Survey: Two Thirds of College-Educated Workers May Avoid Texas Because Of Abortion Ban

T exas employers may lose skilled workers as a result of the restrictive abortion law that went into effect on Wednesday. According to a new poll by PerryUndem, 66% of college-educated workers say they would not take a job in a state that prohibits abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, as Texas now does after the U.S. Supreme Court failed to intervene on Senate Bill 8. Roughly half of respondents said they would consider moving out of a state that passed such restrictions.

More than 85% of abortions happen after the six-week mark, so the Texas law amounts to a near-complete ban on the procedure. Along with banning abortions at a point when most women do not even know they are pregnant, SB 8 makes no exception for rape or incest, and it also allows private citizens to sue those who perform, “aid or abet” an abortion. The legislation imposes the harshest restrictions of any state, setting the scene for a challenge to the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

As echoed in other polls, the majority of respondents (80%) said that they do not want the Roe v. Wade ruling overturned (though polling did not dive into the intricacies of possible limitations to the law), and the same proportion said they feel that access to abortion is an “important” part of women’s rights and gender equity. PerryUndem conducted the survey on behalf of the Tara Health Foundation, which aims to improve the health of women and girls, with support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. Researchers surveyed a national sample of 1,804 adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who have a college degree and are either working full time or looking for full-time work. The survey was conducted between August 13 and August 26.

Three quarters of all the women surveyed said SB 8 would discourage them from working in Texas; 73% said they wouldn’t even apply for a job in a state that passed a comparable ban. Among men, 58% said a state’s near-total abortion ban would discourage them from working there and 53% said they would not apply for jobs there. Concerns were especially high among younger workers: 73% of all Gen-Zers, those age 24 and younger, said they would not take a job in a state with a hostile reproductive health environment; 69% of Millennials said the same.

Those findings may not bode well for employers who are already coping with a turnover tsunami and Covid-related employment changes that have created some 10 million job openings. And a near-ban on abortion could bring more challenges to women who have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic.

“Helping women succeed at work is the biggest lever we have to grow the economy,” says Jim Doyle, president of Business Forward Foundation, a research organization that examines policies and issues affecting American economic competitiveness. “States like Texas are going to discourage companies from investing more there. It’s going to discourage women from moving there.”

Regardless of their personal stance on abortion, most women want control over when they have children—and are acutely aware of the challenge it poses to their careers. From the cost of raising a child, which the USDA calculates to be nearly a quarter of a million dollars to age 18, to the fact that full-time working mothers make 70 cents for every dollar made by fathers, the stakes are high. The struggles to stay engaged and find child care amid the pandemic add to that burden. As Jen Stark, the director of corporate strategy at Tara Health, says of Texas: “Why would you do that to your workforce?"

While the new abortion ban doesn’t appear to have prompted companies to openly scrap plans to move to the Lone Star State, it has dampened the enthusiasm of college-educated workers like Marc Cartright. He was considering relocating from the Bay Area to Texas with his wife, who works at an ag-tech company with a budding presence in the Austin area. While the couple calculated that they could save a “non-trivial” amount of money through the move, Cartright says the new law derailed those plans.

“I just kind of killed the deal in my head right then and there,” says Cartright, who finds the law’s citizen-based enforcement mechanism to be especially “draconian” and inconsistent with the Texan spirit of independence. Another key factor in the couple’s decision was their daughter.

“I think this speaks to how the state views women, like they don’t know how to make their own decisions or something,” Cartright says. “In some respects, they’re codifying the fact that they see women as lesser. And so how else are they going to be treating my daughter as she grows up?”