This Recession is Old News to Women

They're letting us fail, and to what end?

Editor’s note: I am very pleased to welcome Mrs. Vivian P. as our first regular female contributor here at White Papers. Vivan, an American, will focus her attention on what are commonly called ‘kitchen table’ issues such as household economics, inflation, and public safety.

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Like most American women (56%) I control the household budget - and as I sit at the kitchen table, juggling the family budget and planning our next grocery run, I can’t help but reflect on how precarious our current economic climate feels. It’s not just the headlines or the fluctuating stock markets that worry me; it’s the tangible impact on our daily lives that makes me anxious. This anxiety has come and gone in waves since the COVID-19 pandemic.

My husband and I, like many couples, have worked hard to build a comfortable life for ourselves and our children. We’ve managed to save a bit, he has invested prudently, and we live within our means. Yet, despite our best efforts, the sense of economic instability seems to be growing stronger. It's as if no matter how carefully we plan, we’re always one unexpected expense away from a crisis.

And we are not the only ones. According to a study published in Forbes Advisor 78% of our fellow Americans are living paycheck to paycheck as of 2023. This is a 6% increase from the 2022 figures. Even more concerning to me, perhaps because I have teenagers, is that Gen Z reports the highest monthly bills, the lowest income, and the most unexpected emergencies. How are our young people supposed to get ahead when the entire economy appears structured to keep them down?

As almost any American (or European for that matter) will know the cost of living has been creeping up steadily since the pandemic. From the prices at the gas pump to the cost of a simple family meal, every aspect of our budget feels stretched. In one, admittedly non-official, experiment conducted by The TexMex Mom she highlighted that a standard Aldi grocery run which cost $50.66 in 2019 now costs $77.68 in 2024. This is a 53.5% jump in the cost of this particular basket of groceries!

This is unsurprising, official Department of Agricultural (USDA) statistics show that food-at-home prices (groceries) increased by 3.5% in 2020, 3.9% in 2021, 11.4% in 2022, and 5% in 2023. USDA goes on to explain they expect food-at-home prices to increase by 1% over the course of 2024 and 0.7% for all of 2025. These figures seem tame compared to the previous years, but they truly are not. The price of beef is expected to increase by 4.4% while ‘fats and oils’ will experience a 3.4% increase.

Filling up the gas tank is also more expensive than in 2019. Between November 2014 and April 2021, the average retail gas price in the United States never exceeded $3 per gallon and hovered around $2.55 a gallon for most of that period. But, post-May 2021, the gas price has never fallen below $3.20 per gallon and has consistently stayed above $3.50 per gallon.

Is it any wonder that 58% of Americans told Monmouth University in May of 2022 that they were having difficulty affording gas? In another poll, this time conducted by Gallup, 62% of Americans said they were traveling less this summer due to high gas prices - the highest figure since Gallup began asking this question in June of 2000.

Then there is the job market …

My husband and I have been fortunate to have stable jobs through and since the pandemic. He has leveraged his union job for excellent healthcare benefits and a stable wage and I was able to take full advantage of the pandemic work-from-home revolution (at least for a while).

But, I recently fell victim to the mass tech layoffs that are rocking the American economy. Roughly 200,000 tech workers were laid off in 2023 and more than 75,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2024 with Intel opening August by announcing it was laying off 15,000 employees.

These mass tech layoffs represent a particular economic hit for Whites as we make up 70% of the tech workforce and it is one of the few career paths that offered a family wage once exiting college. And then there is the female factor. Recent data has shown that women in the tech sector are 65% more likely to face layoffs than men. Two women are even going so far as to sue Twitter (now X) because it laid off 57% of its female workforce!

Stories of colleagues facing layoffs or struggling to find new employment are all too common. Even in fields considered relatively stable, the fear of sudden job loss or a pay cut looms large.

Generally, I would not make a ‘gendered’ point about layoffs, but these layoffs are affecting mothers more than anyone else. Female tech workers, who tend to specialize more in marketing, HR, design, and other ‘front end’ roles, can work from home at rates far higher than the average worker according to a 2023 MIT article. This means that tens if not hundreds of thousands of women who could work from home and take care of their children now face layoffs and the loss of a (more) ideal work-life balance with no guarantee that their next job will offer the same opportunity.

And is it any wonder? The number of unemployed in the United States has increased by one million individuals since January of 2024 and now stands at 7.163 million with the most recent 500,000 having been laid off since May! For Whites, the number of jobless has increased from 4.3 million in January of 2024 to 4.8 million in the most recent June data. It is interesting to note that the Black unemployed have only gone up by about 220,000 in that same period, less than half the figure for Whites.

This does not surprise me though, as White Papers has before covered the increasing gap between Whites and Blacks. I remember the piece on White wages showing that Whites had yet to recover to their 2019 level of income while African Americans had not only recovered their pre-COVID income level but had surpassed it.

Now, we are watching the wealthy panic over the sharp decline in the stock market as they begin to worry about a pending recession. This panic by the wealthy leaves many of us, especially the wives and mothers sitting at the kitchen table balancing the household checkbook, slightly amused. Pending recession? We’ve been in a quality-of-life recession for years!

Food is expensive, gas even more so, finding a job is a truly Herculean task, and we worry about the future of our children perhaps more than we worry about ourselves.

Homeownership, which once felt like the ultimate symbol of stability, now feels like a high-stakes gamble. Property taxes, maintenance costs, and rising interest rates are constant concerns. We bought our home years ago, but the pressure to keep up with payments and maintain our property is ever-present. The idea of moving to a more affordable place or downsizing is a daunting thought, fraught with uncertainty and emotional attachment.

This speaks to an even broader emotional toll affecting all Americans. The constant worry about finances, coupled with the pressures of maintaining a stable home environment for our children, can be overwhelming. Women in particular face a greater uphill battle in the face of economic hardship. We are 5 points less likely than men to be able to pay all of our bills on time and in full, we are 4 points less likely to be able to cover three months of expenses with savings, and when precarity becomes particularly bad we are more likely to rely on credit cards.

This is not because women are less financially responsible (again, almost 60% of us manage the budget in married households), but because we are often the first to face layoffs while being obligated to the daily welfare of dependents, namely children, in a way that men rarely are. We purchase the clothes, we buy the groceries, and we take them to school, the doctor, and extracurriculars.

To put it even more simply: if the gap in the grocery budget has to be filled for the month or we need to make a sudden school-related purchase it is our credit card being used to make up the shortfall, not our husband’s.

Lest I be accused of engaging in gender ‘warfare’ it is here I should remind the reader that it is male wages, especially White male wages, that have gone stagnant in the face of the ‘precarity economy’ we live in. Men are working more overtime than ever before, with roughly 30% of men now working overtime every day just to make up for the lack of wage increases and in many cases wage stagnation which Americans (but especially men) have faced for decades.

Balancing the need to provide for our families has slowly eroded American’s free time and is beginning to affect our relationships. The stress often seeps into our personal lives, affecting our relationships and overall well-being.

Estimates show that 20 to 40 percent of divorces in the United States are related to financial problems and a further 54% of Americans believe that debt-related issues are appropriate grounds for a divorce. At a time when American families should be coming together to weather the economic storm, we are being split apart by the stress of an economy beyond our control.

Financial strain not only results in emotional stress but can also lead to physical abuse. The Department of Justice has found that the number of women experiencing victimization at the hands of their partner more than doubles from 2% to 5% when a couple is feeling financial strain. The Justice Department also found that the financial strain can serve to trap women in these abusive relationships and often lead to less stable employment for these women.

Similarly, the rate of intimate partner violence against women in relationships where the male was experiencing a period of unemployment nearly doubled from 4.7% to 7.5% while in relationships where men experienced numerous periods of unemployment intimate partner violence against women occurred in as many as 12.3% of cases. A nearly 3-fold increase compared to when men have stable employment.

If the elite, and particularly the government, are aware of the stress and strain that economic precarity puts on relationships (not to mention the danger it puts women in) why do they insist on continuing to build an economy that will only result in more of these deteriorating relationships that put women at risk?

Conclusion:

It’s almost insulting that the elite are only just now beginning to panic about the state of the economy while the rest of us have languished in its sorry state for years and in some cases decades (rural America never recovered from the 2008 recession).

Despite these challenges, I am grateful for the support system I have. Having a partner who shares the financial responsibilities and emotional burdens is a blessing. We work together to navigate these uncertain times and discuss our concerns openly. Yet, even with this support, the reality is that economic precarity is a heavy weight to carry.

Millions of women (and, yes, men) have been dealing with a deteriorating economy for years and the alarm over recession is ultimately old news to us.

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