators and 11 female representatives in the statehouse, increasing the proportion of women to almost 18%. Still, among the 50 states, Wyoming ranks sixth from the bottom, an especially poor performance considering Wyoming was once a national leader in women’s suffrage. “We still have those issues even at the municipal level, where the meetings are more consistent and they are closer to home,” said Natalia D. Macker, chair of the Teton County Board of County Commissioners and the co-founder of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network.
Cowboy State Daily | November 22. 2021
Wyoming came in near the bottom in a new report that shows the gender parity in state legislatures across the nation. Research organization Wyoming Women’s Action Network pointed out that Wyoming’s legislators are not offered certain benefits to make policies, unlike some states such as California and Michigan, which have full-time legislators and pay them tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Casper Star Tribune | September 25, 2021
Both men and women can be affected by threats of violence in politics, but violence against women in politics tends to be overtly gender-based. It targets women because of their gender. ... All people deserve an equal opportunity to participate in civic engagement at all levels and public life.
Casper Star Tribune | August 4, 2021
One of the reasons that women lost jobs and businesses lost key employees? Because as the pandemic revealed — and as parents, business owners, and early childhood education professionals have long known — childcare, paid and unpaid, is the work that makes all other work possible. And women still shoulder most of those care responsibilities.
Casper Star Tribune | July 6, 2021
We talk a lot about jobs and family in Wyoming. They are the cornerstone of our lives together, the foundation of our values, and the backbone of our state. What we don’t talk enough about is who’s holding up these essential mainstays: Wyoming women.
JH News&Guide | June 27, 2021
What I hope this column has done and will continue to do is illuminate — just a little — the ways that getting “back to normal” might not serve everyone in our community, especially women. As we begin to re-emerge after a wildly challenging 16 months, we have the unprecedented opportunity to come back together in a way that really does work for everyone — by investing in what makes communities whole, healthy and economically viable.
JH News&Guide | May 5, 2021
Childcare has exploded into the national conversation for all the reasons that it has been part of the local conversation for years: There simply isn’t enough quality, affordable care to support our working families.
WyoFile | March 12, 2021
In Wyoming, there are two problems related to minimum wage. The first is the minimum wage itself. The second problem related to minimum wage is the one we often overlook: Nearly three out of four minimum-wage workers in Wyoming are women. Most of those women are supporting families.
March 3, 2021
Just in time for Women’s History Month and the start of the Wyoming Legislature in Cheyenne, some nonpartisan voices for women have dropped an important policy brief. Wyoming Women’s Foundation and Equality State Policy Center released a six-page brief — researched by the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center at the University of Wyoming — on Wyoming women in elected roles.
Casper Star Tribune | February 12, 2021
The fight over Rep. Liz Cheney — not to mention Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Speaker Pelosi and AOC and Hillary (still Hillary, always Hillary) — gives political cover to bad actors.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | February 10, 2021
At a time when the world has determined that descriptive pronouns aid in specificity, Wyoming state statute still demands that the only acceptable pronoun is the masculine pronoun: “Words in the masculine gender include the feminine and neuter genders.” (That’s W.S. 8-1-103 (a) (vi), if you want to get specific.)
Casper Star Tribune | February 3, 2021
The fact that the legislature, which is made up of a hyper majority of men continues to resist the idea tells us that they either see value in keeping the language concentrated on their sex, or there is something troubling about including women.
JH News&Guide | February 3, 2021
Philanthropy might enable a few people, or even an entire (small) community like ours, to benefit. Policy expands those benefits to everyone. We are long overdue to make the shift from philanthropy to policy.
Casper Star Tribune | January 27, 2021
Period products are medically necessary — a point reinforced in former President Trump’s CARES Act legislation. Yet they are the only such products subject to sales tax. They also can’t be paid for with food stamps or Medicaid.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | January 28, 2021
The Essential Health Product Dignity Act contained a provision that would have ended discrimination. It would have shielded Wyoming from potential litigation. And it would have helped the state live up to its Equality State moniker. But maybe, as members of our Legislature like to say, the “equality” part of “Equality State” is “not quite ready for primetime.”
WyoFile | January 26, 2021
Our policymakers expect the nonprofit sector to do the heavy lifting for our communities. Address society’s ills. Fill in the gaps for the government. Solve a broken tax policy. Preserve our cultural heritage. Entertain and enrich our lives. Remedy the mistakes of businesses. Provide food, housing, healthcare and safety to underpaid workers damaged by systems built to exploit them.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | January 8, 2021
What’s at stake here is more than the very real struggle between political ideologues or religious sectarians or even conspiracy theorists. What’s at stake is also the health of every resident in Wyoming. And I don’t just mean our exposure to COVID-19.
CST | January 6, 2021
The virulent reaction to public health orders isn’t just about politics, ideology, and conspiracy theories. It is also very much about gender — and archaic notions of what it means to be “masculine.”
JH N&G | January 6, 2021
The new year calls for taking up a plan that recognizes that the most lasting progress is incremental. Resolutions, at least in their modern American incarnation, do nothing more than distract us from fixing broken systems by telling us to change ourselves.
CST | August 22, 2020
“This election is the culmination of work that's been going on across the state in a nonpartisan way for years, which is exciting,” said Jen Simon, a senior policy adviser with the Equality State Policy Center and a co-founder of several women’s groups across the state, including the Wyoming Women’s Action Network and the nonpartisan Cowgirl Run Fund, a political action committee focused on electing women to statehouse seats.
JHN&G | June 3, 2019
Back in March, there was a debate about child care on the floor of the Wyoming House — The People’s House, as they like to call it.
JH News&Guide | April 15, 2020
Right now we are caught in a false dichotomy that says that your work life and your economic productivity should supersede your family, your caregiving and your health. This is because we’ve set our economy and our policy to reinforce specific ideas predicated on a particular set of conditions.
JH News&Guide | March 18, 2020
Women are the primary unpaid caregivers globally, nationally, and in Wyoming. Nearly two-thirds of all unpaid caregiving, especially for aging family members and children, is done by women. And women represent the vast majority of frontline healthcare workers.
JH News&Guide | March 4, 2020
The 65th Wyoming Legislature is winding down its budget session — a shorter session with a two-thirds majority threshold for the introduction of bills. And, though it is too soon to offer a post-mortem, there is plenty of information about the fate of certain bills that would benefit women.
Casper Star Tribune | February 15, 2020
Does a plan exist that can do those things? “I don’t think it does,” said Jen Simon, the founder of the Wyoming Women’s Action Network. “I think you’d have to make it out of whole cloth. Any time you’re starting something brand, brand new, it’s more labor intensive, more expensive, more experimental. Why reinvent the wheel?”
JH News&Guide | February 5, 2020
In case you’re thinking that equal representation isn’t essential to equitable policy, let me take a moment to disabuse you of that notion. Legislatures with more women consistently advance more policy decisions that benefit women, families and communities. Which, in turn, are good for local businesses and economies.
JH News&Guide | January 8, 2020
Higher wages and greater economic security creates benefits for employers and employees alike — and serves as a reminder that economic security for women is a win for businesses and for Wyoming communities.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | February 9, 2022
We know that Medicaid expansion is vital for all 25,000 Wyomingites who would gain health insurance. But accessing basic health care is especially important for new moms, their babies and working women in Wyoming. We don’t talk about these populations as much as we should. But they deserve our support.
Casper Star Tribune Column | December 8, 2019
“Elected women don’t just shed light on certain issues that might otherwise be ignored; they also contribute perspectives to legislative debates that otherwise might not be heard.” -Kelly Dittmar, CAWP
JH N&G Column | December 4, 2019
Equity State will examine how women drive the economy, access services and participate in leadership — as well as the places where women are left out or overlooked.
Wyoming Tribune Eagle | November 10, 2019
Tom Coulter of the WTE writes that recent statistics reveal a complicated legacy for women in the Equality State. Wyoming consistently shows up as one of the states with the largest gender pay disparities.
Op-Ed | October 23, 2019
Much of the information that we collect on healthcare, safety, transportation, housing — the list goes on — and does not get separated out according to sex. That means we don’t know whether or how things affect men and women differently.
Casper Star Tribune | October 14, 2019
Nick Reynolds of the Casper Star Tribune highlights Wyoming's grade of "D" for women's representation. WWAN founder Jen Simon weighs in.
JH News & Guide | September 30, 2019
The Wyoming County Commissioners Association named WWAN co-founder and Teton County BCC Chair Natalia Macker Commissioner of the Year.
JH News & Guide | August 28, 2019
WWAN hosted Wyoming's first-ever Toast to Tenacity in recognition of the 99th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment.
