You may have seen these headlines in the last 24 hours talking about how all 140,000 jobs lost in the United States last month belonged to women. “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December,” it read CNN. “They were all held by women.” wealth similarly framed the news: “Women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs dropped by the US economy in December.”
While this is indeed true, framing these losses as losses for “women” as a whole does not tell the full story. When further broken down by race and ethnicity, Data from the National Center for Women’s Law Behind the news cycle reveals that white women, like men, actually won jobs in December, which means that all those tens of thousands of jobs lost last month were held by women of color.
According to CNN, black and Latino women lost their jobs in December, while white women made “significant gains” in the labor market. That doesn’t mean no white woman lost a job last month, just as it doesn’t mean no men have lost their jobs in recent weeks. What this means is that white women as a whole gained more jobs than they lost in December, while black and Latino women lost more than they gained.
This disparity in job losses reflects broader trends in American women’s employment, CNN adds. Black women and Latinas are disproportionate employee in the industries that were the most difficult of the economic recession of the pandemic, those who things like that tend to be missing remote work policies and paid sick leave. Latin and black women as well 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%).