Photo: 2025 Detroit Women Commission
Detroit has never waited for permission to make history. This city moves through struggle with grit, through growth with grace, and through policy with purpose when community holds the mic. For the first time in Detroit’s timeline, a space has been carved out solely for women to lead, to strategize, and to influence decision-making at the highest level of city government. That space now lives within the newly formed Detroit Women’s Commission—a nine-member advisory body created by mayoral appointment, standing as a direct response to generations of unaddressed disparities and the resilient demands of Detroit’s women.
This is not symbolic. This is structure.
The Detroit Women’s Commission will meet monthly to confront and address critical issues directly impacting the socioeconomic lives of women across the city. That includes everything from the pay gap to reproductive access, housing instability to public safety, maternal mortality to mental health—each issue made worse by disinvestment and policy neglect, especially for Black women. This commission is positioned to not only listen, but to act. It will develop methods and strategies rooted in lived experiences, research, and collaboration. The purpose is to be proactive—not reactive—to the perils many Detroit women face.
“In 2023, I introduced the resolution to establish the Detroit Women’s Commission because women are the backbone of our communities, yet our voices have often been overlooked in policy decisions that directly impact our lives,” said councilwoman Angela Whitfield Calloway, the driving force behind this movement. “This commission ensures that our perspectives, needs, and contributions are at the forefront of Detroit’s policymaking.”
Deputy Mayor Melia Howard, made it plain: “ The Women’s Commission was established to ensure that the voices of women in Detroit are heard, and that policies and initiatives address the challenges they face. From advocating for economic opportunities to improving access to healthcare, education, and safety, our mission is to create lasting change that uplift all women in our community.”
That’s not an abstract mission. That’s a community agenda, and it’s long overdue.
Detroit is nearly 80 percent Black. Women anchor that percentage. They run the homes, the businesses, the faith spaces, and the movements. Yet those same women, especially Black women, have been statistically underrepresented when it comes to shaping legislation or sitting at city government tables. What the Women’s Commission signals is a shift—policy crafted through participation, not paternalism.
Women in Detroit are disproportionately impacted by poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2023 data, nearly 38 percent of women-led households in Detroit live below the poverty line, compared to 19 percent nationwide. The numbers are worse for Black women. That’s not coincidence; that’s structure. Wage inequality, limited access to affordable childcare, transportation insecurity, and gaps in healthcare access continue to push women further from equity.
This Commission comes at a time when Roe v. Wade has been overturned, maternal health disparities remain highest for Black women in Michigan, and economic recovery continues to lag for low-income families in urban communities. Detroit’s women are navigating all of it—and they’ve needed a formal seat at the policy table for decades.
When Deputy Mayor Melia Howard speaks about “improving access to healthcare, education, and safety,” she’s naming the systemic gaps most visible on the city’s East and West Sides. These are not hypothetical gaps. These are real-world conditions that make survival harder and progress slower for Black women raising families, running nonprofits, and juggling multiple jobs just to stay afloat.
By design, the Women’s Commission will be made up of diverse voices—women with varied experiences, neighborhoods, professions, and political orientations. The fact that it is a mayoral commission ensures direct access to executive policy-making, but the monthly structure gives it consistent space for evaluation and accountability. It’s not enough to write reports. The Commission must shape action.
Too often, commissions exist on paper but not in practice. This one has a mandate to not only evaluate issues but also to “create impactful methodologies and strategies that could assist incoming identified perils affecting the women in our community.” That type of forward-thinking, community-rooted work is how structural change begins. It’s policy from the inside, informed by pressure from the outside.
This is about breaking cycles—public ones and private ones. When you walk through neighborhoods like Dexter-Linwood, Jefferson-Chalmers, or Brightmoor, you see mothers doing the impossible every day with little support from the city. Access to basic healthcare options is limited. Safe public transportation is unpredictable. Violence, both intimate and systemic, lingers in too many homes and blocks. A commission that looks these conditions in the face and brings community-informed policy solutions to the forefront? That’s not decoration. That’s Detroit’s next chapter being written by women who live what they lead.
The Detroit Women’s Commission doesn’t represent a special interest group. It represents the majority—because women are the backbone of this city’s economy, education system, community health, and social safety net. This commission will hold space for stories often ignored. It will quantify the challenges that get dismissed as individual rather than structural. It will advocate with power and precision.
There’s a reason Detroit had to wait this long for a Women’s Commission. Systems aren’t built to prioritize the oppressed. They’re built to maintain control. Creating this commission required courage from inside City Hall, but it also required years of advocacy from community organizers, public health workers, educators, and everyday women who refused to be left out of the narrative.
When Deputy Mayor Howard states that the Commission’s mission is to “create lasting change that uplift all women in our community,” that “all” matters. It includes trans women, disabled women, immigrant women, returning citizens, survivors, single mothers, students, entrepreneurs, and elders. That type of inclusion must remain at the core of the Commission’s work.
Detroit can’t afford a Commission that only talks—it needs one that listens, builds, and demands. That’s what this moment is. The Women’s Commission is not a favor. It’s not an experiment. It’s a necessity.
The women who will sit on this Commission will carry the responsibility of not only representing the city’s present but also forecasting its future. Their task is to design a Detroit where women don’t have to choose between safety and shelter, or between health and survival. Their job is to push policy that reflects the reality of being a woman in a post-industrial Black city—where history runs deep, and healing is urgent.
This Commission must serve as a blueprint for other cities. It must be resourced, protected, and elevated—not only by the administration that formed it but by the people it was formed to serve. Detroit’s women have always been powerful. Now, that power has infrastructure.
And Detroit? It moves differently when women lead.
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