It’s a surreal time for American women. On the one hand, the United States just installed a president found liable for sexual abuse; who previously appointed three Supreme Court justices to end federal abortion protections, sending mortality rates for pregnant people skyrocketing; and who halted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s collection of equal pay data during his first term.

On the other hand, a new report says women’s economic gains have outpaced men’s over the past few years. The report from Bank of America, titled "What’s the Power of a Woman’s Wallet?" analyzed internal customer accounts and federal wage data to glean some macroeconomic insights on men’s and women’s workforce participation, wages and spending habits.

Many seem like wins for women. The report says that in five of the last six years, women are spending a greater share of their earnings on nonessential goods like clothes, dining out or entertainment. This "discretionary spending" accounted for 69% of consumers' overall spending last year.

Those gains were boosted by above-average pay growth that took place in female-dominated sectors during that period, the report said — counseling, social services, childcare, health services, education and retail stores, to name a few. The number of women in the workforce has been growing steadily, too: Among workers ages 25-54, women’s labor force participation rate grew twice as fast as men’s in 2024, the report found.

This is being driven in large part by the share of women graduating college compared to men; in the 2021-2022 academic year, women earned most of the degrees issued by U.S. colleges: 63% of master’s degrees, 59% of bachelor’s degrees and 57% of doctoral degrees.

Still, behind many of these gains are glaring inequalities that make it difficult to conclude that women wield the same financial power as men.

For one, women typically hold lower-paying jobs than men, and many female-dominated fields experiencing strong pay growth still pay far less than industries dominated by men, such as finance (54% male), medical surgery (75% male) and the legal industry (61% male).

Elementary and middle school teachers — roughly 77% of whom are women — earn $1,042 per week, while software developers, roughly 3 in 4 of whom are men, are paid $1,920 per week. Both jobs require bachelor’s degrees, and around half of public school teachers have master’s degrees, compared to roughly 1 in 5 software developers.

And even within those female-dominated industries, women are still often disadvantaged. Male teachers, for example, make an average of $1,161 per week, an 11% premium over women’s pay.