Centering Black Women And Women Of Color In The Child Care Debate [Op-Ed]

The Trump administration recently proposed allowing married, single-income households to draw from the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), but the proposal ignores the reality of many Black women and women of color.

The premise underlying the “parent-based care” option is that staying home is a choice equally available to all families, and that public policy should stop favoring paid care over that choice. Alabama’s own labor data undercuts that premise. Among Alabama women, Black women have the highest labor force participation rate of any racial group, at roughly 58 percent, higher than white, Hispanic, or Asian women in the state, according to research compiled by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. That pattern is not incidental; it mirrors national data showing Black mothers work at higher rates than other mothers regardless of their children’s ages, often because a single income cannot cover a household’s basic costs, and because Black women are statistically less likely to have a spouse’s income to fall back on in the first place.

At the same time, the wage floor beneath that labor is lower. Alabama’s gender wage gap is among the largest in the country: women are paid about 67 cents for every dollar men earn, and Black women are paid only about 52 cents, compared with roughly 41 cents for Hispanic women, according to the state’s own Workforce and Wage Gap Task Force. Put together, these figures describe a population of women who work at high rates out of necessity, are paid less for it, and are, under this rule, the least likely to be married in a way that qualifies them for a subsidy premised on a spouse’s income covering the household while they stay home. The “choice” the policy claims to expand, leaving paid work to care for a child at home, already largely unavailable to them. The rule does not open that choice to them; it uses money that would otherwise help keep them in the workforce to subsidize the choice for families who already had more room to make it.

This is the sharper version of the equity question raised by the policy overall: it is not just that working families lose out to non-working ones. Black women and other women of color, who are overrepresented among Alabama’s working parents and underrepresented among its married, single-income households, are structurally positioned to be net losers in a fund reallocation they had no hand in designing.

An Industry Built on Underpaid Women of Color

CCDF dollars reach more than parents. In Alabama, they flow directly into an industry that employs tens of thousands of people and functions as infrastructure for the rest of the state’s economy. During Fiscal Year 2025 alone, more than 43,000 Alabama children received childcare assistance through the subsidy program, and roughly $256 million was paid directly to providers across a landscape of about 1,436 licensed childcare centers, 529 licensed family childcare homes, and 503 ministry-exempt facilities. When a family shifts from a licensed provider to the new parent-based payment, that revenue does not create jobs or sustain classrooms; it exits the sector entirely, absorbed instead into a household budget.

The workers who depend on that revenue are already among the most underpaid in the state. As of 2019, Alabama’s median childcare worker wage was $9.19 an hour, and early educators with a bachelor’s degree were paid roughly 35 percent less than colleagues teaching in the K-8 system, with a poverty rate of 17.2 percent, far above the 11.3 percent poverty rate for Alabama workers generally. Nationally, this workforce is overwhelmingly female, and Black women are disproportionately represented within it relative to the broader labor market, even as national data show they are paid roughly 78 cents less per hour than white colleagues in the same field. In other words, the same demographic group, Black women, that is structurally excluded from benefiting on the parent side of this rule is also overrepresented among the underpaid workers whose jobs depend on the subsidy dollars the rule would divert. The policy does not touch one side of that equation without touching the other.

A Workforce Development Problem, Not Just a Family Policy One

Alabama’s business and workforce development community has treated childcare access as an economic imperative, not a side issue. A widely cited estimate, circulated by groups including Manufacture Alabama, the Business Council of Alabama, and the Women’s Foundation of Alabama, holds that closing Alabama’s childcare supply gap, which currently leaves more than 85,000 families without access to quality, affordable care, could raise the state’s labor force participation rate by roughly 3 percent, adding an estimated 66,000 people to the workforce. That estimate has circulated for several years precisely because Alabama’s labor force participation rate remains among the lowest in the nation, and because business groups themselves have identified childcare access as one of the clearest levers available to change it.

A rule that redirects subsidy dollars away from providers and toward payments for at-home care runs directly against that stated goal. It does not close the supply gap; if enrollment drops at licensed centers as some families shift to the new option, it risks widening it, by removing revenue that keeps existing slots open and staffed. A state that has spent years arguing publicly that childcare access is inseparable from workforce and economic development would, under this rule, be using its own limited childcare fund in a way that runs counter to that argument.

Erasing the Language of Disparity Does Not Erase the Disparity

This proposal is emerging in a policy environment where the federal government has spent the past year and a half dismantling DEI offices, equity initiatives, and demographic-impact reporting requirements across federal agencies. The administration’s own description of this rule change makes no mention of race, gender, or family structure; it uses neutral language about choice and parity between forms of care. That framing is exactly why the underlying data matters. A policy can be written in entirely colorblind language and still produce racially disparate outcomes if it is layered onto a population- Alabama families- whose marital status, income, and workforce participation already vary sharply by race.

Removing the vocabulary of equity from federal policymaking does not remove the demographic facts that vocabulary was describing. It removes the requirement that policymakers account for them before finalizing a rule. In this case, the accounting is available anyway: Alabama’s own labor, marriage, and childcare data show a program that will, in practice if not in stated intent, direct new resources toward married, higher-marital-stability households while drawing resources away from a workforce and a client base that are disproportionately Black, disproportionately female, and disproportionately already working out of necessity.

Supporters of the rule would counter that this framing overlooks a real, long-standing grievance: federal childcare policy has treated formal, paid care as the only legitimate choice for decades, implicitly penalizing families of any race who would prefer to raise young children at home if they could afford to. That critique has genuine substance, and it is not answered simply by pointing to disparate impact. The harder question the rule leaves open is why the answer to that grievance is a reallocation of an already insufficient fund, rather than new investment that could expand both options at once, paid care for those who work, and support for those who stay home, without asking one group of families to go further down a waiting list so another group can be paid to do something the first group cannot afford to choose.

The Deeper Question

Underneath the administrative mechanics is a values question the rule does not resolve: should scarce public childcare dollars be neutral between working and non-working households, or should they be triaged toward the families and communities with the fewest alternatives? Alabama’s own numbers, a state already rationing care, a workforce of Black women working at the state’s highest rates for some of its lowest wages, a childcare industry sustained by underpaid women of color, and a business community warning that the state cannot afford to weaken its childcare infrastructure, suggest the two options are not neutral at all. Redirecting the fund built to make work possible toward the population most able to forgo it does not equalize the system. It reveals whose flexibility the system was actually designed to protect, and whose it was not.

Lenice C. Emanuel is the Executive Director of the Alabama Institute for Justice

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