pull down to refresh
0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 5h \ parent \ on: Black Women Are Taking the Hardest Labor-Market Hit of 2025 — Here’s the Data Politics_And_Law
I agree that DEI or other similar initiatives is likely too small to make up the whole difference, but you have to start somewhere and start unravelling the knot.
If you recall, you brought up college enrollment as evidence that black women were more highly skilled than average. I only brought up graduation rates and major choice to refute that erroneous point. I never claimed differences in graduation rates or major selection explained anything about this unemployment pattern.
However, as I've given this more thought, I do think the best mileage will come from looking more granularly at what specific jobs within those sectors are/were being done disproportionately by black women. There's a lot of task heterogeneity within a broad sector like finance or government.
Another possibility that occurred to me is that employers may perceive laxer enforcement of affirmative action laws under this administration and are cutting employees who had been hired for that reason. This would be a version of my original thought about cutting marginal workers.
Since you’re framing this in terms of sector patterns and shifting legal incentives, this piece gives the broader context behind those dynamics. It lays out the structural factors that fit the mechanisms you’re describing:
The Second Reconstruction: The Legal, Immoral, and Political Effort to Reverse it #1288677
reply
Thanks, I missed that when it was first posted. I'll take a look at it tomorrow.
reply
I didn’t bring up enrollment. My point was simply that, as a demographic, Black women possess higher levels of professional experience and educational attainment than most groups, especially in the sectors where the 2025 losses occurred.
reply
And that point is not correct, because they do not finish their college degrees at a higher rate than white or Asian students. All of the measurable gains from education occur at graduation. Enrollment is irrelevant.
reply
Graduation-rate comparisons to white or Asian students are completely irrelevant to the labor-market reality behind the 2025 pattern. The meaningful metrics here are per-capita and per-sector, not broad racial graduation averages.
• Per capita, Black women earn more bachelor’s degrees than white men and are the most educated demographic within their racial group (NCES/Brookings).
• Per sector, Black women are strongly represented and highly credentialed in the exact fields where the 2025 losses occurred — government, finance, transportation, and professional services (OPM/EEOC).
• These sectors require degrees, certifications, and mid-career experience, and Black women hold those qualifications at above-average rates.
So education or skill levels cannot explain why Black women saw the sharpest 2025 losses while white women stayed stable and white men gained jobs. Graduation-rate comparisons have nothing to do with the timing, sectors, or scale of what happened.
reply