The State of Women in 2026: Progress, Pay Gaps and Participation

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Alex Ossola (0:31)

Hey, What's News listeners, it's Sunday, March 15th. I'm Alex Ossola for the Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, it may be Women's History Month, but today we're not just looking back. How are American women from the C-suite to child care actually doing professionally and economically in 2026? There's little doubt that women have made great strides in the past few decades. Women are holding more managerial roles or top jobs at companies than in the past. They're also more likely to have a college degree. That's been the case for a few years now. According to McKinsey, women now control about a third of all retail financial assets in the US, and that's expected to rise to between 40 and 45 percent by 2030 But underneath all these data points, the reality for many individual women is a bit more complicated. The pay gap between men and women keeps getting wider, particularly so for black and Hispanic women. Parents of young children are seeing the costs of child care skyrocket. A 2025 survey by care.com found that families in the US spent an average of 22 percent of their household income on child care alone. A rollback of DEI policies means S&P 500 companies are appointing fewer women and people of color. To get a sense of what's driving these trends and how women are actually doing as a whole, I spoke with WSJ Economics reporter Harriet Torry and Matthew Nestler, Senior Economist at professional services firm KPMG.

Let's go back for a second to the COVID-19 pandemic. I remember all these headlines at the time that women were leaving their jobs. Harriet, why did the pandemic hit women particularly hard?

Harriet Torry (2:25)

I think caregiving is really the answer to that question. During the pandemic, we saw everything shut down. Schools went to remote learning, and it was just a really tough time for so many families to juggle both of them. And just by default, a lot of women just didn't have the time or the bandwidth to try and stay in the labor force. A lot of women left the labor force, and it took time for them to come back. I mean, there are definitely some benefits from the pandemic. We saw this very big adjustment to remote working. It became so much more normalized to have a remote job. And there are many women out there who have profited from that and who have found a better work-life balance from being able to work from home and to have that flexibility over their schedules. But certainly initially in the pandemic, when the economy shut down, it was really tough for families to balance caregiving duties and work.

Alex Ossola (3:12)

Matthew, women is a big group, of course. Have we seen the employment in certain groups affected more than others?

Matthew Nestler (3:20)

So post-COVID, there's been a bit of a whiplash where there was that decline, and then there was a sharp increase. And when my research is focused on is that over the past couple of years, some of that has started to decline again. And we saw both the higher highs and lower lows in particular among those with a college education, who benefited disproportionately from the expansion of remote work, flexible work arrangements. And that is one of the main reasons now over the past couple of years, there's been a sharper decline, is as that has started to be pulled back a little bit.

Alex Ossola (3:56)

You both beat me to talking about where we are right now. The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the labor force participation rate for women in January of this year was 57.5%. That's down just a bit from the 58% before the pandemic in February 2020 You talked about hybrid schedules, the change to the return to office that's now having an impact. How about some of the industries in particular that are maybe driving this?