Obstacles abound for women in the workforce, and a new report from the Texas Women’s Foundation highlights exactly what’s contributing to the uphill battle.
One of the primary issues remains the gender wage gap, which sees women earning 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in the state. The numbers are even worse for Latina and Black women, who typically earned 44 cents and 58 cents, respectively, for every dollar earned by a man in 2023.
As the CEO and president of Texas Women’s Foundation, Karen Hughes White, succinctly put it, “I would say there’s not been a lot of forward progress” on that front.
The group’s research, which was conducted with the help of Every Texan, took a closer look at 12 factors that directly impact the economic opportunities women have in the Lone Star State. Those included, among several others, childcare, education, employment, and healthcare.
It was through this examination that Texas Women’s Foundation discovered that childcare is actually the biggest barrier women face in terms of economic opportunity.
Roughly half of the state’s residents live in areas referred to as childcare deserts, which essentially means that, on average, there are three children for every one available spot at a licensed childcare facility.
And the lack of availability is only one part of the problem. The staggering price tag attached to yearly childcare is an equal contributor to this barrier. KERA News reports that it costs almost $12,000 per year to enroll a child in center-based infant care. To put that into perspective, in-state tuition for UT Austin is about $10,000-$12,000 annually.
White said the overwhelming price of care “forces, especially women, to make these untenable decisions about going to work to support their family or being able to afford childcare,” as many are unable to do both.
As a result, women tend to either leave their jobs completely to care for their children themselves or must greatly reduce the number of hours they work, which impacts their ability to financially contribute to their families or gain their own independence.
What would fix the issue, according to the Texas Women’s Foundation?
To help chip away at the barrier to economic opportunity that childcare poses for women, sweeping legislative changes would have to be made by state leaders and lawmakers.
Karen Hughes White told KERA News that an expansion of paid parental leave would make a huge difference, as would balancing enrollment between public and private pre-K. It would also require an examination of what’s currently working and what isn’t to identify ways of making lasting improvements.
She said, “Oftentimes, we’ll have policy changes. We’ll have funding increases. We’ll have stronger participation by philanthropy. But we don’t do a good job, in my opinion, of coming back around the table together — to assess what we solved for and where we may have created some unintended consequences.”
Texans Care for Children is in agreement with White. In an op-ed published in October 2025, writer David Feigen listed several recommendations for the Texas Legislature to consider when thinking about how to adjust existing childcare opportunities and costs.
Feigen recommended improving reimbursement rates for childcare providers and providing them with more grants to help address childcare deserts head on.
He also said that improving conditions for child care workers would help entice more people to pursue that career path, which would then lead to more opportunities for centers to be properly staffed for the number of kids in each area.
These may seem like small things, but when mounted one on top of the other, they would lead to widespread change for women who want to have a safe, affordable place to send their kids while they’re at work.
This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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