Why unemployment for Black women is rising
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The jobless rate for Black women has been creeping higher all year.
Why it matters: This could be a sign of weakness in the overall job market, economists say, though others point to the Trump administration's purge of the federal workforce and its push to eliminate DEI efforts.
By the numbers: The demographic-level data on unemployment from the Labor Department can be volatile month-to-month, so Axios looked at the three-month trailing average, based on the jobs numbers released Friday.
- By this measure, Black women's unemployment rose to 5.8% in May, up from 5.3% a year ago, surpassing the jobless rate for Black men, which declined to 5.6%.
- For white women, the jobless rate has stayed relatively flat. While it rose for white men, their unemployment rate is still below the overall number.
The intrigue: The share of Black women working in the federal government shrank nearly 33% over the past year, per data cited by Bloomberg last month.
Between the lines: Women comprise a slight minority of the federal workforce but represent the majority of employees among the agencies targeted by the White House, including USAID, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education, where Black women make up 28% of workers.
- Women also make up a greater share of probationary workers, the National Women's Law Center notes.
- Black women are overrepresented in the federal employment compared with the private sector, accounting for nearly 12% of the federal workforce in 2020, compared with about 7% in the civilian labor force, according to a federal report.
Zoom out: It's "largely an untold story," according to a ProPublica report last week on how firings have disproportionately impacted Black women. Federal contract work has also fallen, though those numbers are harder to come by.
- "The layoffs at the federal level where Black people are more represented, the impacts of the tariffs, particularly on small businesses that hire Black women, and the overall use of DEI as a slur, which may be contributing to a lack of hiring of Black women, all of these factors are probably at play," Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution told Bloomberg.
Reality check: The federal job loss doesn't fully explain the decline in overall employment for Black women.
- Federal employment has fallen by 69,000 this year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the number is expected to move higher, since those on paid leave or receiving severance are counted as employed.
- From January to March, Black women's employment fell by a whopping 306,000. It has recovered a bit since then and now is down by 233,000 for the year to date.
- "It's a really large drop and it can't just be the federal layoffs," according to Jessica Fulton, senior fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
What to watch: Black unemployment in the U.S. always trends higher than the overall number. Historically it has been double the rate of white workers, but that gap narrowed a bit in the post-pandemic job market. A higher Black unemployment rate can be an early recession warning sign, Fulton says.
- "Black unemployment rates rise more sharply and sometimes more quickly than for other workers" heading into downturns, she notes.
The bottom line: Uh oh.
