You may have seen the headlines over the past 24 hours talking about how all 140,000 jobs lost in the United States last month belong to women. “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December,” it said. CNN. “Everyone was detained by women.” Fortune put the news similarly: “Women made up 100% of the 140,000 jobs created by the U.S. economy in December.”
This is certainly true, but to list the losses as losses for ‘women’ as a whole does not tell the full story. When further broken down by race and ethnicity, the National data for women’s rights centers behind the news cycle it appears that white women, like men, actually acquired work in December, which means all the tens of thousands of jobs lost last month were by colored women.
As reported by CNN, black women and Latinas lost jobs in December, while white women made a significant profit in the job market. This does not mean that no white women lost their jobs last month, just as it does not mean that no men have lost their jobs in the last few weeks. What this means is that white women overall got more jobs than they lost in December, while black women and Latinas lost more than they deserved.
This difference in job losses reflects broader trends in U.S. women’s employment, CNN adds. Black women and Latinas are out of proportion employed in industries that have been most difficult due to the economic downturn of the pandemic, those that tends to things like remote work policies and paid sick leave. Latinas and black women too has the highest unemployment rates among all women in the country (9.1% and 8.4% respectively), while white women have the lowest (5.7%).