Donald Trump claims women are poorer than they were 4 years ago.
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. “READ MORE