Joblessness among Black women increased to 5.5% last month, a jump of 0.3 percentage points from 5.2% in November according to the Labor Department.
According to a report by CNBC, the U.S. unemployment rate declined overall in December, but rose for Black women and Hispanic men.
Additionally, Black employment as a whole held steady at 5.7%, while the unemployment rate for Black men actually declined to 5.1% from 5.4% last month.
“What we’ve really seen over the course of the last nearly three years since the pandemic hit, is that we’ve regained, in terms of aggregate numbers, all of the jobs lost,” said Michelle Holder, told CNBC, who is a distinguished senior fellow at Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “But the sort of industrial mix has changed, and has kind of impacted what we’re seeing with regard to the distribution of joblessness, by gender, race and ethnicity. And it’s really disaffecting Black women and Latinx men,” Holder continued.
Although the slight dip in employment for Black women is notable, experts are saying there are clearer horizons ahead.
“The labor market clearly remains strong,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in an interview with CNBC. “We are now seeing that the household survey and the payroll survey are showing similar signs of strength, and wage growth is looks to be coming down.”
“Those are two industries that have not recovered well during the pandemic,” Holder told CNBC. “This is what is constraining Black women’s ability to get back to the state that they were with regard to the American workforce before the pandemic.”
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