By any metric, America’s working women are doing poorly compared to men. Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, according to Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Put another way — as Time magazine did — 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered. The gender wage gap is widening, notes the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, and, she said, “There is no racial group or educational class within the working population in which women outearn men.”
The picture is even worse for specific subsets of women. The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for Black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years, and cuts to the federal work force have hit Black women particularly hard. According to analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, as of 2023, 45 percent of mothers overall and 69 percent of Black mothers were breadwinners for their families. When women lose their jobs, they, their families and the broader economy suffer.
This administration seems unconcerned about these statistics, and they’re certainly not shy about signaling how they see the American worker. A series of posters advertising a website for apprenticeship opportunities put out by the Department of Labor on X depicts a brawny, blond man in retro work clothes against a backdrop of cranes and construction sites. The text across his torso reads: “Make America Skilled Again!” and “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” (I usually refuse to be trolled into Nazi comparisons — because these posters are a deliberate provocation — but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore the similarity to fascist propaganda.)
There are other signs from the government that the interests of working men are paramount, most notably the planned defunding of the Women’s Bureau, an agency within the Department of Labor that is supposed to advance the interests of working women. The Trump administration cannot eliminate the Women’s Bureau because it was established by law in 1920. But it is suggesting that the agency receive no money for the 2026 fiscal year, calling it “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past.”
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