The U.S. Census Bureau released data Thursday from its 2017 American Community Survey.
Jessica Fraser, director of the Indiana Institute for Working Families, said Indiana's results were a mixed bag, but for the most part, she was not surprised.
“All of us thought that the poverty rates would go down a little," she said. "We thought wages would go up. We just didn’t know by how much.”
Indiana’s poverty rate decreased significantly in 2017, but it’s still higher than it was in 2007. Fraser said questions about the post-recession recovery have dominated over the past several years.
"Are we going to continue to make progress towards trying to regain what we had before the recession," she said, "or is the progress going to stall out?"
Fraser said one thing was surprising: the percentage of Hoosiers without health insurance. It increased in 2017, defying a years-long trend.
She said another indicator is also concerning. Last year, the state’s gender wage gap was the third-highest in the country, behind Utah and Louisana. Indiana's gap was the nation's sixth-highest in 2016 and 12th-highest in 2015.