Greetings from your St. George AAUW Public Policy Team!
The November 3 mid-term election is upon us. How exciting! It’s time to exercise our 100-year voting right and support this great state and nation while hoping that good things for women follow! You can reference our October AAUW Public Policy update for election specifics if needed.
As a final 2026 election reminder, Utah will stop automatically mailing ballots in 2029.
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SAVE Database – Supreme Court Decision 9/25/26
On September 25, 2026 the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, allowed states to use a Trump administration-backed tool to ferret out noncitizen voting, although there’s little evidence that noncitizen voting occurs in a widespread or meaningful way.
Utah’s Lt. Governor Henderson’s office has used the SAVE database as a tool. The names of 70,000 Utah voters were put through the database since their citizenship wasn’t immediately verifiable. 11,000 Utahns were identified as “potential noncitizens”. That was followed by a manual review that found “the vast majority are verifiably citizens.” A separate review by the Legislature found the review by Henderson’s office to be comprehensive.
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A Plan to Pay Married Mothers Not to Work
And make single moms pay for it! According to The New York Times, the White House has drafted a plan that would pay about $9,000 per child annually on average to allow nonworking married parents to collect payments from the federal Child Care and Development Fund. The fund helps low-income families afford childcare and supports states, territories and tribes in providing subsidies.
According to the draft proposal, a married couple could qualify if one spouse stays home with the child and the other works at least 35 hours a week. Families would have to meet income requirements.
Unmarried couples and nonworking single parent would not qualify.
Concerns about the legality of restricting the benefit to married couples have been expressed by some Health and Human Services Department lawyers. It would also take money from child-care providers and there are some concerns about fraud since money is not going directly to a child care business.
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How is New Mexico’s first-in-the-nation universal child care program working?
On March 10, 2026, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed Senate Bill 241 — the Child Care Assistance Program Act – following an executive order in 2025 – making New Mexico the first state in the country to offer free, universal child care.
The assistance is available to any family in New Mexico with adults in the household who are working or attending school, with certain exceptions.
According to the Los Alamos Reporter, the most recent article available, the state began overspending within weeks of the November 2025 launch raising questions about long-term funding adequacy.
Licensed child care openings have been an ongoing problem particularly in rural areas where provider capacity falls short of newly eligible demand.
Although cost overruns have been a significant problem, statewide the program is delivering real and immediate financial relief.
With New Mexico being the second most productive oil-producing state, oil-revenue dependency can make program funding challenging.
Even with these challenges, New Mexico stands as an example of what can be done to help working women if the will is there to support working families.
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Utah childcare subsidies are disappearing
In keeping with Project 2025, Utah lawmakers are figuring ways to keep mothers at home. By lowering the income eligibility for the childcare subsidy, parents will now be required to make the tough decision as to who works and can they afford to pay for childcare without the subsidy.
For example, one family in West Jordan has received childcare assistance that allowed them to pay around $180 per month for two of her three children’s daycare. With the subsidy going away, that will skyrocket to $2,800! So, they are faced with a tough decision: can they can afford to live on one income despite saving money on childcare?
In fact, hundreds of Utah families will find themselves in a similar situation as they lose their childcare assistance due to the state’s lowering the income eligibility limits because of federal funding cuts.
A presentation by the Utah Department of Workforce Services reveals that after two consistent years of reduced federal funding, Utah is lowering the income eligibility limits for childcare subsidies.
Families that already get assistance can continue receiving aid if they make 65% of the median income, around $66,840 a year for a family of three. But the limit for new applicants is dropping to 50% of the state’s median income – about $51,400 a year for a family of three.
With most women making less than men, women will be hit harder.
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Women falling behind in workplace
UNWomen recently reported that “Men hold nearly 8 in 10 artificial intelligence jobs and almost 9 in 10 senior leadership positions shaping the technology.”
This is according to a new UN Women report – Gender Snapshot 2026 – launched at the United Nations General Assembly.” AI is advancing fast and women are being left behind.
More reason for our St. George AAUW to stand behind STEM training!
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Technology and learning
Every three years the OECD, Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development, a club of mostly rich countries, releases the results of international school tests taken by 15-year-olds all across the world.
Testing after the pandemic revealed that marks in mathematics, reading and science had collapsed in the previous round of testing. There was hope that grades might start to rebound.
Unfortunately, 2025 scores have fallen further, and in literacy as the chart below shows, the decline is actually speeding up.
The dominant story is of long-term decline. Test scores for the participating 23 OECD-member countries reached a peak around 2012 and have been falling ever since.
Worries about the impact of technology on children’s learning and future dropping scores – and on their reading skills in particular – seem relevant in these scores.
“Ubiquitous phones and widespread access to social media mean young people are getting less practice making sense of complex texts, argues Andreas Schleicher, head of education at the OECD.
An increased number of test-takers rush through the literacy assessment while getting many of the answers wrong.
How did PISA scores do in the United States aside from reading? Fortunately, the scores of U.S. students haven’t fallen as much as some other countries’ scores have since 2018.
The major domain was science, and the minor domains were reading and mathematics in PISA 2025. The United States also participated in the first administration of the Learning in the Digital World (LDW) in PISA 2025.
While the U.S. student performance in mathematics was not significantly different from the OECD average in PISA 2025, U.S. students performed above the OECD average in science, reading, and computational problem solving. Male-female score differences were observed in several test areas. Male students outperformed female students in mathematics and computational problem solving while female students outperformed in reading.
These diminished scores are certainly not a positive. Perhaps the efforts by many educators in the U.S. to eliminate or at least lessen technology in the classroom may help to get students more focused.
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More Books Banned in Utah
In September, Utah banned another seven books! This is the most books that have been banned at one time. Utah now has 44 banned books in public schools.
The new banned books are:
- “House of Earth and Blood,” by Sarah J. Maas (who already had six books on the statewide banned list).
- “Perfect,” by Ellen Hopkins (who already had four books on the statewide banned list).
- “Identical,” also by Ellen Hopkins.
- “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” by Jesse Andrews (who already had one book on the statewide banned list).
- “Kingdom of the Cursed” by Kerri Maniscalco.
- “Storm and Fury,” by Jennifer Armentrout.
- “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue,” by V.E. Schwab.
Florida and Texas lead the way with banned books, but Utah is not too far behind.
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Positive News About Women!
Because we share information monthly about women that is often negative, we want to also include information about women that’s more positive and uplifting to leave our members with a feeling of hope in spite of the challenges.
Nobel Peace Prize 2026 goes to Navi Pillay
At a time of existential challenges – including more wars and conflicts than the world has seen in a long time – international law is no longer just a supplement to peace and security. It is an absolute necessity.
In historic international court cases, Navi Pillay has shown that legal measures can help prevent acts of war and violence. She has also contributed to strengthen the institutions of international law. Her independence, expertise and steadfastness have made her one of the most respected international jurists of our time.
Pillay has spent much of her legal career advocating for the preservation of international human rights law, with a special focus on crimes regarding rape and sexual violence. She was very involved in the anti-apartheid movement, defending political opponents of apartheid in their cases against the state for poor prison conditions and the use of torture.
‘We are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl’ – Poet Susan Griffin
Following the recent death of feminist Gloria Steinem, this acknowledgement seems appropriate. Poet Susan Griffin died in September 2025. As a contemporary of Steinem, their lives were closely linked.
Susan Griffin believed that environmentalism was synonymous with feminism. Why you ask? Susan Griffin covered a variety of topics during her storied career. In her book “Woman and Nature” (1978) she likened male violence against women to the environmental destruction of the planet by capitalist means.
“Women and Nature” carried a theme that went to the heart of the feminist movement tying together science, ecology and women’s history and inspired a generation of women to embrace environmentalism.
Griffin published 21 books, tackling far-ranging subjects from war and inherited trauma (“A Chorus of Stones,” 1992, a Pulitzer finalist) to ecofeminism (“Woman and Nature,” 1978).
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In closing, I want to mention on a personal note that I am aware that the monthly updates have been getting longer since my team and I began putting them out in 2025.
The longer I am in this position and focused on women’s issues, the more I’ve become aware of the challenges we face. We would like to present more positive information, but let’s face it ladies, there are challenges, and we cannot turn our backs on them.
It has been suggested that we break the updates into separate mailings, but at this time our team has decided to do one mailing a month. Feel free to share your thoughts on this with us.
Lisa Rutherford
St. George AAUW Public Policy Chair
