By Amy Everitt

For years, I’ve worked on policies designed to reduce poverty. But too often, the systems we build still fail the people who need them most—especially women. That reality was at the center of a recent Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund conversation I moderated, “Poverty in America Today — Women at the Center: Confronting Poverty, Advancing Equity.”

As I opened the discussion, I shared how difficult it was to narrow down the data on women and poverty because there is simply so much of it. “Women experience higher rates of poverty at any age than men,” I said, and that disparity is even more pronounced for single mothers, women with disabilities, women of color and Indigenous women. The drivers are deeply structural: we earn less, we live longer and we shoulder most caregiving responsibilities.

Women are not absent from the workforce—they are essential to it. “Women work. Women work a lot, and they work a lot of jobs,” I noted. Yet many of those jobs are concentrated in low-wage sectors such as caregiving, retail and food service, where benefits, paid leave and predictable schedules are rare. The result is a reality many families know all too well: work is not a guarantee of economic security.

That reality did not emerge by accident. One of our two speakers, Lillian D. Singh, Senior Vice President, Family Economic Mobility at Share Our Strength, named what our systems reveal if we look closely enough: “The system, the workforce, was literally designed with women to not be included and fully functioning parts of that system,” she said. “Women were not included as a major contributor because we weren’t expected to be in the workforce right from the beginning. We are working to change that structural disadvantage, but until we do, women are struggling.”

Darcy J. Totten, Executive Director of the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls, pushed the conversation further by challenging the idea that the economy is neutral. “We assume that public policy, that the economy—these are big terms—and we assume they’re gender neutral. They are not,” she said. When we rely on averages and aggregated data, the lived experiences of women—especially women of color—are obscured, and inequities become harder to confront.

The pandemic made those inequities impossible to ignore. Millions of women left the workforce during COVID, and many never returned. As Darcy noted, “More than half a million of those women just never came back to the workforce.” The jobs hit hardest—retail, hospitality and education—are sectors dominated by women, particularly women of color. What we are left with is what Darcy described as a “barbell economy,” with growing wealth on one end and growing struggle on the other, hollowing out the middle class.

At the same time, the conversation revealed a powerful and often overlooked opportunity. Women are poised to control an unprecedented share of wealth in the coming years. “Women at the wealthier end are projected to control a significant majority of wealth by 2030,” Darcy said. That shift raises an urgent question: how will those resources be used to support women facing poverty and to reshape systems that have long excluded them?

Lillian offered a compelling framework for what real change could look like. “Moms, women, we often dream in threes—for ourselves, for our children and for our community,” she said. If that is true, then our policies must be designed to support all three—not just individual economic success, but family stability and community well-being.

The solutions are not mysterious. They are structural: equal pay, affordable childcare, paid family leave and stronger safety nets. As Darcy pointed out, if working women and single mothers in California earned the same as comparable men, the state’s poverty rate would drop by 40 percent. That is not incremental progress—it is transformational change.

What stayed with me most from this conversation was a reminder that equity is not only about policy—it is about solidarity. Darcy captured this powerfully when she said:

“Your issues are my issues, even if they aren’t my lived experience. Your challenges are my challenges. We need to show up for each other. We need to work together, in ways that maybe we haven’t been able to before, even when that work is challenging. But when the foundational structures get shaken the way they have right now, we cannot waste this opportunity to rebuild the things that are falling apart in a way that includes all of us from the beginning, at a foundation level.”

Watch the full discussion

Learn more about SV2 and their Poverty in America series.