President Obama called for universal preschool in his State of the Union address and followed up with $75 billion in funding over the next decade to expand quality programs as well as $1.4 billion in 2014 to expand child care. Implementing such a program would not just benefit children; it would also have an important impact on working mothers.

As Sarah Jane Glynn, Jane Farrell, and Nancy Wu of the Center for American Progress highlight in a new report, today’s working parents have very limited options. They can leave the workforce to care for children themselves, which is challenging on finances and can hurt women’s long-term earnings. They can pay for child care out of pocket, which can take up more than a third of a low-income family’s budget. Or they can use federal or state-funded programs, which are very limited.

The benefits of expanding preschool, therefore, would be huge for working women, as they report:

Only 6 out of 10 kindergarten programs in America are open for full-day enrollees. Increased funding for Head Start and child care subsidies together can encourage extended hours to better accommodate parents’ work schedules.

Enabling more women to work by improving access to child care can help mitigate the gender wage gap and reduce a mother’s likelihood of going on public assistance.

Lower costs and increased access to child care can lead to a decrease in the number of women leaving employment and an increase in the rate of entering employment, enabling mothers to keep working when they want or need to do so.

Access to affordable and quality child care has been shown to have important benefits for women’s employment. When faced with high costs, mothers are more likely to leave their jobs and less likely to take new ones. Research from other countries shows that families who receive child care support are more likely to be employed and stay in their jobs longer than those who don’t get help. Single mothers benefit in particular, as they are nearly 40 percent more likely to keep their jobs over two years when they receive support.

Meanwhile, long waitlists for child care assistance can take a big toll on families. They are much more likely to lose their jobs, quit their jobs, or miss work due to child care problems. It also strains finances: a quarter of families on a child care waitlist in Minnesota had to rely on public assistance until they could get support.

The overall economic effects of expanding preschool are undeniable. Studies have found that high-quality, universal programs can have economic returns of $7 to $11 for every dollar spent due to children being more likely to go to college, less likely to become teen parents or commit violent crimes, and see increased earnings later in life.

Yet America lags behind most other developed countries when it comes to enrollment in preschool and spending on these programs. Other countries enroll nearly all of their preschool-aged children in programs, yet just half of American three-year-olds and two-thirds of its four-year-olds are enrolled. The U.S. is ranked 21st for the percent of GDP spending devoted to early education programs.

Today, the House is set to vote on the Working Families Flexibility Act, legislation that would weaken rules requiring businesses to pay employees overtime wages when they work more than 40 hours in a given week and instead give employers the option of providing their workers with “comp time,” or time off from work. The bill is being touted as a Republican response to the need for today’s working parents to balance work and family by allowing them to accrue unpaid overtime hours.

A big worry of opponents of the bill is that employers will have the power to coerce employees into taking comp time instead of having to pay them overtime wages. When confronted with this possibility, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Martha Roby (R-AL), told the Sirius radio show The Morning Briefing with Tim Farley that employees will be able to turn to existing worker protections against coercion under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA):

The employee absolutely can pick up the phone and call the Department of Labor and report their employer because that is not allowed. The anti-coercion and discrimination provisions in this bill are very clear, that an employer cannot not use compensatory time in any way to coerce or discriminate or force an employee to take compensatory time… All of the protections that are currently under the Fair Labor Standards Act exist under this bill as well for the employee to make sure the employer does not take advantage of the employee.

But workers may not be as well protected as Roby indicated. While the bill does give workers the right to sue, George Zornick reports at The Nation that they are denied the use of a faster and cheaper avenue through the Department of Labor. On top of this, it doesn’t give the Department of Labor any extra funds to investigate or enforce the anti-coercion provisions. This means that workers who experience intimidation may have to hire their own lawyer and shell out lots of money to bring a case.

Meanwhile, the balance of power often rests with employers. Workers are fighting wage theft, or employers violating FLSA overtime laws, at huge rates. A 2009 survey reported that two-thirds of low-income employees had experienced a wage law violation in the previous week alone. The problem has been on the rise, with actions filed in federal court alleging wage and hour violations increasing by 400% between 2000 and 2011. Many employers are already failing to follow the FLSA’s rules.

Opponents have other concerns with the legislation. The FLSA requires overtime pay for work over 40 hours a week, which provides a big disincentive to ask employees to work long hours. That could diminish if employers can offer comp time instead. Employers may also be able to deny requests to use the comp time if they can claim it “unduly disrupts the operations of the employer” or that the request didn’t come in “within a reasonable period.”

In the radio interview, Roby also pointed to the fact that public sector workers have had this arrangement since 1985. But as Alex Seitz-Wald reports at Salon, “that move was to cut costs for government, not provide workers with more freedom,” plus government employees generally have a union to help them fight employer violations.

In fact, this is an old idea that has had trouble gaining traction over the years. Seitz-Wald points out that Republicans introduced similar legislation in 1996, 1997, and 2003. If Republicans are looking for policies that can help today’s working families, they could consider paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, and protections for workers who request flexible working conditions.

In a bid for women’s support and votes, the GOP launched an aggressive ad campaign on “mommy blogs” on Tuesday. The ads will tout its deceptively titled Working Families Flexibility Act that would weaken overtime pay laws:

The banner ads will be featured on over 100 websites popular among women and geo-targeted to be viewed by residents in 20 Democratic-held congressional districts targeted by the GOP for 2014. […]

The $20,000 ad buy, running on sites including Ikeafans.com and MarthaStewart.com through Friday, will call on Democrats to vote with House Republicans next week on a bill to give hourly private sector workers more flexibility to choose between compensatory time and cash payment for overtime work.

“Tell Rep. Kyrsten Sinema you shouldn’t have to choose between work and family,” reads one ad set to run in Sinema’s suburban Phoenix district. “Will Rep. Collin Peterson stand up for working moms?” reads another that’s slated to run in Peterson’s western Minnesota district. The banner ads link to a petition site calling on lawmakers to support “more freedom for working moms.”

There’s no doubt that many Americans are overworked and in need of policies that better allow them to balance their families and their jobs. But the GOP’s solution is not much of a solution at all. Rather than giving workers the ability to accrue paid leave through regular working hours, it would instead allow workers and employers to trade traditional time-and-a-half pay for overtime hours for compensatory time off.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) currently requires overtime for work over 40 hours, providing a disincentive to push employees to work long hours, which could diminish if they can offer comp time offered instead. The current law is also already difficult to enforce, as many workers claim they are denied time-and-a-half pay, and some employers may force their employees to use comp time instead. On top of all of this, employers may be able to deny requests to use comp time if they can claim it “unduly disrupts the operations of the employer” or that the request didn’t come in “within a reasonable period.”

There are other policies that Republicans could focus on if they are interested in promoting family friendly work solutions: They could support paid family and medical leave (currently only guaranteed as unpaid leave), paid sick days, and protections for workers who request flexible working conditions.

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has gained international recognition for his aggressive new approach to Japan’s decades of deflation. “Abenomics,” his prescription for boosting the economy and fighting off another recession, falling wages, and a high debt-to-GDP ratio, includes monetary and fiscal policy such as stimulus spending on infrastructure and renewable energy, quantitative easing, and structural reforms.

But there’s a new pillar of Abenomics: putting more women in executive roles by asking businesses to set a target of at least one female executive per company. “Women are Japan’s most underused resource,” he said upon unveiling his plans. And the numbers back him up, as women hold just 1.6 percent of executive roles at Japanese public companies. Only 15 percent of Japan’s companies have any female executives at all.

It may take more than just a focus on the executive suite, however. Only about a third of Japanese mothers are in the labor force. If women’s rate of employment, currently about 60 percent, were raised to the same level of men’s, which is 20 points higher, Japan could grow its GDP by as much as 15 percent. To that end Abe has also promised to create 250,000 day care openings over the next few years to boost women’s employment.

While the U.S. has a higher rate of women in the work force and a larger percentage of female executives, it still has room to grow in both. It now ranks at number 17 out of 22 developed countries for women’s rate of participation in the labor force, with just about three-quarters of women in the workforce, compared to nearly 80 percent for the other countries on average. Just over 14 percent of executive roles in U.S. Fortune 500 companies are filled by women.

The idea that increasing women’s overall participation in the workforce and their representation in the C-suite is good economics is backed up by research. As much as 20 percent of U.S. growth in productivity over the past 50 years can be attributed to fallen barriers to employment for women and other groups who had previously been excluded. The economy would in fact be about a quarter smaller if women hadn’t entered the workforce in such strong numbers since the 1950s.

At the top of the economic ladder, one study found that companies in the MSCI AC World index that had a gender diverse board outperformed male-only ones by 26 percent over six years. Another study of Israeli companies found that those with boards that had at least three directors of both genders attending meetings had a significantly larger return on equity and net profit margin. Research makes the case that more diversity in company leadership often leads to better results.

The U.S. hasn’t taken the aggressive action that Shinzo Abe is proposing to address its disparities, however. The most aggressive action on women’s representation in executive roles has been in Norway, which has a requirement that 40 percent of board members be women, and the European Union is looking at a similar measure. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s lack of spending on child care is part of why it has fallen behind developed peers in women’s labor force participation, along with poor parental leave policies and no protections for those who seek part-time work. If the U.S. enacted better policies on all three fronts, women’s labor force participation rate would jump 6.8 percentage points. That could have a huge effect on an economy that’s still struggling to recovery from the recession.