Black Women’s Unemployment Has Skyrocketed. Here’s What Happened.

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana in the 19th century. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Amanda Nataro was preparing to go to Liberia for a work trip when she was informed that all travel was suspended. She no longer had access to her emails or the building. Within days, his nine-year job at the U.S. Agency for International Development was gone.

As a single mother, her thoughts turned to her elementary school-aged children. They turned to the people she supported in Liberia as they worked to revamp the country’s only public medical school. And they turned to other black women like her – on her team alone, there were senior leaders who were black women – for whom jobs like this in the federal government had been a lifeline, offering high pay, benefits and a chance to do meaningful work.

“We had worked so hard to get seats at the table, and then the chairs were just taken away,” Nataro said.

Ending USAID via an executive order on Inauguration Day was the first in a series of deep cuts the new administration has made to the federal workforce in the year since Donald Trump returned to power. These cuts were deeper for black women like Nataro, who disproportionately worked in jobs that were eliminated.

Black women started 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5.4 percent. They finished it at 7.3 percent – ​​the highest rate in four years. The unemployment rate for black women is now on par with that of white women during the darkest times of the Great Recession.

“The job market that black women live in is what white women would consider the worst job market they have ever experienced,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist. Not counting the pandemic, white women as a group have only experienced unemployment rates this high three times since 1954, when this monthly data began being collected.

The impacts of job loss for Black women began to surface this summer, when cuts to federal agencies began showing up in the data. But that was only the beginning. Workplace trends and government policies that have eliminated jobs and dismantled DEI initiatives in the workplace have a measurable impact on Black women more than any other group.

In any normal month of a normal year, the unemployment rate for black women is twice that of white women, which economists attribute largely to pervasive discrimination. But here’s what was new in 2025: The economy was slowing following the explosive growth it experienced in the wake of the pandemic. Unemployment rates began to rise again for everyone, and industries created fewer jobs than in previous years. When that happens, employers have a larger candidate pool and discrimination becomes more prevalent, said Jasmine Tucker, vice president for research at the National Women’s Law Center.

“When there are more people looking for work, employers can be more demanding. Who do they choose? People who look like them, think like them, talk like them,” Tucker said.

In December, black women spent an average of 29.7 weeks, or more than seven months, unemployed — the highest rate among all groups of women and among all men except black men, who had a slightly higher average.

“I remember sitting in the lobby of the Ronald Reagan Building [and International Trade Center] I was waiting to see if they would let us in to apply for a job,” Nataro remembers.

Some 335,000 federal workers lost or left their jobs last year, including thousands of positions held by Black women.

The share of Black women in the federal workforce (12%) is almost twice that of Black women in the overall workforce (7%). And many of the departments most targeted by Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) budget cuts were those with an even larger share of black women, including the Department of Education, where black women made up more than a quarter of workers.

Those losses began showing up in unemployment figures at the start of the year, and then again in October, when 174,000 public workers were no longer in the labor force, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Black women have also lost jobs across industries, said Jessica Fulton, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on Black Americans.

The largest decline in employment among prime-age black working women, ages 25 to 54, occurred in a broad sector known as “other services,” a category that includes workers in personal care and laundry services, as well as religious groups, civil rights organizations and grant-making positions. Employment of Black women in these jobs fell 13.2 percent in 2025. Other significant losses occurred in manufacturing (12.9 percent), public administration (9.8 percent) and financial activities (7.9 percent), according to annual data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even fields that typically employ large numbers of black women and were doing relatively well last year, such as leisure, hospitality and health care, saw slight declines or modest growth. Black women’s employment in leisure jobs fell 1.4 percent in 2025; in education and health care, black women’s employment increased by 2.4 percent.

This exodus is due to changes in the way workplaces are structured. The pandemic has encouraged employers to be more disciplined, offering their employees new workplace flexibilities. Now, in this post-pandemic era, many employers are returning to business as usual.

Nataro, for example, ultimately applied for 15 to 30 positions, but only interviewed for two. In August, she started a new job in grantmaking, but in academia, not government. It’s a pay cut, but she can walk to work and it gives her the flexibility to care for her children.

Since black women are most likely to be single mothers, workplace flexibility has long been essential for them. But for more than a year now, more employers have begun requiring remote workers to return to the office, eroding a benefit that Black women said gave them a better work-life balance and protected them from some of the discrimination and microaggressions they experienced in the workplace.

The loss of remote work opportunities is part of the reason Black mothers are leaving the workforce in greater numbers, said Kate Gallagher Robbins, a senior researcher at the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Black women are historically more likely to be in the labor force than any group of women, but since December 2023, the labor force participation rate of college-educated Black mothers with children under age 5 has fallen 5 percentage points, more than double the overall rate of highly educated mothers. The steepest declines occurred in 2025, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women and Families.

Back-to-office mandates, the high cost of child care and lack of access to paid parental leave are all factors behind these numbers, Gallagher Robbins said.

Adding to these changes is a new workplace trend in 2025: the dissolution of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, jobs that were often given to people of color. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked federal DEI requirements, saying his goal was to “forge a colorblind, merit-based society.” What followed was a nationwide retreat from DEI, with large companies deprioritizing equity commitments and reducing staff dedicated to inclusion initiatives.

Employment lawyer Chiquita Hall-Jackson said she spent most of the last year fielding calls from Black workers who had lost their jobs, many of whom were Black women in DEI positions.

“One thing we could tell them is that the company is completely getting rid of this position. Then there will be a new job description that pops up with the same duties, just a different title. I see that a lot,” Hall-Jackson said. “It is then difficult for them to find a job with comparable tasks and salary.”

At two recent human resources conferences she attended, Hall-Jackson said employers told her they were worried about being penalized for offering DEI positions and were wondering how to reclassify the positions. This changing landscape has made the market more difficult for women who have 15 or even 20 years of experience and certifications in DEI for positions that no longer exist, she said. A client has been interviewing three times a week for a month and still can’t find a job.

“Now you’re trying to sell yourself to a market that no longer exists,” Hall-Jackson said.

Looking ahead to 2026, there are few signs of unemployment rates falling any time soon. In fact, cuts to Medicaid under Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill will likely impact the health care workforce, Gallagher said, a field where it employs one in five black women. An estimate published in the JAMA Health Forum puts the expected job loss at about 300,000 by 2034. The sector, Gallagher Robbins said, is “a ticking time bomb.”

Statistics are only part of the story, however, Fulton noted. Job loss on this scale for Black women has implications for entire families and communities. Black households are less likely to have access to generational wealth or other wealth-building opportunities, she said.

“What we’re actually seeing is that Black households are more reliant on income earned at work through wages,” she said. “This is something that’s really important, especially for Black women who are typically the breadwinners in their households. If Black women are excluded from the workforce, there’s something really difficult happening for Black families and Black communities.”

Tucker, who has been tracking the data for years, said the implications won’t stop with Black workers.

“When we declare a recession, it will be obvious to us that the signs were there,” she said. “Black women were a sign and we kind of ignored it. »