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The Numbers Don't Lie: What's Really Happening to Black Women in the Workforce
- Latrice Torres
- Jul 22
- 10 min read
By Latrice Torres, SPHR, SHRM-SCP | Founder & CEO, LeaderKeys™ Consulting
Let me start with the headline nobody wants to say: the labor market improved in 2026, and Black women still lost ground.
If you've followed my work — the TEDx talk, the book chapter in Triumph in the Trenches, Vol. 3, or a career strategy session with me — you know I don't do vague empowerment language. I do numbers, patterns, and truth.
So let's look at what actually happened to Black women in the workforce through the first half of 2026, what happened inside my own practice, and what I'm doing about it — because all three of those stories rhyme in a way that should make every HR leader, ERG, and Black professional pay attention.
The Numbers: A Historic Drop, Dressed Up as Progress
Black women started 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5.4%. By the end of the year, it had climbed to 7.3% — a level comparable to what white women experienced during the worst months of the Great Recession. By the first quarter of 2026, Black unemployment overall sat at 7.6%, 1.2 percentage points higher than at the start of the current administration.
Here's the part that has been reiterated over and over again: more than 350,000 Black women were pushed out of the U.S. labor market in 2025 alone.
Now, that recovery you may have heard about? Read it carefully.
Between March and July of 2026, Black women's unemployment rate fell from 7.07% to 5.73%. On paper, that looks like good news, but it isn't — not automatically.
Unemployment only counts people who are still actively looking for work. When people give up the search, they disappear from the rate entirely. The number can go down while fewer people are actually working. For Black women specifically, that's a very real possibility sitting underneath a headline that looks promising.
This is why I don't teach my clients to trust the headline. I teach them to read the data underneath it — because that's exactly what's happening to their careers.
Who got hit hardest, and why:
College-educated Black women bore the brunt. Their labor force participation dropped 2.3 percentage points in 2025 — the steepest decline of any group of women. Nearly half of Black workers with a bachelor's degree or higher work in sectors touched by federal layoffs, and the federal workforce alone shed 277,000 jobs in 2025.
Healthcare exposure. One in five Black women works in healthcare. Medicaid cuts are projected to eliminate roughly 300,000 jobs in that sector by 2034.
The DEI unwind. HR practitioners are reporting employers actively reclassifying or eliminating DEI-titled roles out of fear of penalty — leaving professionals with 15-20 years of specialized expertise applying into a market where the job title they built a career on no longer exists. And as a note of observation, these are very often professionals aligned to roles in human resources, presenting a very interesting dilemma for organizations.
Black women have long been described by economists as the "canary in the economic coal mine" — the group whose labor market shifts first and hardest when conditions tighten. In 2025 and into 2026, that pattern held, ferociously.
The Promotion Gap Nobody's Naming Correctly
Even for the Black women who kept their jobs, advancement told its own story.
The 2025 Women in the Workplace report (LeanIn.Org and McKinsey — the largest study of its kind) found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 93 women are promoted. For the first time in the study's 11-year history, a real ambition gap showed up: 80% of women want the next-level promotion, compared to 86% of men.
Here's the finding that matters most, and the one most coverage buries: that ambition gap disappears completely when women get the same level of manager and senior sponsorship that men get. This was never about women wanting it less. It was about who gets tapped on the shoulder and who doesn't. Only 31% of entry-level women have a workplace sponsor, compared to 45% of men. And when researchers looked specifically at advancing women of color, only 46% of employers said it was part of their diversity commitment at all.
Black women, specifically, still hold just 7% of C-suite roles — a four-point gain since 2017. Modest movement, dressed up as progress, while white women's numbers moved faster and more visibly.
This is not a confidence problem. This is not a "lean in harder" problem. This is a sponsorship and systems problem, and it's the exact reason career ownership has to be a strategy, not a hope.
The Burnout Tax
Roughly 40% of Black women leaders report feeling burned out, compared to about 28% of white women — driven by workplace bias, sustained performance pressure, and the quiet expectation to do it all, prove it twice, and never show the cost. Nationally, women who experience burnout report dramatically lower job satisfaction (80% vs. 96% for their non-burned-out peers) and are far more likely to delay PTO, delay asking for a raise, and work longer hours out of fear of losing the job they already have.
Excellence has never been the problem. Positioning, and the systems around that positioning, is.
Where Did They Go? The Entrepreneurship Question
If Black women are leaving the labor force at this scale, a fair question follows: are they leaving to build something of their own instead? The data says — partly, and not in the clean way a headline would like.
Black women are, without question, the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. Black women-owned businesses grew 13% between 2024 and 2025, compared to 4.4% growth for women-owned businesses overall. On average, 260 Black women start a new business every day. A Wells Fargo-backed analysis puts the current Black women-owned business economy at roughly $390 billion.
The connection to the labor market isn't speculation — it's being said directly by the people tracking it. Tosh Ernest, who formally led the Business Growth & Entrepreneurship for Advancing Black Pathways at JPMorgan Chase, put it plainly: high rates of Black female entrepreneurship "may also reflect lack of opportunity in the traditional workforce — many start businesses to survive rather than pursuing market opportunities."
But here's where the theory needs a caveat, not a headline: this is not a clean 1:1 story of "laid off, therefore founder." Two things complicate it.
First, this is a long-running trend, not a 2025 reaction. Black women-owned businesses grew 50% between 2014 and 2019 — already the highest growth rate of any female demographic, years before the current downturn. What we're likely seeing in 2025-2026 is an existing wave accelerating under new pressure, not a new phenomenon appearing from nowhere.
Second, most of this entrepreneurship isn't replacing a corporate salary. More than 60% of Black women entrepreneurs spend fewer than 40 hours a week on their business, which suggests a side hustle or bridge income running alongside other obligations — not necessarily a full exit from the job search. And the businesses that do get built often don't scale: Black women-owned employer firms average just $650,000 in revenue, the lowest of any group tracked, and only about 3% survive past the five-year maturity mark. The barriers are the same ones that show up everywhere else in this post — unequal access to capital, thinner professional networks, and industry concentration in lower-margin sectors.
The honest answer to the theory: entrepreneurship is very likely absorbing some of the women missing from the "actively looking" count — especially the ones who've calculated, correctly, that the traditional system isn't going to sponsor them back in. But it is not primarily explaining where the labor force went. It's a parallel survival strategy sitting alongside the labor force exit, not a replacement for it — and it comes with its own well-documented headwinds that make it a harder landing than the growth numbers suggest on their own.
What I Saw Inside My Own Practice
I didn't pivot LeaderKeys to serve Black women because it sounded good in a mission statement. I pivoted because my own client data told me exactly what the macro data above confirms — and then it told me something even harder to sit with.
In 2024, I had a record year: 52 career coaching clients. The breakdown:
38 Black women
6 Black men
2 white men
2 white women
2 South Asian men
1 South Asian woman
1 East Asian woman
My client base was diverse. But 73% of the people who walked through my door — before I ever made it official — were Black women. That wasn't a marketing strategy. That was demand telling me who needed this work most. I call this like-experienced: the clients who came to me already understood, in their bodies, what I was building a framework to name.
Of those 52 clients, 85% landed a new role within one to three months of working together. That's a strong outcome by any industry standard, and it's proof that the coaching works — that clarity, positioning by defining their voice, and career strategy creates movement for people.
But here's the number that stopped me, the one that made this pivot non-negotiable: of that successful 85%, only 42% still hold that role or were promoted into a higher one as of this writing. And of that 42% — the group that didn't just get hired, but stayed and advanced — only three were Black women.
Read that again. Black women were 73% of my clients. They landed roles at a strong rate. And they are a small fraction of the group who kept those roles or moved up in them.
I want to be careful here, because this is practice-level data, not a national study — the sample is one coach's book of business, not a controlled research design. But it is not an outlier. It is a smaller, closer mirror of everything the national numbers above are showing: Black women get in; however, the system does not consistently let them stay or rise. Hiring was never the whole problem. Retention, sponsorship, and advancement inside the building is where the real leak is happening and it's happening to the group working the hardest to prove they belong there in the first place.
This is why I don't build offers around "getting the job." Getting the job was already the easy part for most of my clients. The work that actually protects a career — the strategic relationships, the visibility, the manager conversations, the read of the room before the layoff list gets built — is what has to be taught, practiced, and owned. Not performed. Owned.
Career Ownership Is Not a Luxury Right Now. It's the Strategy.
You are not behind. You are under-positioned — and in this market, under-positioned is dangerous in a way it wasn't five years ago.
Career ownership means you stop outsourcing your advancement to a manager's memory, an org chart, or a DEI commitment that can be quietly reclassified out of existence. It means understanding what HR actually sees when decisions get made about who stays, who gets promoted, and who gets cut. Because that knowledge was never distributed equally, and right now the gap it leaves is costing people their careers.
Entrepreneurship is real, and for some, it's the right move. But it's not a rescue plan, and the data above shows exactly why: capital gaps, network gaps, and scaling gaps follow Black women out of the corporate system just as surely as they operated inside it. The answer isn't "leave and figure it out alone." The answer is knowing how to move, whether you're staying, climbing, or building, with strategy instead of survival instinct.
That's the work I do. Not resume formatting. Not generic interview tips. The strategic layer underneath all of it. The layer that determines whether you land the role and whether you're still standing in it, or above it, eighteen months from now.
This Is Exactly Why the Career Accelerator Exists
I built the LeaderKeys Career Accelerator for Black Professionals for the person reading this post and recognizing themselves in it — the one who is excellent, exhausted, and done waiting to be chosen.
This is not a resume workshop. It's a strategic leadership and career ownership experience built around the same framework behind everything in this post: Clarity. Voice. Movement.
Clarity: Naming and releasing the over-explaining, over-proving, and self-editing that keeps excellent professionals playing small — the same pattern at the center of my TEDx talk.
Voice: Building the manager conversations, visibility strategy, and executive presence that the data above shows Black women are consistently denied access to through informal sponsorship.
Movement: Walking out with a strategic advancement plan, a stronger career narrative, and the practical language to navigate promotion, transition, or reinvention on your terms — not the system's.
Four weeks. A small, live cohort of 6-10 people who understand exactly what you're carrying into the room. Not a course you consume alone at midnight — a room built for people who are ready to stop shrinking and start moving.
Upcoming Cohorts
Cohort 6 | August 3–28, 2026
Early Bird: June 8–July 3, 2026
Enrollment Deadline: July 24, 2026
Cohort 7 | October 5–30, 2026
Early Bird: August 10–September 4, 2026
Enrollment Deadline: September 25, 2026
Cohort 8 | February 1–26, 2027
Early Bird: December 7, 2026–January 8, 2027
Enrollment Deadline: January 22, 2027
Cohort 9 | April 5–30, 2027
Early Bird: February 8–March 5, 2027
Enrollment Deadline: March 26, 2027
Pricing
Early Bird: $1,497
Standard: $1,997
VIP: $2,497
Not Ready for the Cohort? Start With Career Clarity
If you're not ready for a full cohort experience, or you need something more tailored to exactly where you are right now, that's what one-on-one career coaching is for — the same coaching behind the client outcomes in this post.
Take the Career Perception Snapshot Assessment—a free assessment of where you are in your career now and includes feedback on how you may be perceived in the market, then, provides an action plan that recommends the right coaching service for you.
Explore 1:1 Coaching Options—you're ready for movement, select the plan that is right for you.
If the data in this post named something you've been feeling but couldn't quite prove with numbers, that's not a coincidence. That's the market. The question now isn't whether the system is going to change fast enough to protect you. It's whether you're going to keep waiting for it to — or start moving with a strategy that doesn't depend on it.
Enjoyed this blog? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Send direct messages to Hello@LeaderKeysUnlocked.com.
Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Economic Policy Institute (EPI); Marketplace; The 19th; Fortune; National Partnership for Women & Families; LeanIn.Org & McKinsey, "Women in the Workplace 2025"; Black Enterprise; JPMorgan Chase, Advancing Black Pathways; Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report; Essence. Client outcome data reflects LeaderKeys Consulting's internal 2024 practice records.
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