Second Gentleman Pool Reports of March 24, 2021

SGOTUS Pool Report #1

Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff arrived at 11:09 a.m. Wednesday at the St. Louis area headquarters - in the suburb of Overland, Mo., - of construction and development firm Clayco Inc.

Participating in the roundtable are St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson; Clayco Project Manager April Austin; Wendy Chun Hoon, director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor; Nicole Adewale, principal at St. Louis-based ABNA Engineering; Elaine Brune, Board Chair of the Metro Trans Umbrella Group in St. Louis; and Paralee Gladney-Stewart, a home care worker with the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The St. Louis visit, part of the Help Is Here Tour focused on the recently-signed American Rescue Plan, is meant to highlight Equal Pay Day and focus on gender equity in the workplace. Women earned about 85% as much as men in 2018, according to the Pew Research Center.?

SGOTUS Pool Report #2

Mayor Lyda Krewson welcomed Emhoff. She noted Equal Pay Day is a reminder of the pay gap between women and men and a time to "take action to end the gender wage gap once and for all."

"As the first women mayor of the city of St. Louis about to introduce the first second gentlemen of the United States" Krewson said there has been progress, but there is still much more work to do.

Emhoff, on the sixth stop on the Help Is Here tour, said the American Rescue Plan "will help all Americans in a very transformational way."

He said Vice President Kamala Harris has said the estimated 2 million women who have dropped out of the workforce due to the pandemic is "a national emergency."

Wendy Chun-Hoon, director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, noted women's participation in the labor force is at levels not seen in 35 years. The Labor Department has looked at women's earnings and found they are "earning less at every single educational attainment level," she said.

April Austin told Emhoff she is one of about two women project managers at Clayco and said she's in an industry where she is "extremely outnumbered."

Austin said she often is at job sites and is around sometimes hundreds of other people, so there is a risk.

"I didn't have the option of not coming to work," Austin said.

Paralee Gladney-Stewart, who works in home health care in Illinois, told Emhoff she and others in her industry are "totally overworked" and had to deal with risks throughout the pandemic.

"We're the most overlooked and most needed industry there is," Gladney-Stewart said.

SGOTUS Press Pool #3

Elaine Brune, Board Chair of the Metro Trans Umbrella Group in St. Louis, discussed how the group has struggled to provide services to trans people in the region over the last year. It has pivoted to providing food and toiletries to trans people, who have a higher rate of homelessness.

"It's extremely isolating for our folks, because they don't have health care or have minimal health care," Brune said.

Nicole Adewale, principal at St. Louis-based ABNA Engineering, said she had to juggle caring for her family and her employees through the pandemic.

"I have 60 employees and my family I had to worry about every single day," Adewale said.

Professionally, she said, raising her children made it more difficult to build business relationships because of the time it takes to raise a family.

"There were a lot of relationships I couldn't really foster because I had to get my kids to school in the morning," Adewale said.

Krewson, who was an accountant in her business career, echoed that sentiment, saying raising a family sometimes makes it harder to attend social and networking events that help advance professional careers.

"The whole time I was advancing in my career of course, I had two kids," she said. "It takes a partnership, it takes Grandma, other people to help with that."

SGOTUS Pool Report #4

Emhoff thanked all the roundtable participants for sharing their experiences with him and said he would pass on their comments to Vice President Harris.

"When I see her tonight, we're certainly going to talk about all of this," he said.

Participants thanked Emhoff for the visit. Krewson told him to "say hello" to Vice President Harris.

Emhoff departed at 12:16 p.m.?