Former President Donald had an all-caps message for women voters on Friday, claiming that they’re worse off financially compared with four years ago — and that reelecting him could solve their problems.
“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER.”
Trump didn’t specify whether he was claiming women were worse off based on income, wealth or another metric. In an email, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote that women “saw unprecedented levels of economic success” during his term, including an increase in wages and low unemployment rates.
However, the data shows that women have continued to make economic progress since then.
No doubt, women have experienced an economic rollercoaster during the past four years. In early 2020, the pandemic shuttered the economy, and women were especially hard hit by job cuts, given they are more likely than men to work in service jobs requiring human contact. Because people needed to stay distant from each other prior to the COVID-19 vaccines rollout, jobs primarily held by women were hit particularly hard.
Once the economy began to recover its footing, millions of women with children struggled to get back on track because many schools and daycare centers remained shuttered or with limited operations, hampering working mothers’ ability to return to work. That caused what some observers termed a “she-cession,” or a downturn that impacted women workers more than men.
But data shows that women have since regained their footing in the workforce, experiencing real income gains since 2019. While women continue to face financial obstacles such as earning lower wages than men, many have also made financial strides during the past four years, experts say.
“The data does show us that we are making gains,” Ana Hernández Kent, senior researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Institute for Economic Equity, told CBS MoneyWatch.
Women are also closing the wealth gap with men.
Households headed by women have narrowed the wealth gap with men between 2019 to 2022, according to Kent’s analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, a data source published every three years. For instance, White women in 2022 had 66 cents of wealth for every $1 of wealth held by White men, up from 56 cents in 2019, her analysis found.
Black women also saw gains, albeit from a much smaller base, with their wealth rising to 8 cents for every $1 owned by White men in 2022, up from 5 cents in 2019. Hispanic women saw a small dip to 9 cents in 2022 from 10 cents in 2019, Kent’s analysis found.
Never-married women, who tend to have less wealth overall than women with partners, also saw big gains between 2019 to 2022, with their wealth jumping 154% to $19,200 in 2022. Looking at this group can be illustrative because their financial outcomes haven’t been influenced in the same way as people who have been married, divorced or widowed, Kent’s analysis noted.
“We know we have a long way to go,” Kent noted, adding that women have also made economic strides when looking even longer term. “It will be 50 years in October since women could get credit on their own — it seems like forever ago, but people will come up and share their stories. It’s humbling.”
Income gains for women
Women have also made income gains during the past four years, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, the median weekly earnings for women was $1,031, an increase of about 2.5% from 2019, on an inflation-adjusted basis. By that measure, women have kept ahead of the post-pandemic price spike despite inflation reaching its highest point in 40 years.
However, Trump spokeswoman Leavitt pointed to Census data showing that women who work full time saw their earnings peak at $57,500 in 2020.
Comparing pre-pandemic earnings with recent data may show a clearer picture because income in 2020, when the pandemic shuttered the economy, skewed higher due to millions of low-income workers losing their jobs that year, effectively excluding them from earnings data, according to left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Because of that, comparisons between 2020 and other years may not be apples-to-apples.
In 2023, the most recent year available, women with full-time jobs earned $55,240, or about the same inflation-adjusted earnings as in 2019, according to new Census data.
Leavitt also pointed to the unemployment rate for women reaching a record low of 3.1% in September 2019. Unemployment for both men and women spiked in 2020 due to the pandemic, but dropped sharply under President Biden’s administration, with the jobless rate among women reaching a post-pandemic low of 3.3% in January 2023.
Income gains are important because that helps people to improve their standard of living, while also having money to save for retirement or buy a home, which in turn builds wealth.
Economically, women tend to earn less than men, a so-called gender wage gap. That’s caused by issues ranging from occupational choices — men tend to pick jobs that pay more, such as in STEM or business — as well as more women than men taking time off for caregiving, which can crimp lifelong earnings and savings.
Still, women have made strides in the workforce during the past five decades partly due to their ability to control their reproductive choices. Women are now more likely to attend college than men, and are choosing to have children later in life, helping them cement their careers before starting families.
Women, abortion and financial distress
In his September 20 post, Trump also vowed that women “WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE.”
Now, two years after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion that had been guaranteed for nearly five decades under Roe v. Wade, nearly a third of states have near-total bans on the procedure in place.
Hampering women’s ability to access abortions can also hurt their financial outcomes, according to a landmark analysis called the Turnaway Study, which tracked women over several years after they sought to terminate a pregnancy.
Women who were denied abortions were more likely to suffer adverse financial situations, from higher rates of bankruptcy to evictions, the study found. They were also more likely to rely on government aid programs like food stamps and welfare because of their financial strain.
Trump’s claims about women’s well-being
As for Trump’s additional claims about a decline in women’s well-being compared with four years ago, the data is more mixed. For instance, the latest FBI data shows the rate of violent crime offenses — homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — decreased annually in the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration compared with Trump’s last year in office.
But the Department of Justice‘s National Crime Victimization Survey suggests overall violent crime rates, as well as the rates of rape and sexual assault, were higher in 2023, compared with rates in 2020 and 2019. Still, those estimates are limited by the margin of error and the fact that victims of murder are not included.
Women’s rates of depression have indeed increased — so have men’s, according to Gallup’s National Health and Well Being index. About 24% of women said they were being treated for depression in 2023, compared with about 18% in 2017. Men’s rates rose to about 11% from 9% over the same period.
Gallup noted that “alarming rates of depression are not unique to the U.S.,” and added that the increase could be due to the impacts of the pandemic, from feelings of isolation to disruptions in mental health services caused by the health emergency.
— With reporting by Laura Doan.
Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.
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