Title IX Champion Nominate an AAUW branch or member for our Title IX Champion award! AAUW members do amazing work to ensure that Title IX is enforced. You’ve investigated Title IX compliance, assembled lists of Title IX coordinators, promoted more-just sexual assault policies, and helped teach students, parents, educators, coaches, and administrators about Title IX’s requirements. The U.S. Department of Education can’t enforce Title IX alone, and your work goes a long way toward making schools and sports fairer for women and girls. Now we want to recognize, celebrate, and publicize your wonderful contributions!

Nominate a Title IX Champion by sending a brief summary of the nominee’s Title IX work and a picture of the nominee or Title IX event to laf@aauw.org. Title IX Champions receive an e-award to display on their branch’s website, and their stories will be posted on the AAUW Title IX Champions page. Submit your nomination before the next round closes on June 17, 2016.

Nominate a champion today!

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that challenged a long-standing precedent that protected union funding. AAUW signed on to an amicus brief urging the court to uphold the precedent. Union bargaining power is crucial for women in the workforce, particularly women of color and LGBT women.

Following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the now eight-member court issued a 4-4 decision upholding the rule (because when the Supreme Court is tied 4-4, the circuit court’s ruling remains in place).

However, the challengers filed a petition for a rehearing, which would allow the Supreme Court to reconsider the case. The court has agreed to consider the petition but may continue to delay the case until a new chief justice is appointed. Stay tuned next term for more information.

Hobby Lobby Follow-up Returns to Lower Courts

The perils of an eight-member Supreme Court were thrown into sharp relief this month when the court sent Zubik v. Burwell back to the circuit courts. In March, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Zubik, a set of consolidated cases that pose a looming threat to women’s access to reproductive health care. Following on the heels of 2014’s disappointing Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision, some religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations filed suit objecting to contraceptive coverage requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

Although the Affordable Care Act included an AAUW-supported accommodation for religiously affiliated nonprofits that objected to offering contraceptive care on religious grounds, some of these nonprofits claimed that the accommodation does not go far enough. Those nonprofits are the plaintiffs in Zubik.

Most, but not all, circuit courts had ruled that the accommodation went far enough to protect the plaintiffs’ religious liberty while still ensuring women’s access to contraception. Rather than resolving the circuit split or making a final decision, the Supreme Court sent all the cases back to the circuit courts, ordering the parties to consider alternatives that could ensure coverage while accommodating the challengers’ arguments. While this is tentative good news for reproductive rights supporters, it does not fully resolve the issue, and the Supreme Court will likely have to hear the cases again after a new justice is appointed. Sign the AAUW petition now to urge the U.S. Senate to fulfill its constitutional obligation to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee.

It’s Graduation Season! Give A Grad A Gift!

Did you know that as AAUW members, you can give a free national membership to as many recent graduates as you like? It’s free for you and free for them. You could even gift the entire graduating class of your local college or university! (And yes, national members, that means you too!)  Give the gift of AAUW membership now.

https://www.aauw.org/resource/give-a-grad-a-gift/