The Chorus of Doom Is Loud
For the first time in over half a century, the gender pay gap in the U.S. has widened over two consecutive years.
ALSO IN THIS POST…
A radical act of feminism
Join me and the New York Financial Writers Association for a talk about women, money and power
I sometimes call it the “chorus of doom,” and lately that doesn’t feel like hyperbole. Each week seems to bring new reminders that democracy is under threat, women’s rights are being rolled back, and human leadership is edging toward relic status.
On Thursday, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was reported to have destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of birth control pills and contraceptive devices that were meant for low-income countries—at the direction of the Trump administration. (Officials in Belgium, where the supplies were stored, later disputed that they had actually been destroyed, but the signal is clear.)
Elsewhere, the headlines were hardly lighter. The saga surrounding the Epstein files continued. Dozens of South Korean women filed a lawsuit accusing the U.S military of illegally promoting the sex trade. And on Tuesday, we were served up a fresh helping of data giving us a decent idea of the direction of travel when it comes to women in the economy. Spoiler: it isn’t pretty.
That last story is the one I focused on for The Persistent last week and it deserves our full attention.
According to the Census Bureau’s latest annual report, the gender pay gap in the U.S. has now widened for the second year in a row—something that has never happened in more than half a century of tracking this data.
In 2024, the average woman working full-time, year-round earned just 81 cents for every dollar paid to an average man. That’s down from 83 cents in 2023 and 84 cents in 2022. Put differently: women have lost ground, not gained it, and the backslide is historic.
“At a time when women, including many mothers, are leaving the labor force at record rates, it is a five-alarm fire to see that the gender wage gap is widening for an unprecedented second year in a row,” said Emily Martin, chief program officer at the National Women’s Law Center.
The backslide is particularly severe for Black women, who are also facing disproportionately high unemployment. According to government data released earlier in September, the unemployment rate for Black women rose to 6.7% in August compared with 4.3% for the wider population.
Tuesday’s Census report shows that Black women working full time, year-round in 2024 were paid just 65 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men—down from 66 cents in 2023 and 69 cents in 2022. White, non-Hispanic women, meanwhile, were paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. That was also down from 80 cents in 2023.
A flurry of pay equity advocates noted that the erosion of progress is a direct result of the Trump administration’s anti-diversity policies coupled with the government’s slashing of federal jobs—cuts that disproportionately affected women and Black women in particular.
"The Trump Administration's assault on workplace protections, dismantling DEI programs, and gutting civil rights enforcement, represents a coordinated effort to roll back decades of hard-won progress for workers,” said Deborah J. Vagins, director of the Equal Pay Today campaign, which is a project organized by the non-profit Equal Rights Advocates.
“Our policymakers have the power to ensure equity for all workers, to combat pay discrimination, to provide needed oversight of this Administration’s dismantling of civil rights agencies, and to lift countless families out of poverty by adopting policy solutions that address the key drivers of the wage gaps,” she added.
Rebecca Riddell, a senior policy lead on economic justice for Oxfam America, described the numbers as “shameful,” noting that the U.S. remains one of the most unequal rich countries in the world.
“The wealthiest among us continue to amass unthinkable fortunes, while millions of people live in poverty,” she added, predicting that under the Trump administration “things will likely only get worse.”
“Poverty rates and inequality are already too high, but they would certainly be far higher if programs like Medicaid and food assistance were not in place. Unless policymakers reverse President Trump’s catastrophic cuts, we should expect increased poverty, hunger and sickness in the years to come, all while the ultra-rich only get richer.”
Read my full report over at The Persistent, where you can also subscribe to a twice-weekly newsletter dedicated to amplifying women’s voices, stories, perspectives and ideas.
A Radical Feminist Act
Elsewhere, last week, I wrote for The Times about a radical act of feminism: using AI.
For several months, and as regular readers probably know, I’ve been concerned with the gen-AI gender gap. Many studies have shown that women are about 20 per cent less likely than men to use generative AI. One recent paper, based on the results of 18 studies covering more than 140,000 people, found that “the gender gap in generative AI usage holds across nearly all regions, sectors and occupations”. And according to research done by Deloitte last year, 28 per cent of women in the UK said that they used generative AI compared with 43 per cent of men.
As I write in my piece, perhaps the simplest way to think about the repercussions of this gen-AI gender gap is to imagine what the labor market would look like if only male employees were using search engines and email, and women were relying on hardback encyclopedias and dictionaries, fax machines, pens, paper and perhaps the odd carrier pigeon.
Just like Google, Microsoft Word and Excel, generative AIs — for all of their mystique and allure — are really just powerful productivity tools that are radically enhancing how efficiently we’re able to get things done. In the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism, efficiency equals productivity, and productivity equals money.
In the piece, I touch on both the reasons for the adoption gap and also what we can do about, and in getting to the bottom of both of those things I was particularly struck by a comment from Shubhi Rao, a tech exec and the former treasurer of Alphabet who recently founded an AI platform called Uplevyl which is aimed at closing the gender gap. “AI is the fastest redistribution of power and money in the history of mankind,” Shubhi told me. “If women do not lead in this AI age, the code, algorithms and platforms will lock us women out of power and wealth for ever.” And what exactly does she mean by that? “I truly see a scenario where women’s economic security becomes extremely fragile.”
You can read my full op-ed in The Times here.
Join me!
Finally this week, I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining the New York Financial Writers Association this coming Tuesday to talk about all things women, money and power.
I’ll be in conversation with Robin Wood Sailer, co-founder of Le Labs Group, and Grace Williams, a former Wall Street Journal and Barron’s reporter who recently published her new book “Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women’s Bank That Empowered a Generation.”
The event’s happening on Tuesday, September 16 at 6:30pm. More details and registration link here.
That’s all from me for this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes September 29.
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Josie
Ps: If you’ve read WOMEN MONEY POWER, the book, or listened to the audiobook, I would hugely appreciate it if you could take thirty seconds to post a review or rate it on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great, and you can leave a review or rating here. A million thanks for your support!