When it comes to rising costs, women are more worried than men — about everything

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Rising costs have defined the past six years for Dayna DePalma. 

It wasn’t something she thought much about growing up in New Jersey with parents who both worked good jobs, who lived in a beautiful house. But in 2019, while in rehabilitation recovering from a drug addiction, she found out she was pregnant with her daughter. As a single mom, she moved back in with her parents and eventually started working at her child’s day care just so she could get the 50 percent discount that made it affordable. After six months, she left that job for a better one and now works in logistics.

But it wasn’t until this month, after months of looking for a place to live, that she was finally able to rent her own apartment. Her daughter just started kindergarten. DePalma has been sober for six years. 

“Just being a single mom, it’s really hard to have a savings in general. I feel like I live paycheck to paycheck just with basic needs supporting her and myself,” said DePalma, 28. 

Costs only keep creeping up, and she’s not sure what comes next. Saving enough to make the move was several years of work. DePalma has no savings, nothing squirreled away for retirement. Homeownership feels like a farfetched dream.  

“I just feel like it’s going to be impossible to be able to own a home,” she said. “My anxiety levels have been through the roof regarding money.” 

That’s a familiar story for most women these days, not just DePalma. The rising cost of living is squeezing women much more than men, and they report more concern about how they’re going to pay their bills, according to a new 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll.

In every category surveyed — groceries, housing, child care, medical bills and retirement — women are more likely to say they are worried about covering those expenses. About 67 percent of women said they are worried about the cost of housing, compared with 60 percent of men. More than two-thirds of women are worried about the cost of groceries, while just over half of men are. Among parents, 52 percent of women are stressed about the cost of child care; 45 percent of men said the same. 

SurveyMonkey conducted this poll online from September 8 to 15 among a national sample of 20,807 U.S. adults, with a modeled error estimate of plus or minus 1.0 percentage points.

In recent months, prices for most necessities have again been rising, and changes from the Trump administration could make affordability more out of reach: Last month saw the largest rise in food prices in nearly three years; costs are up 29 percent from the start of the pandemic. Upcoming cuts to SNAP, the food stamps program, will make accessing benefits that lower that burden even harder. And housing costs, though they are starting to level out from their post-pandemic peak in 2022, are still outpacing inflation. Rising tariffs, which took effect last month, are only expected to worsen both. 

The cost of child care is also outpacing inflation, averaging $13,128 annually in 2024, a 29 percent increase from 2020. And medical bills are soon expected to increase for those on Medicaid — the lowest-income Americans — and especially women and children after Congress cut more than $1 trillion from the program over the next decade. 

On retirement, a spending package that passed Congress this year will provide a tax break to Americans 65 and older, but it will also make the Social Security trust insolvent by 2032, meaning retired women — the majority of Social Security beneficiaries — could see cuts to their incomes in the coming years.

If Americans are worried, it’s easy to see why. It’s also no mystery why women may be worried even more: Women make the majority of consumer purchases for their families and face rising grocery costs head on. Those costs are going to make it harder to pay for other needs, like rent; women are more likely to be renters, less likely to be homeowners and more likely to be spending over a third of their earnings on housing alone. 

If they’re parents of young kids, their other big line-item expense is probably child care, which for those with two or more children now exceeds the cost of the average rent or mortgage in most states. And if child care falls through, women are the ones most likely to have to leave work to stitch together care or leave the labor force altogether. Perhaps they’re missing work because their child is sick. Women are more likely to shoulder health care expenses for kids because they are primary caregivers, while also themselves facing higher health care costs on average because they go to the doctor more frequently for things like prenatal and reproductive care. After all of that is tallied up, what is left for retirement? Thanks to historic inequality, about 30 percent less than men. 

“The shift in who does all the bill paying over the last generation — it’s not just that women do the shopping, they are also frequently the ones handling the mortgage check, paying the credit card bills, definitely looking at the after care bills or the child care bills,” said Mike Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank.

And while men tend to view the economy more individualistically, women are making decisions across the whole family’s bank account, Madowitz said, while also taking the kids to the doctor and drawing up the grocery list.  

“It’s both like women are in fact the accounting department and the manufacturing floor,” he said. 

That view into household finances has made it so, historically, women have consistently felt worse about the economy than men. Because they tend to have fewer earnings and more caregiving responsibilities outside the home, they feel the impact of higher costs first. 

Women of color feel it most of all.

In the 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll, Latinas, especially, consistently reported higher rates of worry than any other group across nearly all categories except retirement. On groceries, 77 percent of Latinas reported feeling worried about growing costs, compared with 69 percent of White women. It was the same for child care (47 percent versus 28 percent), housing (77 percent versus 63 percent), and medical bills (73 percent versus 69 percent). 

Black women also had far higher rates than their White counterparts, especially when it came to food and housing costs. Since early this year, Black women’s unemployment rate has been rising far quicker than for other groups, from 5.1 percent in March to 6.7 percent in August. It’s currently at its highest rate in four years. 

Now, the arrival of higher tariffs on most countries is adding a new stressor to the mix that is already showing up in the inflation data. 

“There are things like groceries where we know it’s gonna show up really fast and that’s obviously stressful because you’re seeing it right away, and also you’re seeing it right away in places where it’s not particularly easy to cut your spending,” Madowitz said. “But then there’s all this stuff where it’s not showing up right away, and on some level that also produces anxiety because you’re like, ‘Well, I know this is coming.’”

That feeling of uncertainty has been hanging over Nicole Taetsch and her family of four in New Jersey. Taetsch has her own consulting business focused on marketing and business development, and her husband works with real estate investment properties. They have a 4-year-old and an 8-year-old and make a pretty good living, “and still, it’s tight,” she said. 

“Everything post-pandemic has gone up, and then the uncertainty of everything: Costs have never really come down, then tariffs have only added to it. There’s all sorts of different pressures,” said Taetsch, 43.

If they had another child “what would we do?” Taetsch said. “There is nowhere to move in our area. We couldn’t buy anything here.”

Even recently, as she did the kids’ fall shopping at Old Navy, she noticed those prices had increased. The same is true at the grocery store. Taetsch hosts a podcast on parents and politics, and her most recent episode discussed exorbitant grocery prices for healthy food items. It was inspired by a LinkedIn post from food importer Greg Santollo about a bowl of cut fruit at Whole Foods with a $35 price tag.

She and her husband, Taetsch said, “are just very cognizant of the fact that prices are going up, there is absolutely no social safety net, the government isn’t making any policies to help the average American, they are only making it harder through taking away people’s health care, not doing anything to improve our health system, not doing anything to invest in our schools or public education or child care — the things that parents need.” 

Taetsch grew up with a single mother and feels like “there is no way that, today, the lifestyle of a single mom raising two kids is anywhere near how my mom was able to raise us.” 

For women of her generation, she said, “I feel like the cards are so broadly stacked against us.”