Why do women feel so broke?

The persistent gap in financial security

Women know a lot about CPI.

It’s a woman’s economy now, at least according to Axios. And just last week, The New York Times reported yet more bad news for the kinds of blue collar jobs traditionally held by men.

These economic narratives aren’t new. In 2012, journalist Hanna Rosin published “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women” — an early prognosis of what has since become conventional wisdom: that modernity advantages women over men. The post-industrial economy that rewarded brain over brawn played to feminine strengths and left men in the dust.

Many of the trends that Rosin cited in her book remain true. Women today outstrip men in college attendance, receive more graduate degrees, and dominate growing service sectors like health care and education. Loss of manufacturing jobs in the early 2000s hit men the hardest. And while female labor force participation famously dipped during COVID-19 “she-cession,” it is back to pre-pandemic levels.

Yet, across virtually every metric of financial security, women continue to report worse outcomes than men. From our poll of registered voters surveyed between March 12 and 17, 2026:

• Seventy-one percent of women said that their income wasn’t keeping up with cost of living. Just 58% of men said the same.

• Half of women said they would be unable to pay $1,000 out of pocket without going into debt in the case of a medical emergency — only 37% of men said the same.

• When asked about their financial futures, women were 14 percentage points less likely than men to say they would be able to live out a comfortable retirement.

It’s not just our numbers. Back in March 2024, an Ipsos/BMO poll found that more American women than men felt insecure about their finances. Last year, a Harris poll reported that women were notably more concerned about inflation than men.

So what is going on here?

It is possible, of course, that men and women experience the same circumstances differently; that men tend to downplay and women to overstate their own distress.

Such a female vibecession would be noteworthy in itself. Under Joe Biden, consumer sentiment surveys deviated substantially from “objective” measures of economic performance, like growth, unemployment, and inflation. The public representatives who failed to reckon with that pessimism came to regret it.

But there seems to be more behind this particular story. Corroborating labor market data suggests that women are, in fact, responding to real financial insecurities — gaps in the economy that have persisted well into the girlboss era.

Most women don’t work in boardrooms

One likely explanation for this gender gap in financial outlook is that women are overrepresented in the demographics hit hardest by rising cost of living. For all the female empowerment talk, women are still more likely to work low-wage jobs, more likely to experience worse employee benefits, and more likely to be raising children on a single income.

Of course, these are bad times for everyone. Inflation has eroded most of the wage growth that occurred after the pandemic. Average monthly rent paid by tenants rose by more than 30% between 2019 and 2024, and child care prices increased by 29% from 2020 to 2024. The national median cost of assisted living has increased by approximately 46% between 2019 and 2024.

So it is no wonder that respondents — irrespective of gender — expressed broad pessimism about their personal finances, with only 8% describing their current situation as “excellent.” But women stand out even against this already bleak baseline.

This tracks with the fact that most women really do tend to have less money in the bank. The structural shift away from heavy industry to the service sector did not directly translate into booming gains for women, who today make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers in the U.S.

Much of this has to do with the fact that the very jobs that women supposedly hold an advantage in are simultaneously the most poorly compensated — even when demand is high. Take child care, for instance, a sector staffed 94% by women and one that is experiencing low, stagnant wages despite significant growth. The same is true of essentially any occupation rooted in caregiving, like social work, home health care aides, or K-3 teaching.

In part, this is because it’s hard to increase productivity in labor-intensive services. The invention of the internet or smartphone hasn’t really changed the fact that you need a certain number of humans to watch your kid. But some comes down to women’s work being systematically undervalued in wage-setting.

Adding insult to injury, the roles that women are concentrated in also tend to have fewer benefits. Contrary to the theory of “compensatory differentials,” which holds that jobs offset an undesirable aspect (like worse pay or conditions) with better benefits or wages worse-paying jobs compensate workers with better benefits, evidence suggests that workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance or retirement plans — which would explain why women are less optimistic about their retirement in our poll.

All of these structural factors are particularly salient for the women raising children without a supplementary male income or savings.

Things look worse at the grocery store

One of the most striking aspects of the gender gap in financial distress metrics is that it seems to extend beyond just the most precariously positioned women.

Women without college degrees felt significantly worse about their finances than women with college degrees — with 15% more feeling unable to live out a comfortable retirement.

Yet women with college degrees in turn felt significantly worse than their male peers. Even among a demographic where low-wage work is less prevalent, economic pessimism remains gendered.

The persistence of this trend suggests that even in households where finances are joint, women tend to be more financially worried than the men they live with.

While we did not ask about marital status, many female respondents likely have male partners — especially women with college degrees. Even as the share of people living alone increases, still around half of Americans aged 25 to 54 are married and around 10% cohabitate. The vast majority of these are heterosexual couples.

One reason men and women under the same roof may experience the economy differently is simply that women are more likely to be in charge of groceries. A Pew Research Center poll from a few years ago found that in 80% of couples with kids, women were the usual grocery shopper.

If you’ve been buying the same gallon of milk from the same Walmart for years, you’re pretty much a walking Consumer Price Index.

For this reason, poverty literature often describes women as the “shock absorbers” of economic downturns. They are responsible for balancing household budgets and for making ends meet, even when there is less to go around.

The economic concerns tied up in having children may also explain the gender gap in financial outlook. When asked whether raising a child was harder today than 25 years ago, 57% of women responded “much harder” in our poll, compared to 45% of men.

Some of this gap likely reflects women bearing more of the day-to-day costs of child-rearing, like diapers, breast pumps, and child care logistics. That would explain why female respondents aged 30 to 64, in their prime parenting years, are more likely than younger women to say their incomes aren’t keeping up with cost of living.

But there is a longer-term anxiety at work here too. Women disproportionately face career trade-offs after a child is born — the so-called “motherhood penalty.” Women who intend to have children have good reason to feel uncertain about the reliability of their future earning power.

A bad time to be a trad-anything

In 2021, Hanna Rosin walked back her original argument about “The End of Men.” The pandemic “exposed what should have been obvious all along,” she wrote in The Cut. “American work culture has always conspired to keep professional women out and working-class women shackled.”

But not everyone shares her revised view of women’s position in the economy.

The Trump administration has made its view that gender equity went too far very clear, rolling back policies aimed at reducing pay gaps. Pro-family arguments for traditional gender roles have also gained ground, with woke ideology being blamed for women abandoning their moral duties as mothers and wives.

This kind of MAGA trad-nostalgia has many flaws. A basic one is that most American women, and for that matter, most American men, do not have the option to step back from their careers and stay at home with their children.

Liberal feminism is not the primary culprit here. It may have given women the cultural permission to lay down their aprons. But it is the cost of housing, health care, and education that made women’s participation in the labor market an economic necessity.

If someone genuinely believes that opting out of a full-time job to raise children should be a viable life decision, they should be joining the battle for affordability being fought across the country.

Correction: We have updated the definition of “compensatory differentials” used in this article.

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