Jennifer Siebel Newsom thinks California’s K-shaped economy is the result of undervalued empathy.

Watch a clip here

She is wrong, and Mississippi’s economic trajectory proves it.

In the clip that circulated widely on social media, Siebel Newsom offered her diagnosis of why California suffers from a K-shaped recovery, a pattern in which top earners and high-skill sectors surge while the middle and lower rungs stagnate or fall further behind. She did not point to restrictive zoning, regulatory overload, a narrow reliance on tech and entertainment, or a homelessness crisis driven by housing costs. Instead, she went cultural. In her own words:

Everything that we’ve feminized in American culture, whether entire industries like education, health care, etc., or just attributes like empathy, care, and collaboration, because of the devaluation of all that we’ve feminized, we actually have this incredible inequitable system whereby socioeconomic mobility has never been as poor.

With California, for example, being the richest and poorest state in our country, we know that we have a lot of work to do to ensure that every California resident achieves not just the American dream, but the California dream.

This is a striking claim. It places cultural devaluation of feminine traits at the root of California’s inequality problem. For those of us who have worked in Mississippi economic development under Governor Tate Reeves’ conservative leadership, this argument demands a direct, data-driven response. Mississippi has taken a different path: lower taxes, lighter regulation, a relentless focus on workforce and opportunity, and respect for market signals over cultural engineering. The results are real. What follows examines Siebel Newsom’s claims against the labor market evidence, and uses the California-Mississippi contrast to draw a lesson about what actually drives broad-based prosperity.

The Labor Market Reality: Near Parity, Not Devaluation

Siebel Newsom implies that a feminized economy suffers because of cultural bias against care and collaboration. The data tell a different story about what is actually happening in the American labor market.

Women represent approximately 47 percent of the total U.S. labor force. According to the BLS Current Population Survey, men’s labor force participation rate stood at 67.2 percent and women’s at 57.2 percent as of February 2026. The gap exists, but it reflects a mix of preferences, life-cycle choices, and family priorities rather than systematic exclusion. Prime-age women ages 25 to 54 have actually reached a labor force participation rate of 78.3 percent, fully recovering from pandemic lows and exceeding their pre-2020 peak.

In Mississippi, the overall labor force participation rate runs around 55.6 percent, broadly consistent with national patterns adjusted for the state’s demographic profile. Our lower cost of living and affordable housing, two features the market produces when government gets out of the way, amplify the real value of wages earned here in ways that nominal comparisons with California simply do not capture.

These numbers do not suggest a workforce organized around devaluation of women’s contributions. They reflect near parity alongside voluntary sorting that economists have studied for decades.

Occupational Segregation: Supply, Demand, and Choice

The sectors Siebel Newsom highlights, education and healthcare, are heavily female-dominated, and that is no secret. According to BLS Current Population Survey data, women hold approximately 27.6 million jobs in education and health services, representing roughly 70 percent of that workforce. That share has been stable for years, persisting even as women have expanded dramatically into law, medicine, finance, and executive leadership.

The academic literature on occupational segregation points consistently toward differences in interests and comparative advantage rather than top-down cultural suppression. Research by economists including Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and David Autor has documented that even as educational attainment equalizes between men and women, occupational sorting by interest and risk tolerance persists across countries and cultures. Women on average gravitate toward people-oriented roles emphasizing communication and care; men toward thing-oriented or system-focused roles involving physical risk, competition, or mechanical complexity. These tendencies appear early in development, hold across societies with different gender norms, and are well-established in the psychometric and labor economics literature.

Basic economics explains the wage patterns that result. When workers enter occupations in large numbers, wages in those fields tend to stabilize relative to sectors with tighter labor supply. Male-dominated sectors in construction, energy, and heavy manufacturing routinely involve hazard exposure, irregular hours, physical demands, and geographic mobility. Economists call the additional compensation for those conditions compensating differentials. Mississippi’s manufacturing and energy industries pay family-supporting wages precisely because they compensate for these realities.

The aggregate gender earnings gap sits at 82.1 cents per male dollar for full-time workers in 2025 annual data from BLS, narrowed from 80.7 cents in the third quarter of the same year as methodology shifts. When researchers control for occupation, hours worked, experience continuity, and industry, the adjusted gap shrinks substantially. That is not a defense of every disparity in every workplace. It is an honest accounting of what drives aggregate differences in measured earnings.

In Mississippi, our lower nominal wages are substantially offset by the nation’s second-lowest housing costs and a cost of living well below the national average. A Mississippian earning 85 cents on the California dollar while paying a fraction of California housing costs is ahead in real purchasing power terms. That is the kind of economic math that rarely makes it into elite cultural commentary.

California’s Failure Is Policy, Not Patriarchy

Siebel Newsom is correct that California combines enormous wealth with deep poverty. She is wrong about why.

According to Census Bureau data using the Supplemental Poverty Measure for the three-year period 2022 through 2024, California tied Louisiana for the highest SPM poverty rate in the nation at 17.7 percent of residents. The SPM adjusts for geographic variation in housing costs and taxes, which is exactly why California’s ranking jumps from 18th under the official poverty measure all the way to first under the supplemental measure. The state’s own housing costs are the leading driver of that gap. This is not a story about undervalued empathy. It is a story about zoning restrictions, environmental litigation, and supply-side policy failures that have pushed the median California home price above $800,000 and driven teachers, nurses, and service workers out of the communities they serve.

On homelessness, the HUD 2024 Point-in-Time Count tells the story plainly. California recorded 187,084 people experiencing homelessness, roughly 24 percent of the national total. According to analysis of the HUD data published by USAFacts, California’s rate works out to approximately 47 people per 10,000 residents. Mississippi, by contrast, recorded the lowest homelessness rate in the nation at 3.5 per 10,000. The American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, analyzing the same data, confirmed that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia had the nation’s lowest displacement rates, and identified median home price to median income ratio as by far the most explanatory variable in predicting homelessness across states, with an R-squared of 78 percent. Housing affordability, not cultural attitudes toward empathy, explains who ends up on the street.

California’s policy mix did this. Tight zoning, protracted environmental review, and a regulatory apparatus that adds years and millions to every construction project have turned the state’s richest cities into unaffordable enclaves. The workforce that staffs California’s schools and hospitals cannot afford to live there. Siebel Newsom’s diagnosis lets the actual policy failures entirely off the hook.

Mississippi’s Better Path

Under Governor Reeves’ conservative framework, Mississippi has moved in the opposite direction. The results are documented in BLS data, not press releases.

On wage growth, BLS QCEW data covering July 2024 through July 2025 show Mississippi’s average weekly wages grew 5.0 percent nominally over the period, second in the nation behind Idaho at 6.7 percent. With inflation running at 2.7 percent over the same stretch, Mississippi workers gained real purchasing power at a rate most of the country did not match. USAFacts, drawing on BLS data, confirmed the ranking: Idaho and Mississippi led the nation in real wage growth during that period.

On homeownership, Mississippi maintains one of the strongest rates in the country. Census Bureau CPS/HVS data put the national homeownership rate at 65.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Independent analyses drawing on ACS data put Mississippi’s rate in the 74 to 75 percent range, well above that national average and reflecting an affordable housing environment that the market, not a government mandate, produced. West Virginia, Mississippi, and a cluster of affordable interior states dominate the top of the homeownership rankings for the same reason: when government does not strangle housing supply, people can afford to own.

On homelessness, Mississippi’s performance at 3.5 per 10,000 under the 2024 HUD count is the best in the country. This did not happen by accident. It reflects affordable rents, low housing cost burden, and a social fabric that includes high homeownership as a stabilizing factor.

These outcomes did not arise from cultural reengineering. They arose from tax cuts, streamlined permitting, workforce investment, and policies that let markets allocate housing and labor without bureaucratic override.

The Masculinity Critique: A Distraction from Real Policy

Siebel Newsom’s broader intellectual project, which runs through her film work and public advocacy, argues that overvaluing competition and stoicism comes at a social cost. The economic implication is that traits coded as masculine crowd out care and relational work, making inequality worse.

This framing mixes a normative cultural argument with an empirical claim and invites confusion. The infrastructure, energy grids, supply chains, and manufacturing capacity that underpin every care sector, including the hospitals, schools, and community services Siebel Newsom rightly values, were built and are maintained by industries that depend heavily on the physical risk tolerance, spatial reasoning, and system-orientation that show up disproportionately in male-leaning occupations. Mississippi’s manufacturing sector, which ranks 13th nationally in manufacturing employment per capita as of December 2025 BLS data, depends on exactly those contributions. Masculine and feminine strengths are not in competition. They are in cooperation. The Mississippi economy needs both, and builds around both.

Men also face distinct labor market challenges that rarely surface in the devaluation framework: higher rates of workplace fatality, substantially higher suicide rates, and a growing educational lag that has women earning 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees nationally. A policy agenda serious about workforce outcomes addresses all of these, not just the ones that fit a cultural narrative.

The Mississippi Lesson

Siebel Newsom’s observation that California has a K-shaped economy is accurate. Her explanation is not. Nearly equal male and female workforce participation in a free labor market produces occupational sorting because individuals have different interests, risk tolerances, and life priorities. Markets pay wages that reflect scarcity, measurability, and productivity, not moral rankings of traits. California’s poverty crisis and homelessness crisis reflect what happens when housing policy fails catastrophically, not what happens when a culture undervalues empathy.

Mississippi’s record over the last several years shows the alternative works. Second in the nation in real wage growth. Lowest homelessness rate in the country. Homeownership rates running nearly ten percentage points above the national average. K-12 academic achievement called the “Mississippi Miracle” by the New York Times. These are underdog wins by any measure, achieved without DEI mandates, productivity-blind equity requirements, or cultural correction campaigns.

The policy lesson is straightforward: protect housing affordability, streamline regulation, choice in education, build workforce pipelines around real skills and real jobs, and honor the market’s capacity to signal value without telling it what to value. Mississippi has done that, and the numbers reflect it.

If Siebel Newsom wants to talk about what gets systematically undervalued in American public life, she might start with understanding the working-class residents of a small Southern state who are busy building real prosperity while California is busy trying to figure out why it couldn’t.

Data sources: BLS Current Population Survey, Table A-8b (February 2026); BLS Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, Annual 2025 (January 2026); BLS QCEW, state-level average weekly wages (Q1 2025 release); HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, Point-in-Time Count; U.S. Census Bureau Supplemental Poverty Measure, three-year averages 2022-2024 (September 2025); U.S. Census Bureau CPS/HVS, Q4 2025 (February 2026); USAFacts analysis of BLS wage growth data (December 2025); AEI Housing Center analysis of HUD PIT data (2025).