Fox & Friends Sunday falsely claimed that raising the minimum wage would harm female workers, contributing to what they called the “phony war on women” -- but women make up the majority of minimum wage earners, and would significantly benefit from a raise.

On the March 30 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Sunday, co-host Anna Kooiman and Independent Women's Forum Executive Director Sabrina Schaeffer pushed several debunked minimum wage myths, falsely claiming that a majority of workers making minimum wage are younger, and suggesting that Democrats who wanted to pay women more were in fact hurting families and workers, contributing to the “phony war on women” (emphasis added): 

SCHAEFFER: The reality is a majority of minimum wage earners are working part time. The majority are younger workers 16-24, about 50 percent are, so it's not quite this dire situation where you have the head of households who are not able to care for their families. And there are -- when the price of something goes up, people tend to buy less.

KOOIMAN: So you're saying it's continuing this phony war on women?

SCHAEFFER: Yeah, of course, and you know, this is definitely sort of a legislative aim looking towards looking at the midterm elections but really what would help people is robust job creation because that's what gives workers -- all workers, especially women who need often part time or flexible work arrangements, more opportunities we want more jobs, we want different kinds of jobs, a variety of jobs, we want women who need part-time work to be able to find it, they're going to have better negotiating powers, higher wages when we have a stronger economy overall.

Kooiman concluded the segment by suggesting raising the minimum wage was not a “long-term solution” that would help “job creation.”

In fact, women make up the majority of minimum wage earners and would benefit disproportionately from an increase in the minimum wage. ThinkProgress reported that according to research from the Center for American Progress, “two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women,” (despite making up only 48.3 percent of the total workforce) making women “far more likely to benefit from a wage increase” than men:

Furthermore, as sixty percent of women are the primary or co-breadwinner in their household, raising the minimum wage would have a significant positive effect for families. The majority of minimum wage workers are adults over the age of 25, and despite Fox's fearmongering, numerous economic studies have shown that increasing the minimum wage would have little effect on jobs and could even increase hiring, while boosting the economy in the short run. Finally, the Economic Policy Institute found that the declining value of the minimum wage was a major contributing factor to growing levels of economic inequality, weakening low-wage workers' bargaining position.

Raising the minimum wage would benefit over 13 million women and 30 million American workers overall -- but that still hasn't distracted Fox News from its long history of campaigning against raising the minimum wage.