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Everyone wants to win working-class voters. But have they realized many are women?
The working class isn’t just White men in hard hats anymore. A crop of women candidates may be the ones who can earn their votes.
By Chabeli Carrazana
The past couple of years have been particularly challenging for working-class women in the economy. They returned to work in high numbers after the pandemic, benefiting from a climate in which businesses were offering better benefits, more flexibility and higher pay, which allowed them to move into good jobs. But those improvements were short-lived.
“We’re seeing a pretty stunning reversal of that that is impacting the real working-class jobs that are sort of manual labor, low-wage, low-education requirement jobs predominantly held by women,” said Kate Bahn, the chief economist and senior vice president of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focused on gender and economic equity.