Going back to the changes that were made in 1987, we used to have a rate structure that had something like 13 or 14 different income brackets, and they were very small, and they got larger very gradually. It resulted in a very smooth tax rate curve. When the 6% rate was jacked up to 17%, and when the very top rate was suddenly dropped from 34% down to 29%, we were left with three brackets, which almost produced a flat line. But even within that, you see tremendous gender differences in the way in which the restructuring of the rates impacted men and women. For example, there were something like 900,000 taxpayers who had been in the 23% bracket, who woke up one day and found out that their tax rate had dropped to 17%. Of those, 68% were men. They got tremendous tax cuts. But the women who had been taxed at the 6% rate woke up and discovered that they were now taxed at the 17% rate--an increase of 11 percentage points on the very lowest. Sixty percent of the people who jumped from 6% to 17% were women.
You go through every one of the brackets--and I did this because I was shocked at what was going on at the time--and you see that you have this double-whammy at each of the new stages, where the average incomes of men are being dropped radically and, because the women always have lower incomes in each income bracket, their rates were jacked up dramatically. At the very top, something like 77% of the people who experienced the federal rate reduction from 34% to 29% were men.
So this had a tremendous impact on women, which has played out every year for 20 years. The cumulative effect of that tremendous restructuring, on gender impact grounds, on women has been just one of the big pieces that has had a very negative effect on women.
I don't know if that's enough of an answer, but I'll stop there.