The Promise Gap: Why Women’s Equality Is Still a Work in Progress.

Women have always been promised equality and recognition. Much has changed. But look beyond the language of progress, and an uncomfortable question remains: has the promise actually been kept?

A group of multiracial women. Credit: The Women Post Studios.

In 1963, standing before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reached for the language of banking to describe something much bigger than money. America, he argued, had made a promise to its Black citizens and failed to honor it. He called it a “bad check,” one returne…