"Fair Shake" describes pivotal year ahead for women's economic freedoms

The past year has been tumultuous for women’s rights and economic freedoms, with the presidential election and incoming Trump administration causing a lot of uncertainty across the country for women’s health, wealth and financial independence.

Written before the election, the book “Fair Shake: Women & the Fight to Build a Just Economy,” by Naomi Chan, June Carbone and Nancy Levit is more timely than ever.

Published last May, the book aims to imagine what the “just economy” or an equal economy would look like in America, what’s holding it back and why it’s taking so long for women to have access to the same economic freedoms as men.

It also shows that women’s progress in the U.S., while slow, has been nuanced. The total number of women participating in the labor force has grown to 79 million — almost 2 million more than before the pandemic — but the overall participation rate is nearly the same compared to the pre-pandemic levels. Just over 57% of women were employed in May 2024 compared to 58% in February 2020, according to U.S. Chamber of Commerce data.

That’s somewhat of an improvement, but some things remain a consistent burden in women’s lives, unchanged for decades. Home and child care is the top reason for non-participation in the labor force today — the same issue as in 1989. 

Here is a transcript of my conversation with co-author June Carbone, edited for clarity and length.

Your book opens with a Tesla lawsuit, Elon Musk and the “winner take all” mentality that you describe as dominant among male business leaders. You wrote the book before the election and now see how Trump's administration will include Musk and potentially other billionaires. What do you think it means for women and the impact on the economy?

The same techniques we described in business — from [the late Sam Walton, [founder of Walmart] to [the late Jack Welch, CEO of GE] to all of corporate America — are really now present in the political sphere, and Trump exemplifies [it]. [The goal is to] make everyone feel insecure, pit people against each other. The personalized leader's power is personalized, not institutionalized, and what matters are results in the short term, the economy and how you get there, how you accomplish the results. Those are the techniques that we describe in every chapter of the book. So what we see Trump doing in the political sphere is the same thing. It's the same tactics.

What do you think is holding back progress? Trump was elected with a majority of the popular vote.

My bottom line is, the worse off people are, the more likely they are to vote for Trump and for Republicans. Our book is about how women's progress is stalled, but the group in society who has suffered the biggest losses are blue-collar men, and blue-collar white men in particular. Black men aren't doing better either, and if they're blue collar, they have the same loss of opportunities white men face. They just haven't fallen as far. And this is a system that invites predatory behavior. 

How do you think the trends and forces you describe in the book will play out under the Trump administration?

What we see is going forward, instead of thinking of capitalists vs. workers, we think of it as the regulated vs. not regulated. The institutionalized part of corporate America may well have a set of interests that are different from the cowboys. I think that those differences will exacerbate, and at some point they're going to lead to a blow-up. A blow-up may be a global depression, but it may discredit these forces more effectively than a Kamala Harris win could have done.

It's a pivotal time in history for women's rights. What kind of factors do you think it's going to come down to, and what can bring about change?

At the grassroots level. One thing to be optimistic about is the reproductive rights agenda on the ballot mostly won. They confuse people, but mostly they won. I find that optimistic. What I see — and this is the thesis of the book — is that we need to talk about abusive power, not sex discrimination. And when you talk about abusive power, first of all, it's ugly. If you make it visible, you win.