This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Amanda Nataro was getting ready to travel to Liberia for a work trip when notice came that all travel was suspended. She was locked out of her emails and the building. In a matter of days, her job of nine years at the U.S. Agency for International Development was gone.
As a single mother, her thoughts turned to her elementary school-age children. They turned to the people she was supporting in Liberia as they worked to revamp the country’s only public medical school. And they turned to the other Black women like her — on her team alone there were senior leaders who were Black women — for whom jobs like this one 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 even get places at the table, and then the chairs were just removed,” Nataro said.
The end of USAID via an executive order on Inauguration Day was the first in a series of deep cuts the new administration made to the federal workforce in the year since Donald Trump returned to office. Those cuts ran deeper for the 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 ended it at 7.3 percent — the highest rate in four years. Black women’s unemployment is now equivalent to White women’s rate during the bleakest moments of the Great Recession.
“The labor market that Black women live in is what White women would think of as the worst labor market they’ve ever been in,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist. Without counting the pandemic, White women as a group have only experienced unemployment rates this high three times since 1954, when that monthly data started being collected.
The impacts of job loss for Black women started to surface this summer, when cuts to federal agencies started to show up in the data. But that was just the beginning. Workplace trends and government policies that axed jobs and dismantled workplace DEI initiatives are having a measurable impact on Black women more than any other group.
On any normal month in any normal year Black women’s unemployment rate is twice the rate of White women, which economists credit in large part to pervasive discrimination. But here is what was new to 2025: The economy was softening from the explosive growth it experienced coming out of the pandemic. Unemployment rates started to creep up again for everyone, and industries added fewer jobs than years prior. When that happens, employers have a wider candidate pool to choose from and discrimination becomes more widespread, said Jasmine Tucker, the vice president for research at the National Women’s Law Center.
“When there’s more people looking for work, employers can be choosier. Who are they choosing? People who look like them, think like them, talk like them,” Tucker said.
By December, Black women were spending an average of 29.7 weeks, or more than seven months, unemployed — the highest rate among every group of women and among all men except for Black men, who had a slightly higher average.
“I remember sitting in the lobby of the Ronald Reagan Building [and International Trade Center] waiting to see if they’d let us in to apply for jobs,” Nataro recalled.
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 percent) is almost twice the share of Black women in the overall workforce (7 percent). And many of the departments most targeted for cuts by Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were the ones that had even larger shares of Black women, including the Education Department, where Black women were more than a quarter of workers.
Those losses started to show up in the unemployment figures at the start of the year, and again in October when 174,000 government workers were no longer in labor force, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Black women also suffered job loss across sectors, said Jessica Fulton, a senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on Black Americans.
The biggest employment dip for prime-age working Black women ages 25 to 54 was in a wide-ranging industry known as “other services,” a category that includes personal care workers and laundry services, as well as religious groups, civil rights organizations and grantmaking positions. Black women’s employment in those jobs dropped 13.2 percent in 2025. Other big losses came in manufacturing (12.9 percent), public administration (9.8 percent) and financial activities (7.9 percent), according to annual data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Even fields that typically employ a large number of Black women and were doing relatively well last year, like leisure and hospitality and health care, either saw small dips or modest growth. Black women’s employment in leisure jobs dropped 1.4 percent in 2025; in education and health care, Black women’s employment grew by 2.4 percent.
Driving that exodus are changes to the way workplaces are structured. The pandemic encouraged employers to stretch, offering their employees new workplace flexibilities. Now in this post-pandemic period, many employers are snapping back to status quo.
Nataro, for example, ultimately applied for 15 to 30 positions, but only interviewed for two. In August, she started a new job in grantmaking, though in academia not government. It’s a pay cut but she can walk to work and it gives her flexibility to take care of her kids.
Because Black women are the most likely to be single parents, workplace flexibility has long been key for them. But for more than a year now, more employers have started requiring remote workers to return to the office, eroding a benefit Black women reported gave them more work-life balance and shielded 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 have been leaving the workforce at higher numbers, said Kate Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Black women are historically most likely to be in the labor force of any group of women, but since December 2023, the participation rate of college educated Black mothers with children under the age of 5 has dropped 5 percentage points, more than double the rate for highly educated mothers overall. The most pronounced dips happened in 2025, according to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Return to office mandates, the high cost of child care and lack of access to paid parental leave are all factors driving those numbers, Gallagher Robbins said.
Stacked on top of those changes was a new workplace trend in 2025: the dissolution of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, jobs that often went to people of color. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump revoked federal DEI requirements, saying his goal was to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” What followed was a nationwide retreat from DEI, with large companies deprioritizing equity commitments and cutting staff dedicated to inclusion initiatives.
Employment attorney Chiquita Hall-Jackson said she spent most of last year fielding calls from Black workers who lost their jobs, many of them Black women in DEI roles.
“They might be told one thing, that the company is just getting rid of the role altogether. Then there’s a new job description that pops up with the same duties, just a different title. I’m seeing that a lot,” Hall-Jackson said. “Then it’s hard for them to find a job with comparable duties and pay.”
At two recent human resources conferences she attended, Hall-Jackson said employers told her they were worried about being penalized for offering DEI roles and were wondering how to reclassify positions. That changing landscape has made it a harder market for women who have 15 or even 20 years of experience and certifications in DEI for roles that no longer exist, she said. One client has been interviewing three times a week for a month and still hasn’t been able to find a job.
“Now you’re trying to market yourself in a market that’s no longer there,” Hall-Jackson said.
Going into 2026, there’s little sign unemployment rates will fall soon. In fact, cuts to Medicaid in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill are likely going to impact the health care workforce, Gallagher said, a field where that employs 1 out every 5 Black women. One estimate published in the JAMA Health Forum put the projected job loss at about 300,000 by 2034. The sector, Gallagher Robbins said, is “a ticking time bomb.”
The statistics are only part of the story, though, Fulton noted. Job loss at 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 actually see is that Black households are more reliant on incomes earned at work through wages,” she said. “This is something that is really important in particular for Black women who are typically breadwinners in their households. If Black women are being pushed out of the labor force, there’s something really challenging 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.
“It’s going to be obvious to us when we declare the recession that the signs were there,” she said. “Black women were a sign and we sort of ignored it.”
