Federal data show the labor force of Black women shrank by about 109,000 last month, a shift that can pull the unemployment rate down on its own.
By EEW Magazine Online Editors
Federal data show an estimated 72,000 fewer Black women were employed in October than in September, even as their unemployment rate fell.
Darnese Foster had sent out more than 100 job applications by the time a reporter told her story this fall. The 47-year-old single mother of two lost her post as a grant management specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services in February 2025, during mass cuts to the federal workforce. Her unemployment benefits ended after six months.
She has since braided hair, taken consulting work on political campaigns and relied on her mother and her 23-year-old daughter to help with bills. "I thought I would have a job a year later," she told MindSite News reporter Lottie L. Joiner in a report published in October.
The October jobs report, released Nov. 6 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, put the unemployment rate for Black women 20 and older at 6.5%, down from 6.8% in September. The same federal table shows an estimated 72,000 fewer of them employed and about 109,000 fewer in the labor force, the count of people who are working or actively looking for work.
The two figures are linked by how unemployment is measured. Only people who are working or actively looking are counted in the labor force, so a woman who stops searching is no longer counted as unemployed. When the labor force shrinks, the rate can fall even as fewer people hold jobs. The report does not say why fewer Black women were counted last month, and monthly survey estimates can fluctuate.
The stakes reach past the women themselves. Sixty-nine percent of Black mothers are key, sole, primary or co-breadwinners in their households, compared with 40% of white mothers, according to a May report from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
On its face, the report read as good news. Employers added 165,000 jobs, and the national unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%. Unemployment among Black workers overall fell to 6.6% from 7.0%.
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building in Washington, photographed Aug. 4, 2025. The department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released the October jobs report on Nov. 6. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
The payroll total comes from a survey of employers. The figures by race and sex come from a separate survey of households, so the two do not always move together.
In the household survey, the number of Black workers with jobs fell by 56,000, and men and women moved in opposite directions. Employment among Black men 20 and older rose by 129,000, and their unemployment rate dropped to 5.3% from 6.0%.
Among Black women, employment fell and participation slid to 61.3% from 61.9%. Their unemployment rate stayed close to double the 3.6% rate for adult women overall.
Cantrell Dumas, a senior researcher at the Joint Center, cautioned against celebrating. He told the New York Amsterdam News the report was "more smoke and mirrors than anything else."
Government jobs are part of the longer story. Black women make up about 6% of the U.S. labor force and 12% of the federal workforce, according to gender economist Katica Roy. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that federal employment among Black women fell by about 95,000 between 2024 and 2025.
The same analysis, drawn from survey data, found that college graduates and public-sector workers absorbed the largest employment losses among Black women last year. It covers 2025 and does not account for October's decline.
Daniella Zessoules, an analyst at Dēmos, noted in a Nov. 6 post that Black women gained about 222,000 jobs in education and health services in 2025. Losses in government and several private industries outweighed those gains, leaving a net decline of about 79,000 jobs, according to Economic Policy Institute estimates.
Zessoules put the October unemployment rate for white women at 3.1%, less than half the rate for Black women. A monthly jobs total, she argued, says little about where openings are or who has a fair chance at them.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to release November's numbers on Dec. 4.
The toll goes beyond income. The MindSite News series that featured Foster, produced with Capital B, The 19th and The Nation, documented depression and anxiety among Black women more than a year after the layoffs.
At the time of that report, Foster was still searching for full-time work.
