This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta and Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Grace and Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
It’s not unusual for presidential administrations to cheer on job numbers, as the White House has been doing since a Friday report. They have celebrated women’s employment, pointing to figures that show that the vast majority of net job growth in August — and since President Donald Trump took office — has gone to women.
But when the data was touted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch religious conservative and the Republican Party’s nominee in a Senate race that will help determine control of the chamber, not everyone was celebrating. Some on the right don’t see more women in the workforce as necessarily a good thing.
“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, American women are leading the way in our economic comeback,” Paxton wrote on X on Labor Day, amplifying a post from the White House about the numbers. “This is what happens when we put hardworking Americans first.”
“What. Is. He. Thinking???” was the response from Megan Basham, an author and reporter at The Daily Wire, the outlet founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
“Everything wrong with the conservative establishment is encapsulated in this tweet,” she wrote on X. “It’s tone deaf, it’s [sic] fails to understand the moment we’re in, and it reinforces the feminist longhouse situation that we are all trying to address. Seriously what’s the matter with Republican candidates???”
Rebecca Jo Plant, a professor and historian of the American family at the University of California-San Diego, said the backlash to Paxton’s tweet was “sad but predictable.”
“Men are struggling in this economy, but it’s not because women are employed. Critics would do better to look at who is actually profiting,” she said, pointing to “the extreme concentration of wealth” in the modern American economy.
The response highlights growing tensions over family policy within the conservative movement: with affordability and cost-of-living leading voters’ concerns ahead of the midterms, the White House and Republican candidates are eager to tout any positive economic data about women driving workforce gains. At the same time, members of the Trump administration, particularly Vice President JD Vance, have pushed to incentivize Americans to have more children and women to leave the workforce to raise families.
Trump, Vance and Paxton are all slated to appear at Republicans’ two-day midterm election convention in Dallas — Wednesday night’s scheduled programming includes segments highlighting provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last year, like an enhancement of the child tax credit and the creation of Trump Accounts for kids’ savings.
On top of that, The New York Times reported Saturday that Trump administration officials are drafting a plan to redirect childcare subsidies that have mainly gone to low-income working parents to pay stay-at-home married parents, a proposal that sparked a spirited debate within the right.
All of it has put into question who Republicans are actually reaching with their messaging.
Take the jobs numbers that ostensibly celebrate wins by working women. The data Paxton cites, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is accurate, but has some important caveats. In BLS’ survey of employers’ payrolls, women have indeed gained about 765,000 jobs since December 2024, while men have lost about 6,000 positions. In another BLS survey of households, this one asking workers their employment status, 1.5 million women have entered the workforce since Trump took office, compared with 74,000 men.
But the upward trend in women’s employment far predates Trump’s term in office — and working women have gone through periods of significant volatility over the past two years. This year, for example, 633,000 women left the labor force between January and August, while the number of men in the workforce remained flat.
Working-class women in low-wage, low-education-requirement jobs, a group Republicans are trying to cling to this year, have seen a reversal of job gains they experienced in the period immediately post-pandemic. During Trump’s second term, unemployment rates for Black women also hit their highest point in four years, driven by major job loss in government sector employment and the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
So while the labor force has seen some positive job growth in recent months, much of that has been in low-wage jobs, particularly in the healthcare field, that provide little security for working women. Picking out those numbers from what has overall been a less-than-rosy year obscures the lived reality of women workers. In July, for example, women accounted for 100 percent of the decline in the labor force.
Katie Miller, a former White House aide in Trump’s first term and host of the Katie Miller Podcast, expressed unease about the August jobs report, saying that women outnumber men in non-farm jobs and noting, “which I think is terrible, by the way,” on an episode of her podcast released Wednesday.
“It’s insane, yeah, of course,” replied her guest, conservative commentator Michael Knowles.
“A lot of Republicans like to talk about how the female unemployment rate is the lowest ever; this is one area where I break with my fellow Republicans,” he added. “I say, ‘Why is that necessarily a good thing?’ Maybe, for some women, but the fact that women, like, have to go to the widget factory to do spreadsheets, I don’t think they should be forced to do that.”
The data shows that most of the job growth in recent years has been in the women-dominated healthcare sector, not the “widget factory.”
And Plant argued the Trump administration’s policies are “accelerating the concentration of wealth,” leaving many people struggling and demoralized.
“In contrast, the 1950s image of America they like to celebrate – fathers at work, mothers at home, intact households – was grounded in an economy and a tax structure that supported the expansion of the middle class,” she said.
The gender pay gap, which averages pay for all women and all men, also reflects the kinds of jobs each group holds. Since Trump took office, the gap has grown wider — more women are in low-pay jobs and more men are in higher-paid ones. Before Trump’s second term, the gap had been shrinking, but now it’s gotten bigger two years in a row — the first time that’s happened since the 1960s.
Trump, who in 2023 was found liable for sexual abuse, touted the August job numbers on Truth Social, writing of women: “No wonder they like me!!!”
Just 35 percent of Americans — and only 29 percent of women — approve of the job Trump is doing, according to the latest Economist/YouGov poll.
His low approval numbers have raised worries among Republicans about whether voters will back their party. Paxton, a staunch conservative and longtime Trump ally, has focused much of his messaging in his Senate race on attacking transgender people and his Democratic opponent James Talarico as “low T” and effeminate.
He’s also long spearheaded the conservative legal movement’s fight against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) with numerous lawsuits and investigations. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he released a sweeping, nearly 75-page legal opinion declaring “decades’ worth of DEI frameworks — memorialized in over 100 woke state laws — unconstitutional.”
But cheering hiring figures was too much for some online commentators.
“Lost my vote,” wrote Joel Webbon, a Texas-based far-right Christian nationalist pastor who has long spouted racist and antisemitic rhetoric, advocated for repealing the 19th Amendment and opposed women serving in positions of power.
More mainstream conservative media figures who don’t hold Webbon’s extreme views also panned Paxton’s post, which they viewed as insincere pandering.
“Fire whoever thought crafting this abomination of a post was a good idea,” wrote Auron MacIntyre, a podcast host and columnist with The Blaze, on X. “Fire them now.”