This op-ed was first published in Bloomberg.
As nice as it is to celebrate Women’s History Month, if we want a brighter future for women, we need to forge public policies that reduce inequity and include all of us.
One crucial place to do that is in the tax code, where reforms could better support women—particularly Black women, who have been most excluded from wealth building and opportunity.
Black women stand at the intersection of gender and racial inequity in the economy. More Black women are earning colleges degrees than previous generations yet remain the most underpaid, financially insecure, and asset-deprived group in the country.
The numbers are stark: Black women hold roughly 90% less wealth than White men, experience income shortfalls of nearly $20,000 a year because of combined gender and racial wage gaps, and reach retirement with far fewer dollars than their White counterparts. These gaps are the result of policy choices, including tax policies, that reward wealth over work and inheritance over effort.
Policy choices that privilege White men are exposed by economist Janelle Jones’ “Black Women Best” framework. The idea is simple but radical: If an economic policy works for Black women, it will work for everyone. When they are struggling, the economy is declining—even if topline indicators suggest otherwise.
Few policies better illustrate that failure than the steady erosion of estate and inheritance taxes.
Over the past four decades, Congress has dramatically weakened taxes on intergenerational wealth. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act doubled the federal estate tax exemption, and subsequent legislation pushed it even higher.
Today, more than 99% of estates pay no federal estate tax. President Donald Trump’s latest tax laws further increased the exemption amount, meaning even fewer families will have to pay the estate tax in the future.
In practical terms, this means that enormous fortunes—overwhelmingly held by the wealthiest White families—are passed down largely untaxed, generation after generation.
State lawmakers, too, have a role to play. While every state once levied some form of estate or inheritance tax, most state legislatures have repealed them over the last two decades. This fuels the lack of state-level infrastructure addressing intergenerational wealth and is an untimely scenario, particularly as states grapple with budget pressures from recent federal tax cuts.
A tax system guided by the Black Women Best framework would promote broad-based, fiscally progressive rather than discriminatory, regressive tax policies. It would restore a more robust tax on very large estates, close loopholes that allow wealth to be shielded in complex trusts, and encourage states to reinstate or strengthen estate and inheritance taxes.
Crucially, it would direct the resulting revenue toward dismantling structural barriers to wealth-building. This includes everything from subsidized child and other dependent care and debt relief to homeownership assistance and retirement savings support.
Black women rarely benefit from intergenerational wealth. White households are nearly three times more likely than Black households to receive an inheritance, and when they do, the amounts are substantially larger. Most Black women, by contrast, are more likely to provide financial support to family members than to receive it.
Inheritances don’t just swell bank accounts; they finance businesses, stabilize housing, reduce debt, and provide a safety net against economic shocks. As trillions of dollars are poised to change hands in the coming decades in what analysts call the great wealth transfer, the absence of meaningful inheritance taxation threatens to widen existing gender and racial wealth gaps.
Weakened estate taxes also starve the public sector of revenue for the investments that could support all women: child and elder care, education, housing assistance, health care, and paid family leave. Tax subsidies for capital gains, homeownership, and retirement savings overwhelmingly benefit those who are male and White and already have secured wealth. The result is a system that subsidizes privilege while demanding more from those with the least.
History shows that policy choices control who builds wealth and who doesn’t. During the New Deal and the postwar boom, exclusionary rules regulating housing, labor, and education augmented White families’ accumulated assets that continue to pay rich dividends today.
This month is about honoring women’s labor, leadership, and legacy. We honor this history by continuing to confront a tax code that undermines Black women’s well-being. Designing policies that target Black women’s success will mean more care for families, more chances for wealth-building, and more opportunities for success.
