You must have seen these headlines in the past 24 hours talking about how all of the 140,000 jobs lost in the United States last month belonged to women. “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December,” said CNN. “They were all owned by women.” Fortune he framed the news in a similar way: “Women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs lost to the US economy in December.”
While this is certainly true, framing these losses as losses for “women” as a whole does not tell the whole story. When more divided by race and ethnicity, National Women’s Law Center data behind the news cycle reveals that white women, like men, actually has won jobs in December, which means that all of the tens of thousands of jobs lost last month were occupied by black women.
As reported by CNN, black and Latino women lost their jobs in December, while white women made “significant gains” in the labor market. This does not mean that no white woman has lost her job in the past month, just as it does not mean that no man has lost his job in the past few weeks. What that means is that white women as a whole won more jobs than they lost in December, while black and Latino women lost more than they won.
This disparity in job losses reflects broader trends in employment for American women, adds CNN. Black and Latino women are disproportionately employee in industries that have been most difficult by the economic crisis of the pandemic, those tend to lack things like remote work policies and paid sick leave. Latinas and black women too have the highest unemployment rates among all women in the country (9.1% and 8.4%, respectively), while white women have the lowest (5.7%).