In three and a half years, Donald Trump has barely registered gains in women’s unemployment and poverty rates, appointed Supreme Court justices dedicated to curbing their reproductive rights, tried to take away their healthcare protections under the Affordable Care Act, and repeatedly said vile and sexist things about women in Congress and the media who dare to speak out against him.
That’s okay, he says. He’ll give women a statue. That should shut them up.
Trump has repeatedly bragged about jobs numbers for women under his administration, with women’s unemployment at it’s lowest point in history. While that’s true, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t even tell about 20 percent of the story, actually, because that’s how much the unemployment rate has fallen under Trump compared to Obama.
In 2011, at the height of the economic crash following 2009, women’s unemployment was at a high of 9.0 percent. In 2017, when President Obama left office, it was 4.7 percent, a drop of 4.3 points. Under Trump, it’s down to 3.6 percent.
For anyone counting, that’s a drop of 1.1 percent compared to 4.3 percent.
The National Women’s Law Center notes that:
‘Even as Trump keeps crowing that women’s unemployment rate is at historic lows, it is important to note that working full-time does not inoculate women and their families from economic hardship. NWLC analysis of the most recent data show that nearly one in six full-time workers struggled to make ends meet with a household income less than twice the poverty line. Full-time working mothers of color are twice as likely as workers overall to face economic insecurity.’
But of course, the status of women in this country isn’t solely related to having a job. In addition to barely registering gains in women’s employment, Trump has also appointed Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, two white men opposed to women having reproductive rights, issued a global gag rule that prevents women in third world countries from access to reproductive rights, praised a SCOTUS decision to allow a woman’s boss to decide whether she can have birth control covered by her insurance, curbed protections for survivors of sexual abuse on college campuses, and locked undocumented immigrant women in detention centers where they reported numerous instances of sexual abuse.
That new statue won’t fix any of that.
Twitter wasn’t impressed with Trump’s promises of “a beautiful statue,” either. Most of them want the right to vote safely, a right Trump is working to undermine. Read some of their comments below:
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