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Black Women Are Taking the Hardest Labor-Market Hit of 2025 — Here’s the Data
172 sats \ 14 comments \ @jamalderrick 8h Politics_And_Law
BLS microdata for 2025 shows a clear, disproportionate shock: Black women are losing economic ground faster than any major demographic group, including white women and white men.

~600,000 Black Women Sidelined Since February

  • ~297k jobs lost
  • ~223k still unemployed
  • ~75k left the labor force
Total: ~600k pushed out of full economic participation.
That’s proportionally equivalent to 3.05 million white women being sidelined. White women saw nothing close to this scale of loss.

Unemployment Spike

Black women: 5.4% → ~7.5% (official), or ~10.2% including labor-force exits.
White women stayed in the 3–4% range. White men remained stable.
Black women are the only group with a spike this steep.

Sector Downgrade

Black women lost jobs in:
  • Government
  • Finance
  • Transportation
  • Professional services
But gained jobs in:
  • Healthcare support
  • Food service
  • Social assistance
Meanwhile, white men and white women gained or held steady in higher-wage sectors.
A sector-quality gap, not just a job-count gap.

Wage Context

  • Women overall: ~81¢ per $1 earned by men
  • Black women: ~71¢ weekly, ~66¢ annually
  • White women: ~83–84¢

Bottom Line

Black women are facing the largest job losses, the fastest-rising unemployment, and the biggest shift toward lower-wage sectors compared to white women and white men in 2025.
The racial and gender disparities show up clearly in the numbers—no spin required.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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71 sats \ 13 replies \ @Undisciplined 7h
That's pretty common when labor markets tighten. Economists have been writing about this as a downside of minimum wage increases for decades.
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69 sats \ 12 replies \ @jamalderrick OP 6h
Tight labor markets usually help Black women, not hurt them, so that explanation doesn’t fit. And minimum-wage theory doesn’t apply here. There was no federal increase, and the job losses are in higher-pay sectors, while white men gained jobs. The pattern is a data divergence, not a minimum-wage effect.
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91 sats \ 11 replies \ @Undisciplined 6h
You're right about tight labor markets. I misspoke. There are tons of applicants per job opening right now and the government in particular has laid off tons of people.
The point is that the most marginal workers lose their jobs first and that tends to be the very young, the very old, minorities, women, and combinations thereof. I'm aware that this isn't about minimum wage changes.
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69 sats \ 10 replies \ @jamalderrick OP 6h
The “marginal workers lose jobs first” explanation doesn’t fit the data. Black women are actually one of the most educated groups in the workforce. They have the highest college enrollment rate of any demographic (NCES/Pew) and strong representation in government, finance, and professional services.
The 2025 losses hit mid-career, higher-skill sectors where Black women traditionally perform strongly, not the low-wage or low-skill jobs where marginal-worker effects usually show up.
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134 sats \ 9 replies \ @Undisciplined 6h
I specifically noted government layoffs and within any group there are margins
Also, college enrollment is too crude of a measure to usefully indicate human capital. Choice of major and class standing are hugely important factors. A fairly well documented phenomenon is that men select the majors that maximize their career earnings, while women select majors they're personally interested in.
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90 sats \ 8 replies \ @jamalderrick OP 6h
The points you’re raising don’t actually explain the 2025 data: • “There are margins in every group.” True but irrelevant. It doesn’t explain why Black women as a group saw the steepest losses while white women and white men didn’t. • “Government layoffs.” That’s part of the story, but it doesn’t explain why the impact was disproportionately concentrated on Black women compared to their peers in the same agencies. • “College enrollment is crude.” Maybe, but Black women have strong representation in the very degree-required sectors where the losses occurred (gov/finance/pro services), so this doesn’t account for the divergence. • “Men pick higher-earning majors.” Major choice years ago can’t explain a 2025 spike in unemployment, especially since white women with similar majors weren’t hit the same way.
So none of these general points actually address the core question: Why did Black women see the largest job losses in high-skill sectors this year while white women stayed stable and white men gained jobs?
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151 sats \ 7 replies \ @Undisciplined 5h
The government layoffs weren't random. They were particularly focused on DEI offices throughout the entire government and hit ED and HHS harder than average. It might also be the case that black women opted for the buyout packages at higher rates (I haven't seen anything about that being the case, though).
Most of the time, high rates of government employment shield black women from bad labor markets because the government is not subject to market discipline. When there are unprecedented cuts in government employment, that goes the other way.
Also, many universities and private firms reduced their DEI programs. Those are disproportionately staffed by black women.
Enrollment is not the same as earned degrees. Black women have lower graduation rates than either white women or white men. It's just not the relevant metric for this discussion.
The answer to your question is going to be the subject of years of forthcoming research done by labor economists other than myself. These are just my initial thoughts and first pass at forming hypotheses.
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69 sats \ 6 replies \ @jamalderrick OP 4h
The federal-cuts point is your strongest argument, but it only explains part of the pattern. Black women also saw major 2025 losses in finance, transportation, and professional services, where white women didn’t and white men gained.
I agree that the buyout idea is speculative and not supported by data or historic patterns for mid-career workers. The DEI-only framing is too small to account for losses across multiple sectors. And major-choice or graduation-rate differences can’t explain a sudden 2025 spike, especially since Black women remain one of the most educated and professionally qualified demographics.
So the gov-cuts argument fits within a single-sector frame, but the rest doesn’t match the timing, scale, or cross-sector divergence.
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