Since February, according to my latest analysis, almost 600,000 Black women have been economically sidelined. The November 20, 2025, Jobs Report makes clear this isn’t a blip. It’s a structural crisis. The economy added only 119,000 payroll jobs in September. Revisions to August and July erased another 33,000 positions (the country actually lost 4,000 jobs in August), leaving just 187,000 jobs gained over three months—an average of 62,000 per month. That’s a 3% slowdown from the previous quarter’s already anemic growth.
Stagnation would be troubling enough. But because revisions are reported only in aggregate, we don’t know which groups bore the brunt of those cuts. Intersectional analysis fills that gap—and what it reveals about Black women’s employment should alarm us all.
Black women are being sidelined at scale
Since February, Black women have lost 297,000 jobs. Another 223,000 remain unemployed. And 75,000 have been pushed out of the labor force entirely. I estimate that these forced exits alone are draining an estimated $9.2 billion from U.S. GDP this year. These aren’t just missing paychecks; they represent lost productivity, lost tax revenue, and diminished national output.
The proportional impact makes the numbers even starker. Black women’s labor force size is five times smaller than that of White women. If White women had been sidelined at the same rate, my calculations show the equivalent would be 3.05 million White women economically sidelined. That’s equal to the entire female workforce of Pennsylvania.
Zooming out, I find that 341,000 Black women are still missing from the labor force since the pandemic began. This is the most educated female cohort in the country, and more than half are breadwinners for households with children. Erasing their economic participation undercuts today’s stability and tomorrow’s workforce.
A widening pay gap, masked by misleading numbers
The latest data show women’s weekly median earnings fell in the second quarter of 2025, even as men’s earnings increased. The result: women earn just 81 cents for every dollar men earn. Black women’s gap is even wider: 71 cents on the dollar weekly and just 66 cents annually compared to White, non-Hispanic men. On top of that, Census data confirm the annual gender pay gap has now widened for two years in a row, the first back-to-back setback in decades.
At the same time, inflation is gendered. In a reprieve for women’s already thin paychecks, the current inflation rate for goods marketed to women is 50% lower than for goods marketed to men. That’s a sharp reversal from the prior month, when women’s inflation burden was 138% higher.
Official unemployment numbers also disguise the depth of the crisis. Black women’s unemployment rate rose from 5.4% in February to 7.5% in September—already more than two points above what the Federal Reserve considers “full employment.” But when accounting for the hundreds of thousands of women pushed out of the labor force entirely since 2020, the real unemployment rate for Black women is 10.23%.
Jobs are growing where women are paid the least
The only meaningful job gains for Black women came in health care, food services, and social assistance: +10,700 positions in September. This is the sector where Black women are concentrated and also among the lowest-paying in the economy. Average weekly pay in these sectors hovers around $530 to $1,200—far below wages in manufacturing, finance, or professional services.
Even within health care, Black women face some of the largest racial and gender pay gaps. Meanwhile, Black women lost 1,500 jobs in government, a more stable and higher-paying sector, and saw zero gains in finance, transportation, or professional services. In short, they are gaining jobs where wages are lowest and losing them where wages are better.
700,000 women missing from the workforce
The November 20, 2025, Jobs Report confirms the divide is still widening—just in a different direction than earlier in the year. As of the latest data, 673,000 women remain missing from the labor force since the pandemic began. In theory, the growth in the number of women eligible to work over this period should have expanded participation. Instead, participation remains depressed.
By contrast, since February alone, 879,000 men have entered the labor force. That divergence makes clear the gap isn’t closing—it’s accelerating. Even as women’s participation remains structurally suppressed, men are re-entering the labor market at scale, reshaping the workforce in ways the topline numbers continue to obscure.
The employment gap is widening fast
On August 31, when I last published an analysis of these figures, Black women were down 319,000 jobs while white men had gained 365,000. Expanding the analysis to reflect men overall, the gap has only grown more lopsided: Black women are down 297,000, but men’s gains have surged to +621,000. That’s a 324,000 widening of the gender gap in two months—a 34% jump. Since February, the swing between black women’s losses and men’s gains approaches 1 million jobs.
Put differently, the labor market added the population of Boston in male workers, while subtracting the equivalent of Greensboro in female workers. That is not a recovery. It is a redistribution of opportunity.
Structural, not cyclical
This is not a cyclical slowdown. It is a structural divide. The labor market is being carved up with precision:
- Women, and especially Black women, are being cut out.
- Men’s gains are being supercharged.
This divide threatens the very foundation of America’s economic stability. An economy cannot remain resilient while sidelining its most educated women and breadwinner mothers. It cannot sustain Medicare and Social Security if over one million women are missing from the workforce. It cannot grow while concentrating Black women in the lowest-paid jobs and locking them out of higher-wage industries.
What must be done
The numbers point to urgent, actionable solutions. Enforce pay and opportunity equity. Rebuild inclusive pipelines into higher-wage sectors like technology, finance, and government. Require the Federal Reserve to account for labor force exits, not just topline unemployment, in its models. And design stimulus not as across-the-board tax cuts but as targeted investment to keep women—and especially Black women—working.
The Exit Economy is here. If policymakers ignore it, Black women will continue to pay the highest price. But the cost won’t stop there. It will ricochet across households, communities, and the national balance sheet—eroding the very prosperity America claims to protect.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
