Yesterday, President Trump announced a two‑week ceasefire with Iran, along with a conditional reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. If you are like me, you have been wondering why the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has caused an increase in oil prices. It turns out that about 20 percent of the world’s traded oil travels through this strait. So, although the U.S. has oil reserves, oil is traded on the world market, which dictates prices.
The news of the ceasefire excited investors, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its best performance since April 2025. If you are invested in the Dow, today was a good day. But for millions of low‑income families already struggling to buy food and gas, the ceasefire offers only optimism for potential relief. It does not materialize into money that can be used tomorrow or the day after.
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was about 2.98 dollars at the end of February 2026, before the war escalated. By early April, the national average was more than 4.00 dollars per gallon, a roughly 32 percent increase from the pre‑war baseline.
Real differences or similarities?
For households with low incomes and no savings, higher gas prices are a monthly bill that means a tradeoff between food, rent, medicine, and child care. Low-income families spend a larger share of their budgets on transportation to keep their cars running and get to and from work. Women who head households in the lowest income quintile are already carrying the tariff-driven food price increases you read about last week.
This week’s story about the effect of gas prices is not exactly the same as last week’s food story. In last week’s tariff analysis, never-married households accounted for 42 percent of affected households, and nearly 70 percent of affected people lived in never-married households. For gas price increases, married-headed households account for 32.6 percent of households and about 49.3 percent of affected people who slipped below the poverty line. Never-married households account for 29.1 percent of households pushed below the poverty line. Hence, the gas shock is less concentrated in never-married households than the food shock was. The effect of gas price increases also leans more heavily toward households without children: 61.5 percent of households pushed below the poverty line have no children, compared with 38.5 percent with children. Among never-married households, households without children account for 21.8 percent of all households pushed below the poverty line, compared with 7.3 percent for never-married households with children (see Table 1).
Table 1. Households and People Pushed Below the Poverty Line, by Marital Status and Presence of Children: 2024
Source: Calculations by the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race using 2025 Annual and Social Economic Supplement, Current Population Survey. www.ipums.org.
However, the effect on women is similar. Women account for 52.6 percent of households and 50.2 percent of people pushed below the poverty line due to increases in gas prices. Women remain more vulnerable than men. Black women account for the largest number of households pushed below the poverty line by higher gas prices, followed by Hispanic women and Asian women. Black women account for 27,768 households and 67,581 people; Hispanic women, 12,412 households and 33,561 people; Asian women, 4,705 households and 16,120 people; and Indigenous women, 1,914 households and 1,914 people. Widowed female-headed households account for 82 percent of widowed households that slipped below the poverty line due to gas prices, and 88 percent of the affected people in widowed households.
Together, the tariff effect on food prices and the increase in gas prices are a double whammy. When the same low-income population experiences higher grocery costs and higher transportation costs at the same time, more households are pushed closer to the poverty line, and many are pushed below it.
Stay sharp,
Rhonda V. Sharpe
President
