Josie Cox's New Book Champions Gender Equality Through Remarkable Women's Stories (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Josie Cox with her book ‘Women Money Power’.Photo:Nancy Borowick, Abrams

Nancy Borowick, Abrams

In a sense, business journalist Josie Cox has spent her whole career gearing up to write her new book.Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality. But one interview with a wealthy business mogul crystallized its urgency.

When Cox asked an ”extremely prominent businessman” about the gender pay gap, he reasoned that “sometimes when women decide to start a family and leave the paid labor market briefly to take maternity leave, when they come back, they’re just not as professionally ambitious as men,” Cox tells PEOPLE. “That infuriated me, and it made me realize that these views and these opinions are still so prevalent.”

As she researched, Cox expected to find a trajectory of progress, a story of hope. But what she found was that American culture has a long way to go.

Abrams

“Unlike the laws that were introduced in the 1970s and 1980s that prevented a woman from getting fired for getting pregnant, prevented men and women for from getting paid different amounts of money for doing exactly the same work, laws allowing women to get credit to start a business, to get a mortgage to open a bank account — that really led to tangible, measurable progress,” Cox says, explaining, “Culture is not tangible, and it’s not measurable. And so that’s the part of the equation that we’re still struggling to fix.”

One of the pioneers who’s spent the last 40 years as a part of that struggle is Anna “Mae” Krier, 97, the last of the Rosies who took engineering jobs at Boeing when the men were called to fight in WWII. Krier joined the workforce when the country needed women to fill the boys’ shoes in 1941, and hasn’t stopped working for equality since.

Mae Krier, one of the original “Rosies”.courtesy of Anna “Mae"Krier

courtesy of Anna “Mae"Krier

Mae still drives herself around in her red Ford pickup (she mused that she’ll have to renew her license when she turns 100 in a couple of years) and recently got a chance to get behind the wheel of a Sherman tank when attending a ceremony in Texas. Although she declined the offer to skydive while she was there, she’s not afraid of much, least of all speaking her mind.

“When women went into the workplace, it was the men’s world up until 1941. They didn’t know how capable American women were, and we were amazing. We were much better than a lot of the men, and they’ll even admit that sometimes,” she tells PEOPLE.

“But I’ve never stopped working for equal pay for the same job, because this was so unfair we were every bit as good or better than the men, and yet they got paid a lot more than we did,” Mae adds. “We’re not there yet, and we’ve got a ways to go.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Mae and her fellow Rosies helped win the war, but they weren’t treated that way when the troops came home. “The men came home to flying flags and praise, and we came home with the pink slip. The men got the G.I. Bill, education, mortgages. We didn’t,” Mae recalls. “In our day, if a man and woman applied for the same job, the man would get his foot in the door, and the woman would go home. So it isn’t fair at all.”

A younger Mae Krier.courtesy of Anna “Mae"Krier

Cox hopes her book sheds light not only on the persistent wage gap and how it continues to impact women today, but also help show her own daughter that gender shouldn’t be a deterrent to her dreams.

For her part, Mae travels around the country spreading that same message. “When I speak to these girls [in schools], I say to them, ‘You’re just as capable as the boy next to you,’” she tells them. “‘Just don’t let him think that he can do it better, because he’s a male. That’s not the case.’”

Through portraits of the women whose shoulders we all stand on and incisive commentary on how we reach higher from where we stand, Cox hopes her book makes its way to everyone who has a hand in working toward equality. That is, just about everyone.

“I really want to convey with this book that inequality is everybody’s problem and as a result of that, everybody stands to benefit from a more equal society and a more equal economy,” Cox explains.

Or, one of Mae’s personal mantras: “Change has got to start somewhere.”

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Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equalityis on sale March 5, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com