In the wake of the presidential election, much has been made of the plight of working-class men struggling to get ahead. But the challenge of making ends meet in today’s job market isn’t only a male problem, and LiAnne Flakes knows that all too well.

The 41-year-old has worked in early childhood education for 24 years. In all of those years she’s made less than $15 an hour. Except for one year when she was working in Washington, D.C., one of the most expensive places to live in the country. Flakes, who now lives in Tampa, Florida, often finds herself choosing which bills to pay, paying the electric one month and the water the next.

“It’s a daily struggle for me,” Flakes said in between rallies that were part of the nationwide “Fight for $15” protests that took place across the country Tuesday.

Despite the low pay, Flakes says she loves her job and wouldn’t think of switching careers. “I enjoy what I do to the point that I practically do it for free now,” she said. Instead, she’s hoping that the government, employers and society more broadly will recognize the value of her work and raise her pay. “This is not a fight for $15 an hour and a union, this is a fight for my life.”

Flakes is one of the millions of women, highlighted in a report released Wednesday, who are working in jobs crucial to keeping our economy humming, but don’t pay much. More than one-quarter of all employed working women are in one of 22 jobs that are growing fast, pay less than $15 an hour and are female-dominated, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and Oxfam America, an organization focused on reducing poverty.

These jobs, which are often considered “women’s work,” are expected to be crucial to our economic future; by 2024, nearly one in six jobs will fit into this category, the report found.

Though these jobs are growing faster than average, they’re still undervalued, the report argues. Often these occupations, which include preschool teachers and health care support, require some education beyond high school, but are still relatively low-paid. Male-dominated, technical jobs that require similar levels of education, like advanced manufacturing and information technology, typically pay more. This dynamic partially explains the overall gulf in earnings between men and women.

“Tackling gender segregation is really important in terms of addressing the wage gap,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the program director for employment and earnings at IWPR and one of the authors of the report.

Even though these female-dominated jobs are often strenuous and in some cases require relatively high levels of education, they don’t pay very much. Why? The report offers a few theories. One is that many of these jobs, which include domestic work, cooking and cleaning, were jobs traditionally performed by women inside the home, for free and so when they moved into the public sphere, they were relatively undervalued.

In some cases, the jobs have historically employed women so that they could pay them very little. The report cites the example of the teaching profession, which began in the 19th century as largely women’s work because women were in less of a position to negotiate their salaries. That kept the nation’s children educated and taxpayers’ bills low. Now, even as women are in a better position to negotiate salaries and attitudes toward women working outside the home have changed, the fact that they’re often employed in government-funded jobs, like teaching, can make it difficult to raise pay, said Hegewisch.

In other cases, the idea that these female-dominated jobs can pay less is actually enshrined into law. So-called “companion care” work, like providing companionship to the sick or elderly, has been traditionally excluded from wage and hour protections, the report notes.

Can Wall Street close this gender gap?

The result of this is that many of the 23.5 million women employed in these jobs are living at or near poverty and relying on government benefits. For example, one-quarter of the mothers working these jobs are using food stamps, according to the report.

Raising the minimum wage and upping enforcement of protections for workers could improve the lives and financial futures of the millions of women working in these jobs, Hegewisch said. Upgrading policies for access to child care and elder care could also help by both improving the care itself and providing workers with better pay, she said.

Investing in workforce development programs, like apprenticeships, that could help women enter traditionally male-dominated and higher-paying fields would also be a boon, Hegewisch said. Those types of programs also often have bipartisan support.

It’s harder to say whether President-elect Donald Trump and a Republican Congress will prioritize investing in the so-called “care economy,” as Hegewisch calls it, though his daughter, Ivanka, championed a paid leave policy on the campaign trail that would provide six weeks of paid maternity leave to workers; advocates who support extending the leave longer than six weeks and expanding access to both mothers and fathers spoke out against her. Hegewisch said she’s hopeful, given that families increasingly rely on the salaries of both men and women to get by.

“Having such a large sector of the economy which is not very well paid does not only affect women,” she said.