Nearly Two-thirds of Lowest-paid Workers Are Women, Study Finds

At the height of the pandemic, there was plenty of focus on COVID-19’s particular toll on low-wage workers. But talk of how indispensable many of those employees long have been to the U.S. economy hasn’t resulted in bigger paychecks for this disproportionately female workforce, said Julie Vogtman, an attorney at the National Women’s Law Center.

“We’ve claimed to recognize that the people who are serving our food, serving our groceries, caring for our kids and our parents and our grandparents in nursing homes are essential,” said Vogtman, the center’s senior counsel and director of workplace quality. “But we haven't, still, as a society, decided to treat them as essential.”

The proof, she added, is in her organization’s most recent analysis of where Americans, by gender and race, are employed. The data are largely unchanged from when the center conducted the same research before the pandemic: Of the 21 million people marginalized in what Vogtman calls “the most underpaid, undervalued jobs” in our nation of roughly 207 million people of working age, almost two-thirds of those in the 40 lowest-paying jobs were women, according to the center’s Hard Work Is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs study.

Among its additional findings were these:

• Black women's share of the low-paid workforce was almost 1.5 times larger than their share of the overall workforce.
• Latinas’ share of the low-paid workforce was twice as large as their share of the workforce overall.
• Almost six in 10 women of color who are mothers working in low-paid jobs had household incomes below twice the federal poverty line in 2021.
• Among all women working full time in low-paid jobs in 2021, more than one in three — or 34.8% — lived in or near poverty.

Further, according to the report, in each of the 50 states, women comprised the majority of child care workers, home health aides and personal care aides, food service workers, and others in underpaid, undervalued jobs.

“And,” says the report, “in every state, women in these jobs struggle to make ends meet and support their families.”

Pandemic relief measures, including the federal government’s increased jobless benefits, helped soften the blow to low-wage earners whose workplaces shut down during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Today, however,” law center researchers wrote, “most pandemic-era relief measures have ended … the federal minimum wage remains a shockingly low $7.25 per hour while the cost of living continues to rise. And access to the basic supports that workers and caregivers need remains largely determined by income, employer, and geography, with no federal guarantee of paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, or affordable child care. Without these supports … women in low-paid jobs, and the families who depend on them, will continue to face severe hardship.”

But amid those inequities, women workers are pressing for and winning something akin to justice in certain places.

As the law center, among other advocates, pushes for federal officials to mandate minimum wage increases nationwide, Vogtman noted that the District of Columbia and several states have done so on their own. According to The Fairness Project, an organization that promotes progressive ballot measures, voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Washington state, and Tucson, Arizona, approved measures resulting in minimum wage increases that took effect in January 2023.

The National Council of State Legislatures’ August 2022 count showed that 30 states had minimum wages above the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, a standard adopted in 2009. No state minimum wage existed in five states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Georgia and Wyoming were the two states whose minimum wage was below $7.25 per hour. The federal minimum wage applies in all seven of those states.

At $16.50 an hour, the District of Columbia has the highest minimum; second to that is Washington state, with $15.74. But according to a 2021 estimate from Drexel University Center for Hunger-free Communities, $20 to $26 an hour comes closer to sustaining workers and their families.

In addition to higher pay, advocates point to expanded family and medical leave provisions and more affordable, available child care as key to improving conditions for low-wage workers.

Regarding the latter, Vogtman acknowledged that some change is afoot. She applauded New Mexico for, in 2022, becoming the first state to make child care free to almost every New Mexican. Starting last May, it began offering a year’s worth of child care subsidies to families whose incomes are up to 400% of the federal poverty level, which meant a family of four earning $111,000 annually would qualify.

As another example, Kids Count On Us, a Minnesota coalition of child care providers and workers in what is a notoriously underpaid industry, helped to win record funding of child care subsidies for families and a salary hike for child care workers in 2023.

“It's been a struggle over the years to get people to see this work of child care as labor — because it's so feminized, its seen as women’s work,” said Jilian Clearman, an attorney who is fundraising director for the Workers Confluence Fund in Minnesota. Its work has included providing technical and other assistance linking Kids Count On Us with unions, including Education Minnesota to achieve that major legislative victory in child care.

The child care workforce is 94% female and 40% of color, according to an Education Trust and U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis — and child care is perceived as “something that really should be taken care of in the family, somehow, by women,” Clearman continued. “And that spills over into how these workers are treated.”

Kids Count On Us, an organization comprised primarily of women, has changed the conversation, Clearman added: “It’s been part of the bigger picture. It’s been getting those workers understood as workers more fully, not just as women.”

Amid such rare victories, the National Women’s Law Center has updated its map and data tables of how women in the 40 lowest-paying jobs are faring in each of the 50 states, pinpointing problems and opportunities for change.

One barrier to raising wages is the willingness of many policymakers, lawmakers, and others to believe popular myths about who low-wage earners are.

“It’s patently false that people in those jobs are just kids; they're mostly adults,” Vogtman said. “The vast majority have completed high school, and many, many of them have completed some college or have full, four-year college degrees.

“And the assumption is that they don't have any family responsibilities. Just none of these things are true. Even as President Biden’s administration, Vogtman said, has been aiming, for example, to invest in child care infrastructure, though Congress has failed to support such measures. “Until we actually change our policies in a permanent way, we can't expect to see major changes to many of the jobs in this country,” she said. We can’t expect to see major changes in how the women, particularly Black women and Latinas and Indigenous women who are holding these jobs, are faring and in how they are able to support themselves and their families.”