Latina women contribute $1.3 trillion to the U.S. economy, according to a new report. That number could be even bigger.

Latina women make significant contributions to the U.S. economy.

According to a recent report funded by Bank of America, the Hispanic female population will contribute $1.3 trillion to the country’s gross domestic product in 2021, up from $661 billion in 2010.

This represents a real GDP growth rate of 51.1% from 2010 to 2021, meaning the non-Hispanic population contributes 2.7 times more to the economy.

Citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the report noted that the total income of Latinas in the U.S. in 2021 was greater than the total income of the entire state of Florida that year. In fact, only Latinas in California, Texas, and New York had a total income greater than the total income of the entire state of Florida that year.

Despite these big numbers, some economists believe that Latinas in the U.S. may contribute more to GDP than the report states.

Belinda Roman, an associate professor of economics at Saint Mary’s University, said there are many areas of activity that the data doesn’t capture, including child care.

“A lot of it is unpaid care,” she told CNBC in an interview. “And what’s interesting is that there are a lot of Latina women health care workers who don’t show up in these numbers, so I think to some extent it’s actually underrepresented.”

Economist Monica García Pérez also thinks the figure could be much higher, saying some of the “unmeasured” contributions of Latinas — for example, stay-at-home moms who care for other neighbors’ children — “make it possible for other groups to participate in the labor market.”

She also noted that, more generally, the professional positions they hold create some difficulties in assessing their contributions.

“This group is very sensitive to shocks, and that may have to do with them being in sectors with high liquidity and turnover,” said the Fayetteville State University economics professor, who added that they tend to be concentrated in care and service industries such as health care, retail and hospitality, making them a “moving part” of the economic cycle.

For example, in an economic downturn, Latinas “are likely to lose their jobs much faster in their industries,” Garcia-Pérez said, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, “but they may also be more likely to re-enter the market because of lower barriers to entry and the types of jobs they have.”

According to a Bank of America report, Latina women outperform other groups when it comes to labor force participation rates.

From 2000 to 2021, the participation rate for Latina women increased by 7.5 percentage points, while the participation rate for non-Hispanic women remained flat during the same period.

This group is also more resilient than others: While labor force growth overall slowed in 2020, growth rates remained positive for Hispanic men and women. Conversely, labor force growth rates for non-Hispanics were negative for the year, meaning more people left the labor force than joined.

Additionally, between 2019 and 2021, Latino GDP grew more than five times faster than non-Latino GDP, increasing 7.7% compared to 1.5%, while Hispanic men’s GDP grew 5.9%, nearly four times faster than non-Latino GDP, during the same period.

These contributions are noteworthy, given that Latino households have been some of the households hardest hit by the pandemic.

“It is precisely at times when the overall economy is struggling the most that the contributions of Latinos in the United States are most evident,” said economist Matthew Fiennep, executive director of the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at California Lutheran University and co-author of the report. “All Latinos are a source of economic strength, but Latinos are the engine of the energy our economy needs.”

“If COVID-19 can’t stop this increase, it’s hard to see what can,” said report co-author David Hayes Bautista, director of the Center for Latino Health and Cultural Research at the UCLA School of Medicine.

The percentage of Latinos with jobs has been increasing since the late 1970s. Specifically, the group’s employment rate soared from 41.6% in December 1978 to 56% in December 2023, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.

By comparison, the share of black women (who, along with Latina women, have the largest wage gap with non-Hispanic white men) increased by 11.9 percentage points. The index for women overall increased by 8.8 percentage points over the same period.

“This is largely due to expanding opportunities for women,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at EPI. It’s also due to the lack of growth in wages for typical workers over the past few decades, she said. “It’s harder to get promoted, so families may have had to put in more hours to get a better life.”

This seems to be working to some extent: Thanks to higher labor force participation rates and improved education levels, Hispanic women’s earnings grew about 2.5 times faster than non-Hispanic women’s from 2010 to 2021, according to co-authors of the Bank of America report.

Hayes-Bautista also noted that generational change and the fact that the Hispanic female population is growing faster than Hispanic men and the non-Hispanic population are other factors driving Hispanic women’s economic production.

“We see that starting around 2000, first-generation immigrants start dropping out of the labor force,” he says. “As they age out of the labor force, their daughters and granddaughters take their place. They’re twice as numerous and bring with them much higher levels of human capital.”

Latina women in particular have been a driving force behind Latino overall contributions, Finnapp told CNBC, and their collective contributions have driven positive workforce growth in certain parts of the country at a time when the non-Latino workforce has been shrinking.

“I expect this trend to become increasingly important over the next 30 years,” he said. “What we’re seeing today is just the beginning of what will become increasingly important events in the U.S. economy.”