Birmingham was recently ranked as one of the worst cities for women in the U.S in a recent study from personal finance website WalletHub despite a high level of success in closing the gender wage gap in recent years as the Lede previously reported.

The reason for Birmingham’s low ranking lies within several other societal factors impacting women across the state, according to local urban analyst Christopher Burks, who also serves on the Birmingham Planning Commission

“On the specific issue of the gender wage gap, Birmingham has made major strides,” Burks said. “But in the broader issues of socioeconomic well-being, health care, and safety, women’s standard of living has been undermined by the state’s politics and economy where men’s interests dominate.”

Birmingham ranked 178 out of 182 cities in WalletHub’s ranking for women’s economic and social well-being and ranked 122 in the women’s health care and safety ranking. This averaged out to an overall score of 39.12 out of 100 points and placed Birmingham in 169th place overall. Other Alabama cities didn’t fare much better, with Huntsville (122), Montgomery (157), and Mobile (174) all scoring in the bottom half of the list.

One area where Birmingham has had great success is increased wages for women. Between 2017 and 2021, Birmingham was the third most successful at closing the wage gap out of the 200 largest U.S. cities included in a study by financial tech company SmartAsset. In that period women went from making 76 cents for every dollar a man makes to 96 cents, according to the study. Although Burks said this was an “astonishing” narrowing of the wage gap, wages are not the only thing that WalletHub included in their assessment of a woman’s quality of life.