Money Talks: Beyond The Pink Tax

0:04Elizabeth Spiers: Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host Elizabeth Spiers and today I'm joined by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, soon to be Dr. Opoku-Agyeman. Wow. She's working on a PhD in public policy from Harvard. She is out with a book now called The Double Tax, How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid. So Anna, tell us a little bit about what you're working on and what led you to write the book.

0:29Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yes. So first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I'm super, super honored. This is an awesome podcast. So thanks for having me and allowing my voice to be amplified. Hi, everybody. My name is Anna. I'm a PhD student at Harvard, but I'm also just a girl from around the block, honestly. Just like someone who watches Love Island probably too much and is just trying to make a living. I'm watching too many edits on TikTok right now. So anyway, that's all to say that, you know, what I do usually for my work is I study race, gender and the economy, which I know right now is sort of a hard thing to study because there's a lot of forces working against it.

1:10Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: But I also think that because there's a lot of forces working against it, it's that much more important for us to actually really focus on. So this book is sort of a manifestation of that, where I'm thinking about sort of the question around why is it so expensive to be a woman in America and beyond? And how do those expenses sort of pile up when we start to cut across things like class and race? And so in the book, what I basically dig into is sort of these different phases of life that women tend to experience and how the costs that arise in those phases of life really kind of mark the ways in which life is expensive for women, especially from a very young age.

1:49Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And so what folks don't know is that, you know, when you read the book, it's, you know, there's a lot of different chapter titles, that sort of thing. But I initially thought about it the lens of first. So sort of thinking about your first mirror, your first paycheck, your first career path, and sort of how costs start to arise for women when they start to encounter their first whatever experience. And so that's essentially what the book is about and what I'm hoping to talk about today.

2:13Elizabeth Spiers: Most listeners of Slate Money are a little bit familiar with the idea of the pink tax, which is that you're going to pay more for stuff if you're women. And we see this when you buy clothing or hair products or things like that. And your idea is that on top of that, if you're a Black woman, you're paying even more for a lot of these things. And there were definitely some in reading your book, some things that I had not anticipated or had not really thought very much about. When you were doing research for this, were there things that surprised you when you, you know, really dug into the numbers?

2:46Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yes. I think that, whew, the cost of having kids was nuts. I think for me, like, I'm almost 30. I'm 29. And I did not know how expensive it was to raise a child in America. Like, I've heard about it kind of in the distance. I have now a sibling who has two kids under the age of five. And, you know, she would talk about childcare and I'd be like, why don't you just hire a nanny? And she would look at me like I was like, what? What are you talking about? It wasn't until, of course, I dug into the numbers and realized the average cost of hiring a nanny is about$40 ,000. And that's not including health insurance and other, you know, ways in which you have to make this person's life dignified, right, through their work.

3:37Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I think that that chapter was the hardest one is stop writing because I wanted to share so much information and I realized I had a word limit. I think that's the longest chapter in the book for that reason. But even realizing that like ultrasounds cost money if you don't have health insurance or prenatal, postnatal also costs money. Then the literal act of having birth costs money. And this is not including that your newborn also is technically being charged for staying in the hospital. So people are leaving the hospital with bills are amounting to$50 ,000 plus. And if you don't have health insurance, that's something that you can go into debt for.

4:19Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And so that to me was a bit radicalizing. I definitely called my parents after. And I said, maybe two, maybe, right? Like the partner has got to be stacked essentially because this is an expensive investment.

4:32Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, I have one and I had a C-section because he was in breach and the cord was wrapped around his neck. So I didn't have a choice. Really? But I paid something like 15K out of pocket on top of very high end, super expensive insurance. And then I had complications after and that was more out of pocket because of things like co-insurance. Girl. And so every time I hear J.D. Vance or someone stand up and say all these women should be having more kids. We have a declining birth rate. And it's because women want to have careers and be liberal. I want to slip my wrist.

5:06Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: It's like, well, you know, what are we doing?

5:08Elizabeth Spiers: Right. Policymakers will argue sometimes that in Nordic countries, you have declining birth rates, too, even though you have more of a safety net. And I just think that sort of misses the point.

5:20Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Correct. Correct. It's interesting when people bring up Nordic countries, because I'm thinking to myself, we're dealing with very different economic conditions. Maybe it is norms in Nordic countries, but we're not going to ignore the fact that there are financial constraints in the States around raising kids. Because first and foremost, the literal act of having birth, we know that folks can die from because the doctors are just not paying attention to what people's needs are. We saw this with Serena Williams, for example, who multi-million dollar Olympian wasn't being listened to in the delivery room.

6:04Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: How much more someone like my sister? So I think when I see the rhetoric around, you know, we're under babied.

6:13Elizabeth Spiers: well also you know i'm an adoptee and i see a lot of right-wingers who are kind of like well why don't you just give baby up for adoption if you don't want a child and then you just think if i'm already not having a child because i can't afford it how am i going to afford the 15k c-section any complications you know like the math is a mapping that's yeah you know i want to talk about some of the other stuff in your book too because i feel like so many things are coming to a head right now around exactly what you're talking about. You know, Donald Trump trying to remove

6:44Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Lisa Cook from the Fed is something we've we've talked about a lot.

6:48Elizabeth Spiers: And of course, Cook has gotten all the usual, you know, racist pablin from the right that she's not qualified based on nothing. Literally based on nothing. But also he was, you know, kind of the first person that Trump went after in this, well, besides Comey, I suppose, in this now weaponization of the DOJ in order to go after people that he doesn't like. That's right. And with Cook, it seems as if he targeted her because she was a black woman. There's no other kind of explanation for why her, because there are plenty of people on the Fed who disagree with his ideas about where interest rates should be.

7:24Elizabeth Spiers: But also the specific thing that he was accusing her of, which is mortgage fraud. I was reading your chapter on real estate and how the different ways in which black people are sort of discriminated against. And it must feel like a double insult to Cook. You got it. That you have to, first of all, work so much harder to be a homeowner. That's right. And then the president of the United States, who granted Trump is not a normal president of the United States. To say the least. But it's just astonishing. So along those lines, it'd be great if you could talk a little bit about real estate in particular and what the kind of uphill climb black women face when they try to be homeowners.

8:05Elizabeth Spiers: Also, Tish James is now getting the same allegations.

8:09Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I mean, folks who are listening to this podcast probably know what the Fed is, but for those who might not, the Fed is essentially the group of economists that manage the health of our economy, right? So they set interest rates, they affect sort of how much money is in circulation, they work in conjunction with different aspects of our government. And so Governor Lisa Cook is part of basically the body of economists that oversee that body of economists. She's the first Black woman, first woman of color to occupy that position in economic policy. It's a huge, huge, huge deal. So what folks don't know is that Governor Lisa Cook is actually the first Black woman I met in economics.

8:45Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And so she is my friend. She is my mentor. And so everything I'm about to say is going to be in support of her. I'm just giving people a heads up, okay? But it's valid. So on the point of her being attacked because she's a Black woman, absolutely. I think folks need to really check the receipts when it comes to her qualifications. And let me just give you a quick sort of like sprinkling of how qualified Governor Lisa Cook is to manage the economy, be part of the body of economists that are doing that. Went to UC Berkeley, went to Oxford, went to Spelman. These are all top institutions where she got trained in economics and policy.

9:23Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: In addition to that, she's worked at the White House, the U.S. Treasury, the Council of Economic advisors. She has advised governments in and out of the U.S., right? She's also worked at a third of the Federal Reserve System. So the system is made up of 12 banks. She's worked for four of them, okay? So if there's anybody who understands how our economy works, especially in light of our global economy, it's someone like Governor Lisa Cook. So then we come back to the double tax, which is a compounded cost of racism and sexism. What I'd like to tell people is that the double attacks is essentially like a fire at a house five houses down okay so you see this fire at the house five houses down it's not near you yet but you see the flames and you smell the smoke you have two options you can either say hey i'm really interested in that next episode of love island so i'm gonna go ahead and tune in right now we'll see whether or not that fire makes its way to me i don't care to to find out what happens with that or you can seek out a solution to put that fire out.

10:28Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: So for those who don't understand the implications of Governor Lisa Cook's being ousted potentially, if she is ousted, anybody from the Fed can be ousted because these are just mere allegations. There's no proof backing up any of these things right now. Any of those individuals can be removed off of allegations. He could say, you know, that person killed an alligator. No proof removed. That's essentially the implications. And so the reason why you should care as a listener is that you don't want a bunch of hacks setting interest rates. You really don't. Because interest rates affect whether or not you can buy your next house or your first house or whether or not the price of groceries is going to go up or down based off of how interest rates affect inflation.

11:15Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: So you really want to make sure that the double tax isn't seeping into your day-to-day. And that means that you have to address it now. And I think with Letitia James, same thing. If you're able to remove an AG of a state, guess what state's next? They're just going to target a bunch of states and try to remove a bunch of AGs. So you don't want this double tax to allow itself to manifest into a bigger problem for society.

11:39Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, this also kind of plays into, at the very beginning of the book, I think in the intro, you set up the idea that if we were really thinking about the health of society, we wouldn't sort of look at these metrics about how the median is doing. What you would look at is how our society treats black women, because they're on the sort of lowest end of every conceivable metric in terms of how much more they have to pay for everything, how many more hoops they have to jump through if they're trying to get a job or a mortgage or anything else. And that kind of reminds me of something, you know, economist Joe Stieglitz argues for a sort of progressive capitalism.

12:17Elizabeth Spiers: And his argument is that, you know, we're looking at the wrong metrics. If we really want to consider, you know, national productivity and national health, we have to look at how society treats its most vulnerable.

12:28Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I 100 % agree with that.

12:29Elizabeth Spiers: You know, one of the great things about your book is that you have solutions at the end of every chapter, you know, the sort of actionable things that you can actually go out and do. So it's not a book that's just entirely, here's the diagnosis. It's, look, these are things that can be done, if not right now, in the immediate future. Where do you see the brightest spots of hope where some of these things might be done, especially in the current environment where the current administration seems hellbent on making things worse for vulnerable people?

12:59Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yeah. Vulnerable people being the first to be hit. Definitely agree with Joe on that point. And I just realized I did not answer your question about the real estate. So let me add that first. I think on real estate, what's been so interesting about that chapter is, one, remember, we're thinking about the double tax, meaning that we're looking along the lines of gender inequality as well as racial inequality. And what people don't know is that this work by Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham and co-authors, what they find is that when women are buying homes, we spend about 2 % more. And when we're selling homes, we get about 2 % less.

13:31Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: So then combine that with all of the barriers that Black people in general deal with. I remember finishing that chapter and seeing that, you know, Black realtors deal with barriers. So, like, even if you're trying to, like, make it more culturally competent so you have someone who understands your struggle, they might get punished because they're representing you, right? We also know that 9 out of 10 appraisers, I think it's 92 or 93 % of appraisers, are white. So the people who are literally setting the value of your home don't even look like you. They might not even see the value of your home because they haven't had your lived experience.

14:09Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Just to connect that really quickly back to Dr. Cook, I also think one of the other goals of mortgage fraud specifically is sort of like a double whammy. It's like, one, we're trying to get her out of this post so that we can reshape the Fed. But the other thing is we're trying to reshape who gets to build wealth through homeownership in this country.

14:28Elizabeth Spiers: One of the more astonishing data points in your book had to do with how many people are buying second homes.

14:34Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And there were an insanely high number of white people and white women who are buying second homes.

14:40Elizabeth Spiers: And I just, it was mind boggling to me. I just, you know, I'm 48 and we just bought our first place two years ago. And who knows? It was astonishing. And that as a metric for who gets to build wealth is crazy. Yes.

14:56Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And just to put that in context for your listeners, what they found from the National Realtors Association in 2024 is that among homebuyers of that year, 49 % of Black homebuyers were first-time homebuyers. For white homebuyers, it was 20%, which meant that 80 % of white homebuyers that year were buying their second, third, fourth, or fifth home, which is nuts. So to go to your initial question around what are sort of metrics of progress? Where are the bright spots? How do we know that we're actually moving things forward? I think, let me start with wealth. I think the first thing is any conversation happening about closing the racial wealth gap that is really centering some sort of reparations policy is a serious conversation right now because that's really what is going to actually close the racial wealth gap for good.

15:53Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And I also think that anybody who is looking to increase the representation in certain career paths that help increase economic mobility for Black folks and brown folks in general are also sort of pushing forward towards progress. I think when we talk about where things can easily be sort of bright spots for society, even amidst all of the chaos, everyday people can talk to their colleagues about how much they get paid. And that increases the floor for everyone. We know that pay transparency laws kind of have mixed evidence, namely because employers can also see those sort of pay transparency interactions that are taking place between employees.

16:35Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: and they can also sort of use that as a way to say, hey, like, we're not sure if we're going to pay all these employees a higher wage because, you know, everybody can see how much you're making, but also if I want to, I can get away with maybe paying you less. Whereas I think that's why unions are so, so important. And I would say that unions are a very, very bright spot. It gives me a lot of hope that we're seeing more and more prominent union efforts because I do think that that's how we get through this, right? especially worker power in the workplace, people linking arms together and saying, this is not okay.

17:11Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I deserve to be treated as a human being in and out of the workplace. And that looks like being a fair wage, a living wage that allows me not only to support myself, but also support my family. I think in the housing sector specifically, it's not clear to me yet what that's going to look like because the economy right now is questionable at best in the sense that like depending on how tariffs go which are going to affect the prices of housing depending on how sort of the the policies around building more housing goes what i will say is that you know i am kind of pleasantly surprised that the conversation around the child tax credit is still taking place though i will say this sort of baby bonus isn't touching the cost of child care at all.

18:01Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: For those who don't know, about $15 ,000 per year on average is spent on child care for base quality care. So we're not talking about one-on-one. We're not talking about extra resources, which is oftentimes what parents want for their children. And so I don't know what that little$3 ,000,$4 ,000 is doing, but I will say that child tax credit and policies like that continuing and maybe being expanded, it's definitely a good way forward. Though we can't do any of that if the government is shut down. So we should probably reopen the government so that we can get these policies going. And we'll talk more about that after a break.

18:47Elizabeth Spiers: It's funny to see particularly red state politicians twisting themselves in knots over the cancellation of SNAP because they've worked so hard to demonize it and to suggest that the only recipients of it are, first of all, Democrats.

19:01Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Right.

19:02Elizabeth Spiers: And then they have sort of resurrected these Reagan-era tropes about welfare queens who, in their telling, are always black people. Yes. And now they're getting blowback because the biggest recipients of SNAP are white women. Oh!

19:20Uh-oh.

19:21Elizabeth Spiers: And, you know, like children and elderly people and people who are working. When you think about this sort of political will that has been built up by Republicans for so long against safety net programs, how do you combat that?

19:36Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: You know, it's interesting. There's a paper, I forgot who it's by, but basically what it finds is that when you tell white respondents that a welfare program supports Black people, they are less likely to support it versus if it supports white people. Then they're like, oh yeah, like this should exist. Right? This is a great example of why you want to address the double tax. So what we know is that, you know, Black folks in particular, Black poor folks, you know, are disproportionately impacted by policies that underserve, you know, their communities, right? There's divestment, there's food deserts.

20:15Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: These are things that, you know, Black communities in particular deal with. Not to say that white communities don't deal with as well. But this is very much a you didn't put the fire out down the street and now that fires at your doorstep. What's interesting is, I don't know if I can say this on the podcast, I don't like Ronald Reagan at all. You can say that.

20:38Elizabeth Spiers: Yes, you can say that.

20:39Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I took a class back in college that was focused on the 1980s. I know I might be dating somebody. Sorry about that. But I took a class about the 1980s and basically I left the class being like Ronald Reagan is probably why we are experiencing most of the things that we're experiencing. Namely because a lot of the seeds of the current moment were planted during that era, arguably maybe before, but really watered during that era. And a lot of folks in the current moment are just taking their cues from the Reagan era, the Reagan playbook. The welfare queen was popularized by the Reagan administration, for those who don't know.

21:16Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And the idea was that black women are leeching off of the government and they're using it to live luxurious lives and they're not taking care of their kids. That's essentially the stereotype. Obviously false, right? But it was so popular, it was used, as you just noted, to essentially demonize the welfare system and those who were on welfare. I think what's interesting to see is something that Dr. Treston McMillan-Cotton was critiquing around the Democrats in the New York Times. But I also think it applies to the Republicans.

21:53Elizabeth Spiers: I love this piece.

21:54Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yes. Is that I don't think the people in power know who actually constitutes the working class.

22:01Elizabeth Spiers: Oh, no. And this is a big media mistake, and I complain about it a lot on social. There is a sort of tendency to use working class as an equivalent of a white, non-educated man. Yes. Even though we know most of the people in minimum wage jobs and things that you would consider working class are not white guys. And particularly, I grew up in a place in rural Alabama where there were a lot of non-college educated people who have built small businesses and they end up being what are essentially white-collar workers. and they still self-ID as working class whenever it comes to politics, simply because it's a self-identification.

22:41Elizabeth Spiers: And whenever we do polls, a lot of times you ask people to self-identify, but the way that they think of themselves does not comport with the reality of the situation. So I think part of the problem is the methodology that people use to classify someone as working class is flawed. And then the other issue is that there is a Democratic tendency to identify a swing voter as invariably a white guy in a battleground state.

23:08Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And then to just assume that that person is working class.

23:13Elizabeth Spiers: It's frustrating because it also means that they sort of refuse to kind of spend money and effort on working class people who are part of the base because they assume that they already have them. So Tressie's column was great. Just for listener context, she wrote an opinion column in the New York Times about Graham Plattner, who is a candidate in Maine who turned out to have a big Nazi tattoo on his chest. Because why? And he's had it for 18 years. Listen, Elizabeth! Big debate about whether this means he's a Nazi or not. My thing is that you don't have that tattoo for 18 years and not know what it is.

23:48Elizabeth Spiers: You know what I'm saying? If you didn't know what it was when you were 18, you absolutely know what it is now and you should have it covered up, which as somebody who has a bunch of tattoos, tattoo artists will do that for free. If you have a shitty tattoo you want to get rid of. So, you know, Tressie's point was, you know, this calls into question this guy's judgment. But also we can't reverse engineer who's going to vote for Democrats based on some nebulous idea of who this swing voter is. You know, either we have values or we don't. And you see the same thing playing out in this discussion about the safety net, too.

24:25Elizabeth Spiers: There is a reluctance to talk about strengthening the safety net. There is a reluctance to talk about reproductive rights before Roe got overturned. And now what people are starting to understand that that is a kitchen table issue. It is an economic issue. And for women in particular, that is a make it or break it economic issue. Yes.

24:44Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And honestly, you know, I love all the points that you just made. I'm kind of confused why politicians don't think it's a kitchen table issue when you consider that women make up more than half of our country.

24:56Elizabeth Spiers: It's this idea of man is the default constituent, even though more women vote.

25:03Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: No, but actually, we're being too logical right now. But my point here is just like, why wouldn't you try to understand what the majority of individuals deal with? I think as I've been putting this book out and promoting it, I've been baffled by sometimes people being like, I don't think this book is relevant to our current moment. And I'm like, huh? What? What do you mean? I'm like, this is covering all the different costs that women are dealing with. And I think what people are not considering, to your point about sort of this nebulous idea of like who almost like the default person is in this country and who we should be trying to convince.

25:43Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I remain steadfast in my belief that elections are determined by women.

25:50Elizabeth Spiers: I agree. I mean, we saw that in the midterms after Dobbs got overturned. Right. One other thing that you talk about in your book is the idea of the glass cliff.

25:59Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yes.

25:59Elizabeth Spiers: When you look at percentages of women who are in the C-suite and particularly in the top roles, they're still abysmally low. But when you do see women being slotted into CEO roles or, you know, high level leadership roles, it's usually when there's a distressed company, Hail Mary situation. And then whenever they can't push the boulder up the hill, invariably there's some critic that's like, well, we knew a woman wasn't cut out for the job. And, you know, you pointed out that in a way Kamala Harris was in that situation, which I had not thought about it that way. But yeah.

26:34Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: So for those who don't know what the glass cliff is, the glass cliff is basically that women, especially women of color, will be promoted during times of crisis. You'll be like, oh, my God, the first woman CEO. But then you find out that the company that she's about to be the CEO of is about to go bankrupt. Right. So like that's essentially the premise of the glass cliff. And so the idea here is that if she succeeds, the person who's going to get credit is the person who put her there. And if she fails, she becomes the scapegoat. And so if we're going to map it on to the 2024 election, if Kamala Harris had won the election, if Vice President Kamala Harris had won the election, I bet you a lot of headlines would have said Biden made the right decision.

27:14Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: He made the right call. Oh, yeah. What a leader. Right. But of course, what happened was she lost. And suddenly you had a bunch of unnamed Democratic consultants talking about why I never thought that she was qualified anyway. She's actually the reason why the Democratic Party, everybody put every single problem in the Democratic Party and in our political system, quite frankly, on her in those weeks and months that followed. And I'm actually really proud of her for claiming and reclaiming her narrative because it was essentially being written for her outside of her control. These are people just, you know, again, I say unnamed because they never like to identify themselves.

27:57Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: But this is the glass cliff and it happens way more frequently than you think. So I want folks to maybe do a little bit of research after this. You should look at the last few women who were appointed to CEO roles in the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 companies. And you should ask yourself, what was happening in the company during that time? Right. And did they remain? Some did and some didn't.

28:23Elizabeth Spiers: And some of it starts so much earlier. You also talk about how career interruption happens for women generally when they have kids. and how at the beginning of their careers, women and men perform pretty equally in terms of, and women, in fact, are more productive than men. And then you have a baby. Everything goes right.

28:43Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Listen, listen. And that's sort of the unequal share of caregiving within the household. You know, one really amazing thing about this book is that it's sort of a mixed methods book, is what we call in the research world, meaning that it's not just about the numbers, but it's also about the stories that we highlight. So when I was first getting ready to write this book, we had put out a call to the world, really to the States around like, who wants to weigh in on how much it costs to be a woman? And 4 ,000 people responded. Obviously we couldn't include 4 ,000 people in the book. We don't got 4 ,000 people type money.

29:19Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: However, we were able to talk to a hundred individuals across the country. And one thing that kept coming up in those conversations with women around caregiving is that care is just assumed. There's never a conversation, right? It's always, okay, you're going to take care of the kids. And it's not necessarily that it's verbalized, but that's the expectation that it's placed on you and extends from the moment you assume care. So I think there was one woman we were talking to around sort of the stage of life where you're taking care of your aging parents or aging relatives. And she said something like, the moment that care is expected of you, that expectation never goes away.

29:58Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And I just thought to myself, oh my God, that means that you are constantly being expected to exert yourself at the expense of yourself for the betterment of others. And that's just an expectation that never disappears. And so I like to tell people that for me, writing and reading this book just made me more empathetic of the women in my life. I began to really understand the kind of decisions that my mom made. Oh, you know, she'd be on the phone in the morning. That was my alarm clock for many, many years, talking to relatives in Ghana, only for me to find out that all the relatives in Ghana are relying on her, right?

30:34Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: So she's taking care of so many, she's taking care of her siblings' children's children. And so like, you know, I can't even fault her for being on the phone at that time of day, trying to sort out the ins and outs of her family, because that was the expectation that was placed on her.

30:53Elizabeth Spiers: One of the things that you sort of pointed out in the research and the stats is that when you look at people who are professional caregivers, those people are heavily black and brown women who are being caregivers in their own homes and then are expected to go to somebody else's home and take care of grandma.

31:12Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Elizabeth, and this extends from enslavement. so just think about it right women who were formerly enslaved or who were enslaved at the time would work the fields and they got to go home and feed their families so you're feeding somebody else's family and then you're going home to feed your families and so i think what i say in the book is from mammies to nannies now if you go to new york city you'll see sort of a black or brown person pushing a white baby in a stroller i remember this was a cover on the new yorker magazine a while back and it went viral, viral. People were like, what's going on in this picture?

31:48Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Because I think what was happening was you had a white child, you know, coming down a slide and, you know, there was one caregiver that I think was maybe Asian American or maybe Latino. And then you had a black woman showing that, you know, other caregiver, a picture of her son as a white baby was sitting on her lap. And people were like, what's happening here? I'm like, isn't it obvious. It's like they're taking care of somebody's kids and also having to think about the kids that they're taking care of when they go home. That care is expected of you 24 hours in the day.

32:22Elizabeth Spiers: There's another factor, I think, that really has to do with the policy environment right now, which is that, you know, this administration also seems hellbent on destroying higher ed. And partly because, you know, there is a sort of perception, especially among white evangelical types that higher ed indoctrinates everybody to be a liberal. But also, I always thought part of it was because higher ed is still the biggest source of class mobility for black and brown people. And even for, you know, white women who grew up working class. Yes. It was for me. And I think when you mentioned the house on fire analogy, I can sort of see that directly when we think about who the caregivers are for the elderly and who the doctors are, who the nurses are.

33:02Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Ooh,

33:04Elizabeth Spiers: Elizabeth, this is good.

33:06Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Yes, keep all the women at home and then see what happens in 30 years.

33:10Elizabeth Spiers: You know, it does feel like a ticking time bomb.

33:13Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: I absolutely love everything that just came out of your mouth the entire time, of course, but especially right now, right? No, this is such a great observation. I wish I came up with it. Oh, my God. I love it because of two things. Let me just parse out the first thing about higher ed and then talk about these caregiving folks versus the folks who are like in the medical professions. I wrote an op-ed for Bloomberg last year where I basically said these attacks on DEI are a lot more nefarious than people are giving them credit for. What I mean by that is that we have evidence that a lot of these Ivy League schools are pipelines into high paying, really great benefits jobs.

33:54Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: This is something we know. They know that we know this. And so I'm not confused that these attacks are happening at institutions like that and not institutions like community colleges, though they're being gutted in their own specific way. I think that they understand, when I say they, folks who are against higher ed being available for everyone, that part of what's taking place is Black and brown people are starting to become the majority of the upcoming generations. So Gen Alpha is majority minority. Every one in four Gen Z folks are Hispanic. And so they're realizing, uh-oh, if we want to maintain power and dominance, we have to essentially close down the pathways to power, to potential access, to wealth or wealth building.

34:48Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And so what we're going to do is attack affirmative action. What we're going to do is make arbitrary standards that are going to be a moving target, depending on what's happening politically, so that it serves us and doesn't serve them. It's crazy to me that legacy admissions is still a thing, like as a concept, because what about my pawpaw tells you anything about my intelligence?

35:11Elizabeth Spiers: You know what I'm saying? Well, I see. I worked for Jared Kushner, who is a C student. Really? With Harvard because dad donated$2 million. I was the editor-in-chief of the New York Observer when Jared was still ostensibly a Democrat. Oh, my God. And I went to Duke. I mean, I feel like you could guess the legacy admits or you knew who they were. Right.

35:33Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And there's like transparent conversations happening, at least like between the folks who are making these decisions. That, yeah, that person is associated with this person. And so we should absolutely have them at the university. I think what was so shocking, one of my favorite studies that I cited in the book, is, you know, 43 % of white students that were admitted into Harvard's 2019 class, they did not get in based on merit. They got in because they were either children of faculty and staff, legacy, athletes, or just what you said, their parents or grandparents or whomever donated a very, very significant amount of cash to the school.

36:10Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Now think about, well, who tends to be in a group like that? Not people who look like me. It's surely not white poor folks, folks who are middle class and working class. And so, you know, going back to your point about caregivers and medical folks in the medical professions, it's so interesting to me. I think the caregiving crisis, and it is a crisis or opportunity in waiting, is really emblematic of why you have to address the double tax. Because we can't afford not to. Like, I'm laughing to keep from crying, to be quite frank with you. The entire caregiving infrastructure is relying on women just doing unpaid labor.

36:53Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: And what happens if, one, you run out of the women who want to do that labor? and two, that labor becomes too heavy to bear. And that's kind of what we're about to see with the baby boomer generation entering their final stages of the working life and getting ready to retire. Not to mention what we were just talking about with the government shutdown and what the administration is currently doing, where you're trying to get rid of healthcare access to people who need it, which means that people might be sicker and sicker for a longer time, which means you need more caregivers. But the thing is, we know we have a doctor shortage, right?

37:28Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman: Like we have a doctor shortage. You're blocking pathways to getting folks to become doctors. And then you're not paying the people who are doing this work really because they have to because of their aging parents or whatever, or they're doing at a significant discount in terms of their pay. and you're expecting the whole thing to just stay afloat. And it's like something has to give. And if it's women, everything comes crumbling down.

37:56Elizabeth Spiers: So that's it for Money Talks. Thank you to our wonderful guest, Anna Gifty Apoko-Ajumann. Also, thank you to Jessamyn Molly for producing. And we'll be back on Saturday with our regular edition of Sleep Money.

38:15Thank you.