Black women face widening job losses as employment gap deepens

Black women’s employment rate fell to 55.7% in 2025, even as national payrolls kept growing and the overall unemployment rate held at 4.3% in May 2026.

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 172,000 in May 2026. BLS monthly race-and-sex tables track unemployment and labor-force participation by demographic group, and Black women age 20 and over still face a steeper path into stable work than other women and than men in the labor market. Women’s labor force participation peaked at 60.0% in 1999, then declined before beginning to rebound from pandemic-era lows in 2022.

National unemployment stayed stable between June 2024 and June 2025, while unemployment for Black workers rose by more than half a percentage point. Black women are heavily concentrated in education, health care and government-adjacent jobs, sectors squeezed by federal downsizing and public-sector cuts. Black women bore the brunt of the slowdown in 2025, with losses especially sharp among college graduates and public-sector workers. Black women’s employment rate dropped by 1.4 percentage points in 2025. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research projects that, if current trends continue, Black women’s pay will not reach parity with White men’s full-time, year-round pay until 2227. Black unemployment has often run at more than double White unemployment.