College-Educated Black Women Appear “Well-Positioned” for Labor Market Success, but Still Have Limited Opportunities for Leadership

Black women have a long history of working in the labor market. Throughout most of the last 50 years, labor force participation rates among Black women have been higher than those of women from other racial and ethnic groups. This is especially true for college-educated Black women, for whom the pursuit of higher education has been the clearest path to upward career mobility and greater economic security. Between 1979 and 2007, Black women with bachelor’s degrees were the only group of women to maintain labor force participation rates above 80 percent. But despite their high labor force participation, highly educated Black women have been—and continue to be—systematically held back from upward mobility.

In the last two years, a combination of chaotic economic policy choices and deliberate anti-equity actions by the Trump administration has resulted in a much softer labor market and threatened to derail decades of equal employment policy and practices that have contributed to improved outcomes for all women, including expanded access to professional leadership positions. And preexisting trends show that college degrees don’t close the divide in Black women’s pay or the types of employment available.

Overall, the US labor force participation rate is lower now than at its peak in 2000, but the direction of that trend has not been consistent over time or across all demographic groups. In a 2025 report on US labor force participation rates over the last five decades, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) details separate trends for women and men ages 25 to 54, a group commonly referred to as “prime age.” By focusing on the prime age population, this analysis removes many of the effects of concurrent demographic changes—like rising educational attainment and population aging—that can pull down average rates for the entire working age population (16–64).¹

The report finds that after softening from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, prime age labor force participation rates have generally been on the rise for the last 10 years. The one obvious exception is the temporary drop in labor force participation during the 2020 pandemic recession. But in the wake of the strong economic recovery that followed, the labor force participation rate for prime age women with a college degree reached an all-time high of 85.9 percent in 2024.

Among prime age college-educated women, Black women’s labor force participation rates peaked in 2024, reaching nearly 90 percent, compared to the second-highest rate of 87 percent for White women (Figure 1). While the labor force participation rate of prime age college-educated Black women fell to 88.3 percent in 2025, it remained higher than that of their counterparts from other racial and ethnic groups.

Over the last decade, tighter labor markets have also resulted in significant labor market gains for Black workers. On either side of the pandemic, Black unemployment rates were at record lows—6.1 percent in 2019 and 5.7 percent in 2023. And in 2024, the employment rate (employment-population ratio, or EPOP) for the prime age Black population was 77.6 percent, just 0.1 percentage points below the all-time high of 77.7 percent in 2023.

In 2024, the employment rate for prime age Black women with a college degree rose to 86.9 percent. This, too, was a higher employment rate than for any other group of women (Figure 2). While Black women’s employment notably declined by 2 percentage points in 2025, they—along with White women—continued to have the highest employment rate (84.8 percent) among similarly educated prime age women. In another blog post this year, I showed that employment rates among college-educated Black women in the first quarter of 2026 were still slightly lower than they were in the first quarter of 2025.² Applying similar methods to prime age college-educated Black women, I estimate that their employment rate in the first half of 2026 (85.0 percent) was also lower than in the same period a year earlier (86.6 percent).

While college-educated Black women were well-positioned to benefit from the tight labor market in 2024, employment rates alone fail to capture the kinds of jobs these women held. Public sector employment has often been credited with offering women and Black workers more opportunities for leadership and career advancement than the private sector. However, public sector jobs are just a small fraction of total employment in the US. In fact, in 2024, fewer than one-third of Black women with a college degree were employed in the public sector (including federal, state, and local government).

Still, data show that college-educated women represent a much larger share of managers employed in the public sector (41.3 percent) than in the private sector (24.3 percent; see Figure 3). In the public sector, nearly one-fifth of those women are Black compared to less than 10 percent in the private sector. As a share of all managers, college-educated Black women represent 8.2 percent of managers employed in the public sector, and just 2.2 percent of private sector managers.

The Trump administration’s massive cuts to the federal workforce, elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) departments within federal agencies, and what many see as deliberate efforts to push Black women out of high-ranking positions in the federal government stand in sharp contrast to the higher (though still imperfect) standards for equity and nondiscrimination established by federal legislation and executive actions six decades ago.

While the number of workers directly affected by federal workforce decisions may be small relative to the entire US labor force, the administration’s unjustified focus on rooting out so-called DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination among private employers stands to affect many more people, given the increasing diversity of the working age population. As the data above show, these unwarranted changes come at a time when, after several years of strong labor market conditions and a brief period of increased attention on equity, there was still more room for improvement.

Valerie Wilson is the director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity & the Economy (PREE) at the Economic Policy Institute.