Barriers, Not Bootstraps: Job Prospects Are Uneven for Young Black Women

Key Findings

• Alongside disproportionate job losses in 2025, Black women also unequally bore the brunt of a lethargic job market, spending twice as long to find a job as White¹ women in the second half of 2025.
• Even though all young workers (aged 16-24) are finding it harder to get jobs in a “low-hire” economy, young Black workers were twice as likely to be unemployed in 2025, with nearly 1 in 5 young Black women unemployed in August of that year.
• The sharp increase in young Black women’s unemployment in 2025 was not explained by a rise in the share of young workers in the labor market, a decrease in Black women’s educational attainment, or a lack of job opportunities in sectors where Black women predominantly work, such as health care and professional jobs.
• Regardless of their level of education, Black women see lower returns on their investment when it comes to employment or earnings compared to their White coworkers. At the same time, Black women also shoulder the highest student debt burdens—particularly in high-cost, high-demand fields like health care—where even the cost of a professional diploma can approach 20 percent of their full-time year-round median income.
• Increasing unemployment among young Black women, despite their strong educational attainment and job prospects, points to systemic and discriminatory barriers limiting their potential.
• Policymakers should remove graduate student loan limits and cancel student loan debt, reinforce civil rights protections in the workplace, and advance laws to help ensure equitable pay and workforce participation such as salary transparency, the rights of workers to unionize and to collectively bargain, guaranteed paid leave, and investments in child care access and workforce training programs to counter the historical sexist and racist hurdles Black women must overcome to succeed in the labor market.

Introduction

Over the past year, numerous news reports have documented the monumental scale of jobs lost by Black women in 2025 due to a combination of targeted attacks on federal government workers, the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and a worsening economy.² In February 2026, IWPR reported that between January and August 2025, Black women lost over 251,000 jobs.³ Our research found that not only were Black women overrepresented in sectors that were abruptly cut by the Trump administration in the last year, such as the federal government (which lost more than 30 percent of its workforce between February and December 2025), they also lost jobs at disproportionately higher rates than other workers across occupations. Even excluding job losses in federal, state, or local government, Black women lost jobs at three times the rate of all women in professional and service occupations in 2025. Despite significant job losses, Black women have been navigating these tenuous economic times in creative ways, including pivoting to different careers, starting businesses, and most importantly, lifting each other up in community.⁴

Compounding the problem of unequal job losses was a labor market that stagnated in a “low-hire, low-fire” state, where workers found it harder than ever to find new jobs. In March 2026, the labor market recorded 6.9 million job openings—the fewest since December 2020 (apart from November to December 2025), when the economy was still in the sluggish recovery of the immediate post-pandemic market.⁵ The number of hires in April 2026 was the lowest in six years, with February 2026 and November 2025 numbers nearly as bad; the previous lowest point was in April 2020, during the worst of the COVID-19 layoffs and hiring freezes. These numbers highlight the dwindling opportunities available for job seekers in the current economy, especially for those newly entering the labor market.

The intersecting inequities of gender and race in the labor market mean Black women are one of the most disadvantaged groups of workers, even in a thriving economy.⁶ When the labor market is bad, it is worse first for Black women, who are often labeled “the canary in the coal mine,” because their employment numbers often indicate the start of a trend for the broader workforce.⁷

Despite job losses tapering off after August 2025, the unemployment rate for Black women rose steadily in the latter half of the year, largely propelled by new entrants to the labor market having trouble finding jobs. This fact sheet examines the evidence and potential factors behind the rising unemployment rate among young Black women, as well as key steps that employers and policymakers can take to help them find and maintain employment.

Our analysis considers three possible explanations for young Black women’s worse prospects in the current economy:

• An increasing share of young Black women in the labor market.
• Racial and gender gaps in educational attainment in recent years.
• A lack of job opportunities in the occupations in which young Black women tend to work.

Young Black Workers Face a Difficult Labor Market

Black women, who are often the first fired/last hired due to historical and structural barriers to employment, took the longest to find a job in the slowing job market of 2025 (Figure 1).⁸ Although Black workers took longer than White workers to find employment in 2024 as well, the difference in the median unemployment duration between Black and White workers of the same gender was far shorter (2–4 weeks). In 2025, the time it took unemployed workers to find a new job rose steeply for Black workers, and especially for Black women: In December 2025, Black women spent a median of 19 weeks unemployed before finding a job, compared to 9 weeks for White women. Longer unemployment durations can compel workers to accept less-than-ideal jobs and wages, negatively impacting their future career growth, especially for women and Black workers.⁹

New entrants are finding it harder than ever to find employment in the current economy, and there is much speculation about the underlying reasons, including the proliferation of AI making it harder to qualify for and work in rapidly changing and decreasing starter jobs, companies requiring extensive experience for entry-level roles, and increasing competition for entry-level jobs due to rising unemployment among young workers.¹⁰ Recent graduates are already at a significant disadvantage by entering the job market during a bad economy, often having to take the first available job, even when it’s not in their field of interest or pays lower wages.¹¹ When the labor market weakens, marginalized workers are often the first to bear the brunt and take the longest to recover, with wealth disparities often deepening during a bad economy.¹² Algorithmic AI-screening tools are also reinforcing racial bias in hiring, making it harder for young workers of color to break into an already tough labor market.¹³

These impacts are felt unevenly: For young Black workers in particular, this labor market looks especially bleak.

Even though the overall unemployment rate for young workers rose in the past year, young Black women’s unemployment surged much faster than young White women’s (Figure 2). The unemployment rate for young Black women (without adjusting for seasonal fluctuations that occur throughout the year) reached a peak of 19 percent in August 2025, meaning nearly 1 in 5 young Black women in the labor force at the time was unemployed. This was more than twice as high as the youth unemployment rate for White women and nearly a staggering five times higher than the unemployment rate for all women in August 2025, which was the highest it had been since December 2021.

There Aren’t More Young Black Workers Entering the Labor Market Than Before

Over the past decade, the share of the labor force aged 62 or older has increased across nearly all races/ethnicities and genders.¹⁴ Current economic conditions also mean that older workers are staying in jobs longer or even coming out of retirement to meet the high cost of living, which may be creating a potential displacement effect for younger workers.¹⁵

If a larger proportion of younger workers were also entering the labor force in recent years, it could mean that the high unemployment we see is a crowding-out effect from not having enough new jobs for the increased pool of job seekers. If more young Black workers have entered the labor force than White workers, the worse labor market outcomes young Black workers are experiencing now may simply be because more young workers are competing for the same declining set of jobs.

However, the share of young Black women (16–24) in the labor force did not change drastically in 2025 and has overall been decreasing over the past 10 years, from 15.2 percent in 2016 to 13.4 percent in 2026 (Figure 3). In comparison, the share of young White women in the labor force has stayed consistent in the past decade. Thus, the current increases in the relative number and rate of unemployed young Black workers (compared to White workers) are not due to demographic shifts leading to a younger, more competitive job market for Black new entrants compared to White new entrants.

There Is No Recent Change in Young Black Women’s Qualifications

Fewer job openings mean employers can require higher education and experience for entry-level roles; in fact, in March 2026, more than 41 percent of recent college graduates were working in jobs that did not typically need a college degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.¹⁶ If the economic downturn also coincided with Black women getting fewer college degrees, we might think that young Black women are being left behind in a competitive labor market because they are underqualified.

However, in our analysis, we do not find any significant changes in educational attainment among Black women in recent years. A marginal decrease in Black women’s attainment of bachelor’s degrees in 2025 was offset by a marginal increase in attainment of master’s degrees or higher.¹⁷

Additionally, while higher education does improve the career prospects for Black women by lowering their total likelihood of unemployment and increasing their overall earnings, Black women do not experience the same returns on their educational investment compared to their White coworkers, in terms of both employment and earnings. Our analysis shows that at every education level, the unemployment rate for Black workers is higher than that for White workers, and this rate rose in 2025 (Figure 4).

The fact that Black women face a gap in both employment and earnings, even at high levels of educational attainment, sharply highlights the “double tax” of structural racism and sexism.

The compounded discrimination that Black women face in the labor market makes their career outcomes significantly worse.¹⁸

Black Women Do Not Work in Occupations That Have Fewer Opportunities in the Current Economy

Most Black women are employed in professional and service occupations (Figure 5). Professional occupations are those that often require higher levels of skill or training and are often gated by degree and certification requirements. More than half of all Black women in professional occupations work in health care, in roles such as nurses, therapists, and health technicians. Half of all Black women in service occupations work in health care support and service jobs like home health aides, nursing assistants, and other health care support jobs. Together, health care occupations accounted for nearly 1 in 5 working Black women in 2024.¹⁹

Young Black women, on the other hand, tend to work mostly in lower-paid jobs within service occupations, with 1 in 6 working in food preparation and service in 2024.²⁰ They work in these occupations at rates similar to those of other young workers, who also tend to be disproportionately employed in service and sales jobs in retail, food service, and leisure and hospitality.

Young workers often start their careers in lower-paying jobs with fewer barriers to entry, in the hopes of transitioning to better-paying jobs later in life. For the young Black women who may aspire to one day work in health care, education, and business, the availability of jobs in these fields is a critical concern.

When looking at job openings by industry, we see that despite recent slowdowns and large-scale government job losses, health care and private education still have one of the highest levels of job openings (Figure 6). The next most robust industry is professional and business services.

Even in an increasingly “low-hire, low-fire” market, the highest job openings are still in the industries in which Black women typically work, and yet Black women entering the labor market are seemingly not able to access these jobs, often even with higher education.

To make matters worse, as we saw with the recent losses in federal jobs, even a small decrease in available jobs is likely to leave Black women more vulnerable to unemployment and underemployment compared to other workers.²¹

Young Black women who are trying to transition from lower-paying service jobs to jobs in health care and education also face an additional barrier: the professional certification or higher education that many of those jobs require. The student debt from investing in additional education can further compound Black women’s earnings and wealth inequity, especially if they are unable to find employment after graduating.²²

In fact, health care fields, where many Black women tend to work, have some of the highest student debt burdens for women, especially for graduate study, compared to degrees in other professional or service occupations (Figure 7). Even a professional diploma in these fields at an undergraduate level cost nearly $10,000 in 2020, which is more than a fifth of the median annual income of Black women in the United States in 2020–2024.²³

In addition, student debt is cumulative, meaning that if a young worker chooses to first get a professional diploma, work in the field for a few years to gain experience and earnings, and return for an associate’s or bachelor’s degree, they would accumulate an additional $18,000–$20,000 in student debt on top of their initial nearly $10,000 investment, not including any accumulated interest or other student loans (Figure 7).

We conclude from our analysis that the rising unemployment rate for young Black women was not explained by any commonly cited reason. In fact, the continued lack of prospects for young Black women—even those with high educational attainment and job opportunities in their fields of interest—points to other barriers, both structural and discriminatory, that keep young Black women from secure, high-paying jobs and equitable career trajectories and highlights the urgent need for policy to correct the course.

Policy Recommendations

Systemic racism and sexism put Black women at a disadvantage when entering the workforce. Although policies have attempted to combat the historic and structural oppression that Black women face in the workplace, recent attacks on education access and rollbacks on worker protections by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the US Department of Labor continue to make Black women workers more vulnerable.²⁴ To mitigate the harms of these growing threats and address the diverse systemic factors contributing to the challenges Black women face when entering the workforce, policymakers should start by pursuing the evidence-informed policy solutions that encompass an equally diverse range of actions, including:

Policymakers should remove graduate student loan limits and cancel student loan debt.

H.R. 1, or the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” placed significant limits on educational attainment, including caps on federal student loan borrowing and restrictions on eligibility for the Pell Grant program, both of which are crucial for low-income students.²⁵

Historic disenfranchisement and racism have denied many Black families the opportunity to build generational wealth. As a result, Black women are forced to take on more student debt to cover their basic needs while going to school.²⁶ Even prior to H.R. 1, among all borrowers, Black women held the highest average student loan debt.²⁷

As high college costs force students to borrow to finance their education, capping borrowing means many of those students may no longer be able to afford to pursue higher education, deepening existing economic inequities that higher education has historically helped to ameliorate.²⁸ Higher student debt repayment burdens can silo many Black women into low-paying jobs, even after attaining higher education.²⁹ For Black women to be competitive in the job market, their educational needs must be supported. Policymakers must prioritize canceling student loans for all, reducing the cost of higher education, and lifting the limits on graduate student loans.

Congress must reinforce civil rights protections in the workplace.

The EEOC, created by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was established to enforce federal employment antidiscrimination laws in the workplace. Since the beginning of the second term of the Trump administration, however, the agency has championed the president’s attacks on DEI. Through policy rollbacks, new enforcement plans, and the dropping of demographic data reporting requirements, the current EEOC is actively undermining the very protections it is meant to enforce.³⁰

To defend Black women’s rights in the workplace, Congress must utilize all oversight authorities to ensure that agencies, including the EEOC, are upholding—not undermining—and enforcing existing worker nondiscrimination protections and statutes. Policymakers must also ensure that the agencies are fully funded to conduct related work and collect critical data, and that workers’ rights are further strengthened by closing loopholes and gaps.

Policymakers should advance laws to help ensure equitable pay and workforce participation.

Comprehensive policies are essential to support equitable pay and economic security for Black women. Policymakers should support expanding laws that would enhance accountability, increase resources for workers seeking justice, and address the unique discrimination challenges Black women face in the workforce, particularly as new entrants.

Federal and state policymakers should promote efforts to enforce salary transparency. Pay transparency is essential to dispelling confusion regarding work compensation and pay disparities and can provide workers with an important tool to ensure they’re being paid fairly and help job candidates negotiate better pay.

Policymakers should enact laws to protect and strengthen the rights of workers to unionize and to collectively bargain for better pay and working conditions. Occupational segregation, the unequal distribution of different populations across jobs or industries, is also a major contributing factor to wage disparities and job losses for Black women.³¹ This can be mitigated by increasing worker protections, including union participation, which research has shown to promote racial equity, to ensure that Black women can enter and succeed in fields that have been historically hostile.³²

In addition, policymakers should advance a national paid leave program guaranteeing a minimum of 12 weeks of paid time off, provide wage replacement for all workers, and protect workers from retaliation for taking leave. Access to such leave is critical for Black women, many of whom balance caregiving with the responsibilities of being the primary breadwinners of their families.
Finally, policymakers should increase investments to create a system where child and elder care are accessible and affordable for everyone and promote policies that support the care workforce. These policies would enable Black women to better participate in the workforce without sacrificing their caregiving responsibilities.

To learn more about IWPR’s federal policy recommendations on Equal Pay and Better Workplaces, go to iwpr.org/federalpolicyagenda/. For additional information on state policy solutions, visit statepolicyactionlab.org.

Conclusion

Our analysis shows that young Black workers, and particularly young Black women, are finding it especially difficult to find a job in today’s labor market. In this fact sheet, we explored three potential reasons as to why: (1) more young Black women are entering the labor market than previously, (2) there is a growing gap in qualifications between Black women and other workers, and (3) young Black women work in occupations where fewer opportunities exist in the current economy.

• Our findings show that even though older workers are staying in jobs longer and delaying or coming out of retirement early due to current economic conditions, there is no significant increase in the number of young Black women entering the labor force.
• Additionally, we do not find any major changes in Black women’s educational attainment in recent years; in fact—to their further detriment—Black women do not receive the same return on their educational investment as other workers in terms of employment or earnings.
• Finally, our findings show that Black women do not work in occupations where fewer opportunities exist. Instead, the sectors in which Black women tend to be employed, namely health care, private education, and professional and business services, have seen some of the most growth in the labor market recently. Yet, Black women are still struggling to find jobs in these fields, even with higher education. In our previous work, we also highlighted that even in sectors where everyone lost jobs in 2025, Black women lost disproportionately more jobs.³³

Black women incur some of the highest student debt burdens while pursuing higher education, which, when combined with a lack of job opportunities, deepens existing economic inequities and exacerbates the racial wealth gap. We recommend that policymakers prioritize codifying civil rights protections for Black women workers, cancel student loan debt and remove caps on borrowing, and bolster workplace protections and pay equity laws to ensure that Black women have equal opportunity to succeed and thrive in education and in their careers.

Stay tuned for more research on key topics affecting Black women in the workforce from IWPR’s Advancing Black Women in Leadership initiative.

This research brief was prepared by Dr. Mrinmoyee Chatterjee, Dr. Jennifer Turner, and Salma Elakbawy, with fact-checking by Comfort Sampong, Dr. Martha Susana Jaimes, and Pamela Alvarado, and feedback on previous drafts from Dr. Kate Bahn, Tonya Williams, and Jesseca Boyer. Thank you to our key funders for their generous support of IWPR’s core research and flagship products.