As alarming as the new GOP tax plan may be, there is another impact it could have that is less obvious, but still insidious: it could hinder women’s career paths.
In addition to raising taxes on 83 million middle-class families, the tax bills making their way through Congress have the potential to affect America’s workers and the careers that people pursue.
Career development often starts with education, and the House version of the tax bill removes the student loan interest deduction and employer-provided educational assistance. Simply put, it makes getting an education more expensive for people who do not have the immediate cash to pay for it. Since women carry higher levels of educational debt, they could be particularly affected.
Graduate students will be hard hit as the Republican plan taxes tuition waivers – often granted to students teaching while pursuing advanced degrees – as income. So, 145,000 graduate students could see their tax bills increase by 300% if this provision becomes law.
Heather Laine Talley directs the Tzedek Social Justice Fellowship in North Carolina, describing it as “incredible work developing emerging social justice leaders.” Talley was clear that she would not be in her current job without her graduate degree. “Before getting a PhD, I was working in the service industry – waiting tables and teaching fitness classes. Without a tax-free tuition waiver, graduate school would not have been possible for me, and it's almost certain I'd still be doing something in the service sector.”
Anna Chu from the National Women’s Law Center was not surprised by Talley’s story, noting that the tax bills could be “yet another deterrent that prevents young people – including many young women – from realizing their professional dreams.”
Last week, I wrote about how the tax bill is unpopular with the majority of small business owners. But the tax bill could also affect whether people follow their passions and decide to become entrepreneurs in the first place.
Kate Bahn is a labor economist at the Center for American Progress and said the repeal of the individual mandate, which could leave 13 million more Americans uninsured and lead to higher premiums for others with insurance, “heightens the risk of ‘job lock’ – where workers are worried to take on the risk of entrepreneurship, and can feel stuck in their current, sometimes lower-paying, jobs.”
Bahn pointed out that “lower income people, women, and people of color already face more barriers in employment opportunities, so constructing additional barriers to starting their own business is bad economic policy.”
The tax bill carries unintended consequences for how people do their work as employees, too. Consider, for example that 3.9 million Americans work from home at least half of the time – 52 percent of whom are women. For employees, the tax reforms would mean an end to deductions like business use of the home and unreimbursed business expenses. In the House version of the bill, moving expenses incurred as people relocate for jobs would no longer be deductible either and teachers would not be able to deduct school supplies they buy.
As a former elementary schoolteacher, I’d spend money on school supplies for my students where the school had no budget to offer. Not being able to deduct those expenses would have deterred me from investing in the materials my students desperately required as my salary barely covered my own cost of living.
Simply put, what does it say about the values of our country when we have a tax code that will allow a corporation to deduct a highlighter but a teacher, who’s educating our next generation, can’t?
Concerned citizens have been lighting up the phones to Capitol Hill, with more than 650,000 calls to Republican lawmakers’ offices since the tax bill was introduced in Congress. And in the last week alone, the Not One Penny campaign reports that there have been more than 215 events protesting the current GOP tax bills.
Whether these bills become law will depend on the next steps of Republican leadership.
But Chu’s take on the current tax bills is clear: “the GOP tax bills are a bad deal for women, and they could absolutely affect the education women receive and the jobs they are then able to get.”
