What comes to mind when you think of rural America?
Gbenga Ajilore once said that when people think of rural spaces, they think of the American Gothic painting. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans in rural areas died of the virus at nearly twice the rate of those living in nonrural spaces.
Approximately 15% of Americans live in rural areas, and many of them look nothing like the individuals in American Gothic. Preconceived notions of who and what kind of people live in rural spaces are a roadblock to crafting effective and inclusive policy.
Asian Americans are a population that are not always considered when thinking about rural spaces.
The Census Bureau defines ‘Asian’ as a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
This suggests that the term ‘Asian American’ is more or less a catch-all for individuals with a myriad of immigration stories and life experiences. 
When we disaggregate the data, it becomes clear that there are income differences for Asian female-headed households across ethnicity. These differences are even more pronounced when we compare those that live in rural and nonrural areas.
The average household income for Chinese women in rural areas is nearly half for Chinese women in nonrural areas. There is a similar trend among Filipina women, whose average household income is 54% higher in nonrural regions compared to those in rural.
However, the average household income for Asian female-headed households is not always higher in nonrural areas. For example, the average household income for Indonesian women is 47% higher in rural areas than it is in nonrural. There is a similar trend for Fijian women whose household income is nearly four times higher in rural areas than in nonrural.
Japanese and Hawaiian women’s rural and nonrural household incomes are nearly par.
Policy is never one size fits all, especially in this case. It may seem intuitive to assume that rural Americans, by default, see lower incomes than non-rural Americans, who we presume are closer to economic activity. Though as shown for Fijian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Hawaiian women, for some, rural incomes are equal to or better than their nonrural counterparts.
Through disaggregation, we see no group is a monolith- especially Asian American women.
