The State Gender Policy Collective (“Collective”) is a community and resource hub for state policymakers and advocates working to advance gender justice across the country. The Collective is an initiative of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) that was incubated in partnership with the State Innovation Exchange (SiX). The Collective resources and harnesses the power of state policymakers and advocates who affirm their commitment to a set of values and a vision where every person of every gender can thrive.
Our Members
Here’s where our members are located:
Our Vision
Every person deserves to live, learn, and work with safety, dignity, and equality. Our vision for gender justice cuts across the many issues that are central to peoples’ lives and futures.
We are working toward a world where every person has access to the health care they need, when they need it, including abortion care, birth control, fertility care, and gender-affirming care. A world where every pregnant person is safe and dignified in childbirth and every person has access to high quality and affordable housing, child care and early learning, and is economically secure. In our vision for gender justice, every worker is paid a dignified, fair wage, works free from discrimination and harassment, and has paid leave and fair work schedules so they and their families can thrive. And every student—including students of color, LGBTQIA+ students, and pregnant and parenting students—can learn in environments where they feel safe, valued, and respected, with access to culturally responsive, historically accurate curricula that affirms their identity.
Our Values
As we pursue a vision for gender justice where every person of every gender can thrive, the following values guide our work:
We believe that gender justice is deeply interwoven with the pursuit of all forms of justice, including racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice.
We decry the ways in which gender oppression harms not only cisgender women and girls, but also nonbinary, gender nonconforming, gender expansive, and transgender people. We recognize that policies specifically intended to harm any of these communities harms all of us.
We know that gender oppression does not operate in isolation—it intersects with and is magnified by other forms of oppression, including racism, ableism, xenophobia, and poverty. We center in our work people who face gender discrimination alongside other forms of discrimination and oppression—women of color, immigrant women, LGBTQIA+ people, transgender girls, and disabled women, to name a few.
We recognize that people do not live single-issue lives. We hold that to achieve true gender justice, we need to deeply understand the interconnectedness of issues and work together across issues and movements; for example, reproductive freedom to economic justice; environmental justice to maternal health; sexual harassment in schools to workplace discrimination; housing discrimination to gender-based violence.
Our Commitment
We believe that states offer the most immediate opportunities for improving the lives of women, girls, and LGBTQIA+ people. We strive to not only defend gender justice, but to build and drive a proactive for the future we seek to achieve. While our stories and our states are different, our values connect us across geography in a shared dedication to gender justice.
We are in solidarity with and work for all people seeking health, dignity, and freedom, for themselves, their families, and their communities. We will build power through policy with the people who are most directly impacted by discrimination and oppression.
We deeply value the leadership of state and community movement partners and will work in close collaboration with those leaders who know their communities and states best.
We promise to leverage the innovation and inspiration of our linked network of colleagues from states across the country and use the power of our collective voice and the privilege of public office to advance these values and this vision.