Gender and womanhood in this report

The Women’s Fund has adopted a gender-expansive understanding of “women” for the purposes of our work, reflecting our commitment to being inclusive of those most impacted by gender-based inequities. We use the term woman expansively, recognizing the diverse identities and lived experiences of people who face gender-based inequities. This includes cisgender women, transgender women, nonbinary, and other gender-expansive people who identify with or have lived experiences aligned with womanhood.

Our intent in adopting this definition is to honor the self-identification of people experiencing gender-based inequities, particularly as it relates to the economic security of women, girls, and others impacted by these inequities. We also seek to ensure that our funding, research, and programming reflect the diverse realities, leadership, and contributions of those most impacted—while acknowledging the compounded inequities faced by women of color, trans women, and people living at multiple marginalized intersections.

At the same time, we recognize that much of the data available for research and reporting relies on categories such as sex assigned at birth, which do not fully capture the breadth of gender identity or lived experience. In this report, we name those limitations while affirming our belief that recognizing diverse gender identities in our work—and continually working to do so more fully—is essential to advancing equity.

We recognize that adopting a definition is one part of a broader, ongoing practice of living into our values. This report represents one step in a community-centered process to align our research, grantmaking, advocacy, and internal practices with those values. As a Fund, we are actively investing in learning, relationship-building, and shared leadership to support this evolution and to deepen our collective capacity to live out this commitment with care, accountability, and intention.

A note on language, tone, and style

This report varies across its different parts in language, tone, and style. This is reflective of where the information in the report came from. Qualitative data, comments from the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Cohort, and guest columnists reflect the language, voice, and tone of residents who shared their stories and perspectives with us. Similarly, when working with survey and administrative data, analysts used the language that residents selected when completing surveys or enrolling in services to respect how they self-identified. Different language is used to describe race, ethnicity, gender, and sex across these different sources, and the language used reflects that.

The Community Cohort

This project engaged a cohort of women and people who have a gender experience that aligns with womanhood from Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to participate in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process. This cohort contributed lived experience related to indicators of women’s thriving, including housing, wages, childcare, and other social conditions. The project intentionally centered Black and Latine participants to elevate the experiences of those most impacted by local disparities.

A note on ‘the cohort’

The cohort is referenced frequently through this report given their central role in its development. Sometimes they may be referred to as the ‘cohort’. Other times they may be referred to as the ‘community cohort’ or even the ‘CBPR cohort’ for Community-Based Participatory Research. However they are referenced, they are the one and only cohort that guided and directed this body of research.

Selection Criteria

Participants were selected using information gathered through a community interest form and follow-up communication. Selection criteria included:

• Self-identification as a woman, or someone with a gender experience aligning with womanhood, residing in Winston-Salem or Forsyth County.
• Interest in participating in community-based research, indicated through the interest form.
• Representation from Black and Latine communities, consistent with project goals.
• Ability and willingness to engage in the project’s scheduled CBPR activities, which totaled approximately 26 hours across the project period.
• Representation across different income levels, supporting the project’s focus on economic conditions, wages, and other factors influencing women’s ability to thrive.

These criteria ensured a cohort reflective of the diverse lived experiences the project aimed to understand.

The selection process

The community interest form served as the primary screening tool. The form collected:

• Basic personal and demographic information, including whether respondents were women or had a gender experience aligning with womanhood living in the local area.
• Self-described interest in participating in community-based research.
• Information relevant to representation, including racial/ethnic identity and income level, allowing for intentional selection across different economic backgrounds.
• Availability and readiness to engage in the cohort’s CBPR structure.

Selection involved reviewing these responses to:

• Confirm eligibility (identity, residency, interest level).
• Prioritize representation of Black and Latine participation.
• Ensure variation across income levels, so the cohort reflected the diverse economic conditions under study.
• Confirm availability for the project’s engagement schedule.

Those meeting the criteria were invited into the onboarding phase, where expectations were reviewed, and participation was confirmed.

The Recruitment Process

Recruitment utilized community-centered outreach strategies, including:

• Distribution of the interest form across networks connected to women and residents with a gender experience aligning with womanhood in the Winston-Salem and Forsyth County area.
• Direct outreach to individuals already engaged in community programs or initiatives.
• Follow-up communication to confirm eligibility and complete onboarding.

Recruitment emphasized equitable representation, accessibility for working-class parents, and selecting participants whose lived experiences aligned with the research focus.

Community Based Research Approach

The project followed a Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model emphasizing co-learning, shared power, and mutual accountability. Engagement consisted of 26 hours of structured activities beginning in June, 2025, and concluding in December, 2025. Participants contributed to identifying community priorities, suggesting measures, and interpreting findings rooted in their lived experiences. Recognizing that publicly available data often omits or underrepresents certain identities and lived experiences, the CBPR cohort intentionally identified perspectives that might be missing. Staff then invited guest columnists with lived and community expertise to ensure the report reflects stories and realities that numbers alone cannot capture.

Together, these processes generated a broad understanding of both personal realities and community-wide needs, ensuring the findings reflect lived expertise and the collective wisdom of both cohort and guest columnists.

The Cohort’s Role

To better understand the experiences and priorities of local women, we used a mixed-methods community-based research approach that included individual interviews and a group focus discussion. First, eleven cohort members participated in one-on-one, semi-structured interviews, conducted by Action4Equity. These interviews were designed to capture personal stories, challenges, and perspectives across four key areas: education, wages, housing, and childcare. The interviews provided rich, detailed insights into how systems and conditions show up in women’s daily lives. Following the interviews, Action4Equity facilitated a 45-minute focus group with the full cohort and the Women’s Fund’s Research, Education, and Advocacy Committee to gather community-level reflections and identify shared themes representing the broader experiences of women in the county. The focus group centered on collective conditions—not individual circumstances—and allowed participants to discuss what helps or hinders women’s ability to thrive, as well as priority areas for change.

signs of thriving and barriers to thriving

The cohort also participated in brainstorming and prioritizing signs of thriving and potential barriers to thriving across the four key areas. The Forsyth Futures analyst team reviewed their priorities and suggested potential measures for each topic. The cohort reviewed these suggestions, provided feedback and suggestions for improvement, recommended how the data should be disaggregated, and selected measures for the report. The Forsyth Futures analyst team analyzed local data for each measure, creating visualizations and drafting definitions and notes. The analysts shared these initial reports with the cohort for their feedback and interpretation. The cohort provided feedback on the analysis, including context that should be included in the report and their perspective on what readers should take away from the analyses. The key findings sections on this page and each section page represent those takeaways.

Qualitative Findings

Qualitative research is research that aims to understand and share stories and perspectives, not numbers. It answers questions of “why?”, “how?”, and “what is this like?”, not “how many?”

As a part of their work on this report, Cohort members were invited to participate in in-depth interviews. An analyst from Action4Equity reviewed the interviews to create overall narratives for each participant, prioritizing the “overall story” and meaning of each interview over chronology. The analyst then identified 6 potential topics (also known as “codes”) to identify shared experiences across the narratives. The six topics selected were structural access and constrained choice; economic stress and family stability; dignity, safety, and emotional harm; advocacy, power, and institutional response; and gendered expectations and intersectionality. This process allowed the analyst to identify shared themes that emerged across the narratives, such as economic precarity despite full participation in work; caregiving as invisible infrastructure holding everything together; systems that don’t work for women at the intersections of race, gender, and class; survival strategies vs. real stability; and what women say would actually help.

The analyst then analyzed patterns in these topics across narratives and organized the findings by topic or domain. The three domains used to organize the information were: housing, child care and education, and fair wages. The analyst attempted to answer the following questions for each of these domains: What are women experiencing in common? Where do their experiences diverge, and why? How do the same forces (wages, debt, caregiving, racism, policy, credit) show up across domains? What are women already doing to cope, lead, and build alternatives?

Within each of these domains, the analyst organized their findings using a common framework for each domain. They organized these findings around: economic precarity despite full participation in work and school; caregiving as core infrastructure, not an afterthought; systems that assume a second income, co-signers, or extended family support; institutions that can either amplify or harm or act as protective factors; and intersectionality.

The analyst used AI as a technical assistant in this process to help harmonize language and headings across sections, tighten repetitive language while preserving participants’ meaning and voice, and suggest clear, advocacy-oriented formulations of cross-cutting insights (e.g., “wages sustain survival not security”). The analyst checked all AI-assisted text against the original stories and edited it for accuracy, tone, and alignment with the participants’ intent.

Excerpts from the qualitative content are also woven throughout the research topic pages of the report.

Guest Columnists

From the earliest conversations with the Community Engaged Research Cohort, we approached this report with care and intention around a critical question: Whose stories might be missing?

Much of the quantitative data included in this report comes from federal sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and emergency department data. While these datasets are robust, they have important limitations. Many commonly marginalized identities and lived experiences are underrepresented—or entirely absent—because they are not collected. For example, the Census does not gather information about respondents’ gender identity, which means that data about gender-expansive individuals is not available in public Census datasets. These gaps matter.

It was critically important to both project partners and the Cohort to intentionally identify perspectives that might be omitted and make a meaningful effort to include them. From that commitment, the Guest Columnist approach was developed.

As potentially omitted perspectives were identified, the project team worked through personal networks and community partnerships to connect with individuals who hold direct knowledge and experience related to those perspectives. In many cases, we sought not only individuals with lived experience, but also individuals with broader community knowledge. For example, rather than inviting only a single parent of a child with special needs to share their story, we reached out to Chris Gentry, Director of The Family Support Network with The Centers for Exceptional Children. Through decades of work with children and families across Forsyth County, she brings insight into the diverse and nuanced realities facing families raising children with special needs. The result is a column that reflects complexity and demonstrates that no community is a monolith.

Each guest columnist was compensated for their contribution and supported by the project team in drafting a piece in the style of a personal essay. Columnists were encouraged to write in their authentic voice, without rigid formatting or stylistic constraints. As a result, the columns vary in tone and approach, reflecting the individuality of each contributor.

By weaving lived experience alongside data, we aim to elevate stories that numbers alone cannot tell. Excerpts and quotes from the guest columns appear throughout the research topic pages, and the full essays can be read on the Guest Columns page.

The following perspectives are addressed through guest columns in the report:

• LGBTQ+ people
• Youth with disabilities and/or special needs
• Households with people with disabilities and/or special needs
• Youth raised in households with low levels of educational attainment — including English-speaking households as well as households with members for whom English is a second language or where barriers to communicating in English may be present
• Immigrants and people who may not have legal immigration status
• Youth aging out of foster care
• Youth raised in households with low income
• Various youth perspectives

How to read this report

How the report is structured

The report is published as an interactive website that blends qualitative and quantitative findings generated through a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) process. Content is organized around a central home page that provides high-level narrative framing and summarizes key findings, followed by five core sections:

• Access to Childcare
• Affordable Housing
• Equitable Education
• Fair Wages and Employment
• Conditions that Shape Thriving

Each of the first four sections reflects priority issue areas identified by the community in the 2020 Gender Lens report. The fifth section, High-Level Barriers and Signs of Thriving, presents cross-cutting indicators the CBPR cohort identified as essential measures of thriving and barriers across all issue areas.

Within each section, readers will find contextual narrative framing, key findings identified by the cohort, quantitative content (including interactive data visualizations and technical notes), and qualitative excerpts and guest columnist quotes that add lived context to the data.

Additional pages include the full methodology, the complete qualitative findings, full guest columns, and partner forewords that reflect the perspectives of the organizations involved in producing the report.

The Glossary

To make the technical language of the report easier to read, the analyst team included a list of terms that may not be common knowledge or are used in specific ways in this report. Readers can click these links and terms for a simple explanation of their meanings.

Key findings

The Community Cohort identified the key findings for each section of this report. These key findings reflect the information and responses that they felt were the most important for the readers to understand.

Detailed Analyses of Measures

The cohort identified indicators of thriving and barriers to thriving for each topic in this report. These indicators and barriers were measured by the Forsyth Futures analyst team and reviewed and interpreted by the Community Cohort. The cohort’s interpretation is included in the key findings for each section.

Each measure also includes a description and context section. This section includes technical information about how the indicator or barrier was measured, as well as information that the cohort identified as important for readers to understand the measure in the appropriate context.

Each measure also includes technical notes from the analyst team in the data notes section. This is where readers can find more detailed and technical information about each measure, including caveats and information about statistical testing. All statistical testing in this report is at the 95% confidence level. Data notes also include data sources and citations. These sources include information referenced for both the analysis and the measure description and context section. If readers have specific questions about the methodology or data sources used for these measures, they can reach out to the Forsyth Futures analyst team at communications@forsythfutures.org.

Each measure also includes at least one data visualization. Many of these visualizations are interactive, and hovering the mouse over these visualizations allows the reader to access more detailed information about each data point.

Statistical Differences Matter

When analysts worked on this report, one of the things they tried to understand was how confident they could be in their findings. There were two main ways they answered this question: the margin of error and testing for statistical significance.

The margin of error shows how much “wiggle room” analysts believe there is around an estimate or number. For some kinds of data, especially reports based on administrative records, everyone is counted, and analysts can be confident that the numbers reflect the actual number of people. For other data, researchers gather information from only a sample, or a smaller group, and use that sample to draw conclusions about the whole population. In these cases, analysts include a margin of error to indicate confidence in the numbers. In this report, the margin of error reflects the range that analysts are 95% sure the actual value falls within. Larger margins of error mean lower confidence, and smaller margins of error show greater confidence.

Statistical significance generally shows how likely it is that differences in numbers are due to random chance or a margin of error, instead of real differences in the community. In this report, analysts call differences “statistically significant” when they are at least 95% sure the differences are not from random chance.

A note on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in producing this report

In some cases, staff used artificial intelligence tools to help optimize the final published content of this report. In all cases, this content was subsequently reviewed by human staff for accuracy and validity. These cases include:

• Optimizing written content for clarity, complexity, and accessibility.
• Creating introductions to analysis sections.
• Identifying and mapping mentions of common themes across the body of qualitative content (including guest columnist content) for the purpose of interspersing qualitative excerpts and quotes throughout the research topic pages of the report.
• Drafting glossary definitions.
• Refining language while preserving participant voice the qualitative data.
• Making minor edits to photography used in the report.