women economics

what I've been trying to do with my coverage this year

Hi everyone,

First off: I want to say thank you to everyone who donated to the collective GiveDirectly fundraiser over the last ten days! It’s been such a tremendous success with 1,690 donations across the readers of thirteen newsletters. So far people have donated a collective $565,625 (!), and GiveDirectly agreed to match the first $500,000, so that means over $1 million will be headed to help some of the poorest people on earth. (The campaign goes for another 18 days if you want to participate.) For more on what GiveDirectly does for rural African villages, here’s a story my colleague Dylan wrote in 2019.
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At the end of December I usually do a review of the pieces I’m most proud of, and reflect on my work from that year. I still plan to do that, I usually do it in the days after Christmas. But yesterday I published a new piece and I have been doing some reflection a bit early.

The new story is on the secondary-earner effects (i.e. the effects on the lower-earning spouse, usually the wife) associated with filing taxes jointly in the US. There's been much national focus on declining marriage rates, the benefits of marriage for adults and children, and on policies that disincentivize marriage. I look at joint filing, which is a tax penalty within US marriages. Nearly all peer countries have abandoned their joint filing systems after realizing how it impacts on women and employment.

Now some readers were surprised I would call it a “penalty” since joint filing itself provides a marriage bonus to couples by letting them pay less in taxes. But something can be a benefit and a penalty at the same time. See also: motherhood penalties. It can depend on what time horizon you’re thinking about. Joint filing can provide your family tax savings that year, but if it also discourages you from working, as we know it does for many, then over the course of your lifetime it could be understood as an penalty. Maybe you get divorced, maybe you outlive your spouse, maybe you want to work later on but now find it harder to reenter the workforce because of the time you took off. And yes, of course, some people genuinely want to take off but we also know many people exit not because they necessarily want to but because the cost of child care is too high, or it’s too hard to find care, or it seemed like the best economic decision for their household at that moment.

International studies reinforce this: when other countries like Canada and Sweden ended their joint filing systems they saw an increase in married female labor force participation. And when the Czech Republic introduced joint taxation in 2005, the number of married women in the workforce went down.

I don’t think we’re going to get rid of joint filing in the US any time soon, as so many of our other health and retirement systems have evolved around it and it would amount to a tax hike on most married couples which is not exactly popular politics. But there are other ideas we could explore to reduce this penalty, like increase affordable access to child care and deduct taxes on the secondary earner. We should be talking more about those ideas, and we should be thinking more about how to mitigate vulnerability if certain relationships go south. You can read that here.

It’s been just over a year since my essay on millennial mom dread came out. It’s been amazing to continue to hear from people who resonate with the piece. Even just this week I received a note from a writer who published an essay in Vogue on her positive experience in motherhood. (Her title: “The Underrated Joy of Being a Working Mother”). New books came out this year like What Are Children For? which explore the ambivalence young women have over having children. (Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic recently had a nice interview on her podcast with one of the authors of that book I recommend listening to.) Look at essays like this in Elle, in the FT, and New York Times. I think the discourse has fundamentally shifted, and I’m proud for playing a small part in that.

But but but…. this year has also been fairly dizzying in how much else has been going on when it comes to women and mothers and families. That has really been a huge focus of my work over the last 12 months, which I think is easier to understand if I take a step back. I really strongly believe we can’t untangle this complex knot if we don’t understand the policies in effect, the policies we haven’t tried, and all the messy politics.

This year I explored the “motherhood penalty” - which refers to the economic impact women face when becoming parents. But the reality is more complex and layered than the oversimplified narrative we typically hear. Just as parenthood itself deserves a more thoughtful discussion, I do think women deserve more than just calamitous warnings about career death upon having kids. There's room for a more constructive, supportive conversation, and I hope I contributed to that.

I also looked at the growing attacks on abortion rights, covering extreme efforts in states like Florida and Arizona, and the playbook to restricting access to birth control. (If that sounds far-fetched to you, I understand! But I encourage just reading the story). This year was unprecedented for attacks on IVF, and I wrote about the shocking ruling in Alabama that said frozen embryos count as “children” under state law. I looked at the distorted debate around regulation in the US fertility industry, and how IVF is playing out politically within the Republican coalition.

On the pro-choice side I looked at how abortion rights groups were holding back their criticisms of Biden even as they disagreed with his “Restore Roe” position and I covered how abortion rights groups withheld support from a ballot measure campaign in South Dakota because they didn’t think it went far enough to restore access. (South Dakota has completely banned abortion.) I covered the funding debates over tens of millions of dollars flowing into the election for abortion rights, while funding for abortion care itself was drying up. I covered the seven winning abortion rights ballot measures in 2024, and what to expect on abortion with Trump winning a second term. I explained why incidence of abortion in the US has gone up, and how the overturn of Roe sparked a new campaign for expanding access across Europe.

I’ve dug into debates about declining birthrates and pro-natalism, an area I believe will become even more salient in the coming years. This conversation overlaps with restrictions on abortion rights in real and troubling ways. This past fall three Republican attorneys general filed a new lawsuit to try to get mifepristone off the market, and one of their more wretched arguments is that reduced birth rates from abortion medication harm states through "diminished political representation" and reduced federal funding due to lower populations.

As unsettling and gross as this conversation can be, I have also tried to approach my reporting in a way that reflects that some people really do want to have more kids than they ultimately do, and feel they can’t for various reasons — be it lack of housing, child care, concerns about their careers and relationships. If reproductive justice is about supporting people to have the kinds of families they wants, then I think liberal/progressive people should think through where they might find common ground with those who they might otherwise strongly disagree. I also want to take seriously what it could mean for the planet to have fewer people, and parse through the various theories and warnings floating around about a future with declining population.

The economics of parenting and motherhood have all overlapped into my exploration of child care this year too. I’ve reported on the politics of child care in the Democratic coalition and I’ve looked at new innovative ideas to expand care. I’ve looked at why women’s labor force participation has continued to rise even when people warned child care was about to go off a cliff, and how we can pay child care workers more without charging parents higher fees. I looked at how Germany’s decade experiment with universal child care is playing out, especially for working moms.

There are a lot of questions ahead. One, I wrote about recently: if Democrats could compromise with Republicans on abortion, should they? Would tackling marriage penalties in the tax code affect birth rates? I want to hear your questions.

I’m going to continue to focus on family policy in the months to come — the intersections between family, reproductive rights, falling birth rates, gender in the workplace, care work. I’m going to keep doing it with an eye on helping you understand what people are arguing about, what the crux of the disagreements are. And I’m going to continue to try and lift up interesting new research, and highlight promising solutions. I’m not asking anyone to become an obsessive news junkie, but I thank you for continuing to read, and paying attention.

If you want to support more of this work next year please consider becoming a Vox member!

Thanks again,
Rachel