300,000+ Black Women Are Out of Work. Now What?

They won’t say it out loud, but they’ve been laying us off for months.

Behind the headlines about “strong job growth,” the truth is staggering: nearly 300,000 Black women left the workforce in just a few months in 2025. But why? It’s not that we lack talent. In fact, we are overqualified in many cases.

Cutbacks in education, healthcare, and diversity, equity, and inclusion were loudly rolled back. Then contracts dried up, and doors once cracked open were suddenly slammed shut. The sectors where we showed up strong, you know the ones we held down during the pandemic, turned into revolving doors. And we weren’t the ones allowed back in.

Let’s name it for what it is. Erasure. 

So what happens next? 

We innovate and rebuild.

There’s been an undeniable shift happening. Black women are walking away from broken systems and creating our own. Business registrations are up. Nonprofits are being launched from living rooms. Consultancies are forming at kitchen tables because Black women possess a knowledge base that regardless of whether anyone wants to admit it or not, is valuable and insightful. Even people who wouldn’t have called themselves “entrepreneurs” a year ago are now leading projects, forming collectives, and flipping side hustles into full-time work out of necessity.

The amount of courage taken to depend on ourselves to provide can be overwhelming. Take it from me. At the time of this publication, it has been slightly over a year since I was effectively pushed out of my job of 10 years because I no longer fit the mold. I was looking for upward mobility in an organization that held no space for growth and I? drew too much attention trying to create a new position. I broke the cardinal rule of not flying under the radar. I became, in my employer's eyes, too big, too loud, and too disruptive which are the adjectives that systems love to assign Black women. But I am happy to say that I am finding my footing as an independent data scientist. I get to brand myself as a civic systems architect and I have the freedom to develop my career as I see fit, minus the constant stress of having to figure it all out.

But let’s not romanticize the hustle. It’s not easy out here. Not one bit. 

We’re bootstrapping with personal savings that were already thin. We’re being denied credit, offered scraps of funding, or told our ideas are too ambitious, while others get multi-year contracts to replicate what we’ve already been doing in our communities.

It’s wild how they’ll fund research on our problems before they fund us directly to solve them.

Ahhh, but we move on. The story is that we’re building what we were never meant to inherit. Businesses. Institutions. Ecosystems.

We’re finding each other. Forming coalitions. Supporting Black-led organizations  with actual infrastructure.  We’re hiring our friends, because let’s face it, it is a normal practice in all sectors. Contracting our brilliant cousins. Making sure the next girl doesn’t have to learn everything the hard way.

If you’re one of the 300,000, or just someone who feels the shift, here’s the truth: You’re being redirected. And that thing you’ve been thinking about starting? It’s time. Not in five years. Now. My grandmother used to say “You are not a tree! Move.” I took that to mean so many things, but today I’m thinking it means that it is easier to pivot if you are already in motion.  You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to move. The system isn’t designed for us. But that will not stop us from designing new systems. Onward.