Published Sarasota Herald Tribune, December 9, 2024. Guest Column.
“Women May be Hurt Homst by Trump’s Policies to Come”
Lately, I have been thinking about the incoming Trump administration’s policy proposals and wondering who and what they might affect. So I got curious. Since the Trump administration is proposing eliminating the Department of Education (DOE), that seemed like a good place to start. Over Thanksgiving week, I asked a dozen random friends and family the same question: “Any idea where the Department of Education spends its money?” Their overwhelming answers? “School lunches,” they’d say, or “testing.” I wasn’t sure myself, so I looked it up.
Fact: Over half the annual budget of the Department of Education goes to student loans and grants for higher education.[1] And whom does this affect? Women. That’s right, women hold 2/3 of student loans.[2] This is for a couple of reasons: women seek higher education in larger numbers than men and they receive about 40% more graduate degrees, where more debt is often incurred. Women receive less family support, and, after graduation, they earn less than men.[3]
Yes, DOE money funds Title I programs that aid schools in low-income districts, helping equalize school districts with low property tax revenues. Money also supports technical education and special needs students in K-12 school districts. But because of the volume of student loans, the impact of eliminating the programs of the DOE would fall disproportionately on women.
This got me thinking about some other policies. So I looked into workplace issues. When you hear ‘minimum wage worker,’ who do you picture? A teenager working at McDonald’s? The guy delivering your DoorDash?
The Trump administration is opposed to raising the federal minimum wage, currently stagnating at a mere $7.25 p/hour, the rate it’s been for over 15 years. (If adjusted for inflation and productivity, it would be $26 p/hour.)[4]
Fact: Women, make up 67.9% of minimum wage workers. They are the childcare workers, nursing home aides, retail shop clerks, cashiers, and, yes, restaurant servers who make up the bulk of this workforce.[5] That’s right: men are not even a third of our minimum wage earners! Changes in the federal minimum wage would not apply equally, but would disproportionately affect women.
And while we’re in the workplace, what about the gender pay gap, which hasn’t shrunk in two decades? In 2023, full-time year-round working women earned just 84% of what their male colleagues earned.[6] This is due to many factors, including occupational segregation and the absence of childcare (mothers lose an average of $295,000 in income over a lifetime).[7] But it’s also due to pay discrimination. Economists in Trump’s first administration prevented the Equal Employment Opportunity Council from collecting data on workers and pay levels.[8] Without data, there are no ways to identify unlawful gender pay inequities. How will this help us?
Finally, I looked into health. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that a ‘massive overhaul’ of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) would be one of his first priorities under the incoming Republican administration[9].
Fact: Over 10 million women and 7 million women of reproductive age gained coverage under the ACA by 2019 alone. [10] Moreover, the ACA mandated equity, forbidding a common practice called ‘gender-rating’ where insurance companies charged women more than men for identical policies.[11] The ACA also required insurers to cover maternity costs and contraception – without which it is very hard for women to live modern, independent lives. Remember, women need maternity care and contraception because they have female bodies that can bear children, something that both requires and – presumably – benefits men. Yet the health insurance costs of this fall exclusively only on women.
So when you read about proposed changes in policies, get curious. Think about who might bear a disproportionate share of burdens – or benefits. And ask if these inequities are really helping America as a whole?
E Scott Osborne is President of Through Women’s Eyes, a Sarasota non-profit.
[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-department-of-education-do/
[2] https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/deeper-in-debt/
[3] https://www.earnest.com/blog/women-student-debt/
https://www.aauw.org/resources/research/deeper-in-debt/
[4] https://www.ilr.cornell.edu/carow/carow-policy/minimum-wage#:~:text=As%20illustrated%20below%2C%20the%20real,rate%20of%20$7.25%20per%20hour.
[5] https://camoinassociates.com/resources/current-data-about-minimum-wage-workers-in-the-us/#:~:text=Women%20are%20disproportionately%20represented%20among,of%20male%20hourly%20workers%20were.
[6] https://blog.dol.gov/2024/03/12/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-gender-wage-gap#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20women%20working%20full,full%2Dtime%20made%20in%202023.
[7] chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/Mothers-Families-Work/Lifetime-caregiving-costs_508.pdf
[8] https://www.eeoc.gov/wysk/what-you-should-know-national-academies-evaluation-compensation-data-collected-through-eeo-1#:~:text=No.,data%20collection%20in%20the%20future.
[9] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/30/politics/johnson-obamacare-trump/index.html
[10] https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/health-coverage-women-under-aca#:~:text=Over%2010%20million%20adult%20women,of%20reproductive%20age%20remain%20uninsured.
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/health/policy/women-still-pay-more-for-health-insurance-data-shows.html