MSNBC: How bent BLS data could fuel conservatives’ war on working women

August 15. 2025

An interview with Executive Director Noreen Farrell is featured in MSNBC today. Noreen discusses the implications for working women following the Trump Administration’s replacement of the head of the Bureau for Labor Statistics and announced intention to stop collecting and publishing certain workforce data updates.

“This is economic sabotage wrapped in bureaucratic language,” Noreen Farrell, executive director of the pro-woman workplace advocacy group Equal Rights Advocates, told MSNBC.“Eliminating the jobs report while women flee the workforce isn’t incompetence, it’s the intended outcome of their war on civil rights.” …

“The data over the past six months — from our perspective and our work — show that 200,000 women have left the U.S. workforce since January 2025. Labor force participation for mothers with young children has plummeted 3%, as Fortune just reported,” Farrell said. “Return-to-office mandates have doubled, and I think the administration knows that these numbers expose their failed policies. They really are alarming to the average working American. And threatening to just disband and no longer issue [BLS] reports — it’s just a way to hide data that is harmful to the administration.” …

“What we have seen over the past six months is everyone saying the quiet parts out loud: ‘Women do not deserve equity, and they certainly don’t deserve to be in the workplace,’” Farrell said. “We see that not only from sort of the trends we’re seeing with women being pushed out, but a complete abdication of policy progress on child care, paid family leave, pay equity, addressing sexual harassment in the workplace.”…

“First they dismantled workplace protections. Then they gutted DEI programs. Now, as women abandon careers in record numbers, they want to stop counting,” she said. “This is what systematic discrimination looks like in 2025.”

Read the full article.