Claim: President Donald Trump has claimed that he has done more for women than any other president of the United States.
Rating: This claim is MOSTLY FALSE. The Trump administration has cut funding for women’s health services, and has also rolled back rules from the Obama administration to fight the gender wage gap. Currently, women are paid 82 cents for every $1 that a man makes.
On Aug. 14, 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted: “I have done more for WOMEN than just about any President in HISTORY.” Prior to the pandemic, under an economy that was generally doing well, women did outnumber men in the paid workforce for only the second time in history.
But Trump’s policies tell a different story. In his first year in the White House, Trump disbanded the White House Council for Women and Girls, a council formed during Obama’s presidency whose goal was to communicate with women’s groups and evaluate how policy changes impact women.
Trump has also eroded protections for monitoring gender pay equality. The Trump Administration rolled back an Obama-era rule that mandated large companies be transparent about how much their employees are paid by race and gender. The rule’s purpose was to address gender and racial pay inequality. However, a federal judge later overruled the Trump Administration by reinstating the rule.
Furthermore, within Trump’s own White House staff, the gender pay gap is higher than the national average. White House women staffers earned approximately 69 cents for every $1 that male staffers earned. The national wage gap stands at 82 cents for every $1.
Trump has restricted women’s health services through the Title X gag rule, barring health clinics that provide abortion services, or referrals for abortion providers, from receiving money from the $286-million Title X federal program. This is despite the fact that abortion is a small part of the services that these health clinics provide, and abortion is legal under U.S. federal law.
More than 4 million patients rely on Title X, a public program that provides vital health services for low-income women who don’t always have health insurance. Title X helps fund accessible birth control, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, and breast and cervical cancer screenings. Title X’s funding helps prevent 1.9 million unintended pregnancies each year. It allows women to access the tools to make decisions about if and when they want to have children, which is innately tied to women’s careers, health, and financial independence. Trump’s Title X gag rule led to a 46% reduction in the network’s capacity, which affects about 1.6 million patients.
Conclusion: The Trump Administration’s policies restrict women’s abilities to make their own decisions about their health and careers. His rules especially hurt vulnerable women who are low-income or do not have health insurance. Therefore, his claim that he has done more for women than any other president is MOSTLY FALSE.