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Live · The Lost Ones Project
The state of
Black women in
the economy
Tracking the displacement, recovery, and economic future of Black women in the American workforce. A corporate accountability and workforce recovery initiative — powered by live federal data, updated monthly.
Now tracking
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Lost Ones
Black women currently unemployed and looking for work — based on Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly data.
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Currently employed
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Median annual earnings, Black women
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Annual economic demand at risk
The displacement of Black women from the American workforce is not a single number.
In January 2025, 599,000 Black women were unemployed and looking for work. Since then, workforce displacement — layoffs, eliminations, forced resignations, and contract terminations across federal, public, and private sectors — has pushed that number to 691,000, representing $34.4 billion in annual economic demand at risk. The Lost Ones Project is the first infrastructure connecting live federal labor data, corporate disclosures, and the lived experiences of displaced workers into a single accountability system. It draws from over 72,000 federally mandated workforce filings across 28,000+ employer records — and when the Lost Ones Ledger launches, directly from the women the data represents. Updated continuously, disaggregated by race and gender, and built to answer three questions the market has never had to face at the same time: who is responsible, what does it cost, and how do we fix it?
Learn more about our methodology
This dashboard aggregates and disaggregates federal employment data by race and gender in one place for the first time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks how many Black women are employed, how many are actively searching for work, and what they earn. These numbers update monthly through the Current Population Survey.
Federal data has a structural blind spot. When a Black woman stops looking for work — because she’s discouraged, because she’s caregiving, because the market told her she wasn’t welcome — she exits the unemployment count entirely. She isn’t employed. She isn’t unemployed. She’s uncounted. These are The Lost Ones.
The numbers below are the floor of the crisis, not the ceiling. They represent what can be measured through public federal data — employment levels, unemployment rates, earnings, labor force participation, and consumer expenditure — disaggregated by race and gender.
The Lost Ones Ledger — launching later this year — will capture what no government dataset can: lived experiences, exit patterns, and corporate accountability signals that connect individual displacement to systemic outcomes.
Timeline
How we got here
In January 2025, Black women’s unemployment was 5.4% — elevated, but stable. Over the next twelve months, a combination of federal workforce reductions, DEI rollbacks, and private-sector restructuring triggered the sharpest rise in Black women’s unemployment in years.
Jan 2025
5.4%
Unemployment rate for Black women 20+. Federal hiring freeze announced. Deferred resignation offers sent to federal employees.
Apr 2025
6.1%
DOGE-driven workforce reductions accelerate. “Liberation Day” tariffs hit manufacturing — 70,000 jobs lost by year end. Federal employment for Black women begins steep decline.
Aug 2025
7.1%
Federal agency cuts surface in the data. DEI rollbacks spread to private sector. Black women’s federal employment down 30% vs. 11.6% for all women. Alarms sounded.
Nov 2025
8.0%
Peak unemployment. Highest rate for Black women in four years. IWPR reports 113,000 fewer jobs since January. Average job search duration: 29.7 weeks — more than seven months.
Dec 2025
7.3%
Rate eases slightly but remains nearly double white women’s rate (3.8%). EPI confirms losses driven entirely by public sector. College-educated Black women hit hardest.
Now
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-- Black women currently unemployed and looking for work. The crisis has not ended — it has become the new baseline.