Poverty is a Policy Choice—and Women Deserve More 

In the third episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, economists and advocates break down how our economy is leaving women behind and lay out strategies for advancing a feminist economic future.

“When you see the injustices that there are in low-income communities and people-of-color communities and [for] women in general,” legendary labor organizer and feminist leader Dolores Huerta told me in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “then you realize that this is not right, and that we should do something to change it. This is what has perpetuated me into this lifelong struggle.”

“We’re not done yet, Huerta added. “There’s still a lot more work to do.”

The third episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward—a Ms. Studios podcast tracing the intertwined histories of the magazine and the larger feminist movement—explores the transformations in women’s economic lives Ms. has chronicled in the last 50-plus years, and where we go from here in the fight for economic justice. I spoke to Huerta and other economists, advocates, and movement-builders for this episode—collecting their visions for a feminist economic future and exploring, in our conversations, the myriad gaps in our current economic system.

You can listen to the episode in full now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcasts, or on msmagazine.com. And make sure you like, follow and subscribe so you don’t miss the next installment—then rate, review and share the podcast with your co-conspirators so they don’t, either!

In the wake of the so-called “Big, Beautiful, Bill” being rammed through Congress by the President and his henchmen in Congress—enacting policies that experts warned will initiate the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history—the conversations I had with experts for this episode of “Looking Back, Moving Forward” shed light on the longstanding policy failures that have pushed women disproportionately into poverty and led to the widespread diminishment of women’s paid and unpaid labor.

We’re not done yet. There’s still a lot more work to do.

Labor rights and feminist champion Dolores Huerta

“Poverty is the result of systems that have been intentionally put in place that the majority of us benefit from,” Aisha Nyandoro, founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, home to the Magnolia Mother’s Trust guaranteed income program, told me. “That’s why poverty exists. Individuals are not poor simply because they are not working hard enough, simply because they are not educated enough, simply because they are not doing whatever the things are we tell ourselves individuals are not doing. Poverty is a systemic failing, not an individual failing.”

Gaylynn Burroughs saw those systems at play when she was an attorney at the Bronx Defenders, representing poor women of color whose children were in the child welfare system simply because they couldn’t make ends meet. “We could’ve just provided the food,” she said. “We could’ve just helped people get medical care. Why don’t we just provide the support people need? Why do we have to traumatize these families?”

Now the Vice President of Education and Workplace Equality at the National Women’s Law Center, Burroughs is leading strategic work to build a better economy. “There is this trend that we have seen that women are just more likely to live in poverty and to experience hardship,” she asserted. “It’s not like this is inevitable. The fact that women are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty is a choice that we have made as a society.”

We can learn from feminist history what other choices we could make—and what other visions are possible for the feminist future.

“The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists in the Boston area, wrote more than 50 years ago that by liberating people who, simultaneously, experience sexism, racism, heterosexism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism, we will free everyone, because freeing them means dismantling all those structures of power,” historian and Barnard professor Premilla Nadasen told me. “As contemporary feminists, we have to continually ask: In whose interests are we fighting? Who will benefit from the work that I’m doing right now? Who should we put at the center of our organizing campaigns? It’s more important than ever that we turn to history, that we turn to feminist organizing, we turn to anti-racism organizing as a way to help us chart our new path forward.”

Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino called on politicians to make different choices during the COVID-19 pandemic, outlining in Ms. the potential power of federal investments in the care economy to not only alleviate women’s economic stress, but to boost the health of the entire economy. 

You want to create this vision of a world where there’s gender and racial equity, but we now have to defend things like diversity.

Gaylynn Burroughs, National Women’s Law Center

“So many of us were living off Zoom screens with little children around interrupting us every three seconds,” Mabud recalled, “and I think that brought the caregiving crisis home, quite literally, for people who maybe hadn’t thought about it so much before. There was a bit of an opening to insert care into this broader economic conversation, to reframe care as infrastructure, as vital, a vital service, vital labor that provides the foundation for all of the rest of our labor, and really advancing the idea that care jobs are job-creating jobs.”

“So much of the conversation among economists and among policy people about infrastructure has always been about male-dominated infrastructure,” Lenore added. “We cannot rebuild our economy or build back better, as it were, with male-dominated sectors and not female-dominated sectors.”

We also can’t build back better—or advance a truly beautiful economy, big enough for all of us—without changing what business-as-usual looks like for women across the country.

“We still are facing the consequences of historical and present-day discrimination,” Burroughs explained. “We need to go faster in fixing these problems, but unfortunately, it seems like we’re going backwards. The pay gap persists. In fact, between 2022 and 2023, it was the first time that we saw that the pay gap actually widened between women and men in decades. We still have an epidemic of workplace harassment that is happening. Women shoulder the burden of unpaid caregiving. We don’t have the support we need to be caregivers and to also be workers and also do all the things that we need to do in our lives.”

We have to continually ask: In whose interests are we fighting? Who will benefit from the work that I’m doing right now? Who should we put at the center of our organizing campaigns?

Premilla Nadasen, labor and women’s historian

“We had a global pandemic and a deep health crisis that affected every single person in this country,” Palladino lamented, “and we don’t have paid sick leave coming out. We clearly haven’t moved forward in terms of public support, and in fact, we’ve moved backwards in terms of everything happening with Medicaid and Medicare right now. We’re going to need to really continue to hammer home on these needs.”

“We know what to do to make it better for women in the economy,” Burroughs added. “Raise the minimum wage. Protect people from workplace harassment. Have things like paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, support for childcare. We know these things, and yet, we are dealing with a flurry of activity that we have to navigate through just to protect the things that we already have… You want to create this vision of a world where there’s gender and racial equity, but we now have to defend things like diversity.”

Nyandoro echoed the sentiment. “I would really like to see a federal guaranteed income,” she told me. “I would like to see the child tax credit made permanent. I would like to see universal childcare… But quite frankly, where we are, right now, I would love for us to have better empathy and better understanding about the policies and systems that actually exist within this country. I would like for the folks in charge to actually know how shit works. I want some baseline, basic stuff—and once we get to that, then we can get back to imagining.”

Individuals are not poor simply because they are not working hard enough, simply because they are not educated enough, simply because they are not doing whatever the things are we tell ourselves individuals are not doing. Poverty is a systemic failing, not an individual failing.”

Aisha Nyandoro

And yet, the imagining is critical, even in trying moments like the one we find ourselves in right now. So is the remembering. Because not all is lost—and we can’t stop fighting for those who need these changes the most.

“I’m 95 years old this year, and I can look back into my own history, and I can see how things have changed over the decades,” Huerta told me. “We know how to reach that goal line of equality. We’ve got to keep on marching. We’ve got to keep on protesting…We have to identify the oppressors, and we have to make strategies and plan how we are going to confront them. We are being tested in terms of our democracy. We are being tested in terms of our organizational capacities and whether we can all come together to defend ourselves against fascism and save democracy.”

Huerta is optimistic we can win those fights—which is just more proof that transformational change is women’s work after all.