Trump claims women are poorer than they were four years ago. Is that true?

Former President Donald Trump delivered an all-caps message to women voters Friday, saying they are worse off financially than they were four years ago — and that his re-election could solve their problems.

“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE IN LESS HEALTH 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 ABOUT THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I WILL FIX THIS, AND FAST, AND FINALLY THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER.”

Trump did not specify whether he was saying women were worse off based on income, wealth or some other measure. In an email, Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote that women “have experienced unprecedented levels of economic success” during his time in office, including rising wages and low unemployment.

However, data shows that women have continued to make economic progress since then.

There’s no doubt that women have experienced economic ups and downs over the past four years. In early 2020, the pandemic shut down the economy, and women were particularly hard hit by job losses because they are more likely than men to work in service jobs that require human contact. As people were required to stay apart before COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, jobs held primarily by women were particularly hard hit.

Once the economy began to recover, millions of women with children struggled to get back on track as many schools and daycares remained closed or with limited operations, hampering the ability of working mothers to return to work. This led to what some observers have called a “women’s recession,” or an economic slowdown that led to a drop in demand. women workers affected more than men.

But data shows that women have since regained a foothold in the workforce, seeing real earnings gains since 2019. While women continue to face financial barriers such as lower wages than men, many have also made financial progress over the past four years, experts say.

“The data shows us that we are making gains,” Ana Hernández Kent, a senior fellow at the Institute for Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told CBS MoneyWatch.

Women are also closing the wealth gap with men.

According to Kent’s analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, a data source released every three years, female-headed households narrowed the wealth gap with men between 2019 and 2022. For example, in 2022, white women held 66 cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth held by white men, up from 56 cents in 2019, according to her analysis.

Black women also saw gains, albeit on a much smaller base, with their wealth rising to 8 cents for every dollar held by white men in 2022, up from 5 cents in 2019. Hispanic women saw a slight decline, from 10 cents in 2019 to 9 cents in 2022, according to Kent’s analysis.

Never-married women, who tend to have less wealth overall than women in relationships, also saw big gains between 2019 and 2022, with their wealth jumping 154% to $19,200 in 2022. Kent’s analysis suggests that looking at this group can be revealing because their financial outcomes weren’t impacted in the same way as those of married, divorced or widowed people.

“We know we have a long way to go,” Kent said, adding that women have also made longer-term economic progress. “It will be 50 years in October since women were able to get credit on their own. It seems like forever, but people will come forward and share their stories. It’s humbling.”

Income gains for women

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women have also seen income gains over the past four years.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, women’s median weekly income was $1,031, an increase of about 2.5% from 2019 on an inflation-adjusted basis. By this measure, women have managed to stay ahead of the post-pandemic price spike, despite inflation reaching a 40-year high.

However, Trump spokeswoman Leavitt pointed to census data showing that women who work full-time saw their income peak at $57,500 in 2020.

Comparing pre-pandemic incomes to recent data can give a clearer picture because incomes in 2020, when the pandemic shut down the economy, were higher because millions of low-income workers lost their jobs that year, excluding them from the income data, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Because of this, comparisons between 2020 and other years may not be accurate.

In 2023, the most recent year available, women in full-time jobs earned $55,240, about the same inflation-adjusted income as in 2019, according to new census data.

Leavitt also noted that the unemployment rate for women hit a record high of 3.1% in September 2019. Unemployment for both men and women spiked in 2020 due to the pandemic, but has fallen sharply under President Biden, with the unemployment rate for women hitting a post-pandemic record low of 3.3% in January 2023.

Income gains are important because they help people improve their standard of living, while also having money to save for retirement or buy a home, which in turn creates wealth.

Economically, women tend to earn less than men, which is called gender pay gapThis is due to issues ranging from career choices (men tend to choose higher-paying jobs, such as in science, technology, engineering and mathematics or business) to the fact that more women than men take time off to care for children, which can reduce lifetime earnings and savings.

Women have nonetheless made gains in the workforce over the past five decades, in part because of 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 solidify their careers before starting a family.

Women, Abortion and Financial Distress

In his September 20 message, Trump also promised that women will “NO LONGER THINK ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS SHOULD BE, WITH THE STATES AND THE VOTE OF THE PEOPLE.”

Today, two years after the Supreme Court’s decision annulled the constitutional right to abortion which had been guaranteed for nearly five decades under Roe v. Wade, nearly a third of the states have implemented a near-total ban on this procedure.

Hindering women’s ability to access abortion can also hurt their bottom line, according to a landmark analysis called the Turnaway Study, which followed women for several years after they sought to terminate a pregnancy.

The women who were denied abortion were more likely to suffer from adverse financial situationsranging from higher rates of bankruptcy to evictions, the study found. They were also more likely to rely on government assistance programs like food stamps and welfare because of their financial hardship.

Trump’s statements on women’s well-being

As for Trump’s other claims about women’s well-being declining compared to four years ago, the data is more mixed. For example, the latest FBI data shows that the rate of violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) declined every year during the first three years of the Biden-Harris administration compared to Trump’s final year in office.

But the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey suggests that overall violent crime rates, as well as 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 murder victims are not included.

Rates of depression among women have indeed increased, as have rates among men, according to Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index. About 24% of women reported being treated for depression in 2023, up from about 18% in 2017. Rates among men rose from 9% to about 11% during the same period.

Gallup noted that “alarming rates of depression are not unique to the United States” and added that the increase could be due to the impacts of the pandemic, from feelings of isolation to disruptions to mental health services caused by the health emergency.

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