Women -- young and old, black and white -- have been left out of the economic resurgence credited with lifting New Orleans out of decline after Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic levee failures that left much of the city flooded.
That's according to a new report from Tulane University's Newcomb College Institute, which takes an in-depth look at the state of women in New Orleans more than a decade after Katrina.
The report was released Friday (Aug. 26) ahead of the 11th anniversary of the storm, a date that approaches as much of Louisiana recovers from historic flooding and now anxiously watches a tropical disturbance moving toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Mirya Holman, an associate professor of political science at Tulane and one of the authors of the report, said there has been a lot of research about how uneven the Katrina recovery has been, but most of it has been along racial lines. New Orleans is regaining its population, but it is getting whiter and younger, and black families, in many cases, are worse off.
"It's not just about race, though," Holman said. "It's also about gender and the intersection of race and gender."
U.S. Census data shows women have seen improvements. More women are involved in local politics. More local women have college degrees than ever before. Fewer are dying from heart conditions, diabetes and other major diseases.
The report also finds women continue to lag behind men in pay and workforce participation. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men. Women are opening more businesses, but sales from those businesses are stagnating.
Holman said many women have yet to experience the benefits of the growing, startup-friendly New Orleans leaders like to tout. It is important to recognize that disparity, she said.
"Women's stories are not always the same as men's stories," Holman said.
Here are highlights from the Tulane report.
The city's share of female workers has stayed the same.
About 52 percent of workers in New Orleans were women in 2000, compared with 50.7 percent.
But fewer women are participating in the workforce.
Men and women participated in the labor force at nearly the same rate before Katrina, or about 75 percent. Female participation has since fallen, as has the unemployment rate for women -- indicating fewer women are actively looking for jobs. The share of women in New Orleans not in the labor force and not actively looking for a job rose from 9 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2014.
And women are now more likely to live in poverty.
About 30 percent of women in New Orleans live in poverty, up from 27 percent prior to Katrina.
The wage gap between men and women has gotten worse.
Among full-time workers, women's median income in 2014 was $36,367, or about 79 percent of what men made -- higher than immediately after Katrina, but lower than in 2009. Looking at all workers, the wage gap between white men and women was worst for black women (50 percent) and Hispanic women (63 percent).
The pay gap also widened between white men and women in New Orleans. White women earned nearly as much as white men in 2005 (95 percent). That fell to 79 percent in 2014.
Women are earning as much as men in some jobs -- but they tend be low paying.
Women are closing in on what men are paid in sales and office administrative jobs as well as in food preparation, but median annual wages for those jobs were $22,314 and $16,025 respectively. An exception was management, business and financial jobs, where women earned $44,536 a year, or $2,695 more than men.
New Orleans has more homeless women.
Women made up 39 percent of the city's homeless population in 2014, up from 27 percent in 2011. The report notes local initiatives often target homeless populations that skew male, including a city partnership to end homelessness among military veterans in the city.
More women own businesses, but sales are not growing.
Women owned 37 percent of businesses in metro New Orleans in 2012, up from 28 percent in 2002. Sales by women-led firms have not grown at the same rate, however. They made up just 3 percent of sales, receipts and value of shipments in 2012, a decrease from 2002.
Childcare costs are skyrocketing.
The median annual cost of childcare for an infant in Orleans Parish was $6,500 in 2012, up 31 percent from 2005. The report says rising childcare costs could be driving down workforce participation among women with young children, which fell from 77 percent in 2009 to 70 percent in 2014.