@popcornreel
most recent numbers as of last summer were 319,000, before T fired head of BLS which makes followup hard. Numbers are likely up to 400k now.
i see several calls to 'put this in perspective' so i will step in. Sociologists who specialize in social mobility are studying why this is the case and ongoing research explains why. Black women tended to be overrepresented in many government jobs vis a vis other jobs (not relative to the population) because these were seen as good jobs: they instituted merit based advancement and had protections against job discrimination, and were seen as a stepping stone to the middle class, providing stable benefits to workers with families and dual income households. There were also disproportionate cuts to agencies where more black women were employed in bureaucratic roles like information processing and front line service delivery (think like the DMV, but federal units like USPS or IRS etc). And then there is the anti-woke crowd looking at higher up and more visible staffing positions, where there have also been disproportionate changes under the accusations that any woman of color in their role must be an empty and ill qualified hire --utterly untrue, the black women I have personally witnessed at work at federal agencies if anything have to be more qualified and hard working than many of their peers and are still often subject to slights and disrespect by outsiders who seem unaware of their impeccable credentials. Many of these families are in the first or second generation of higher education and wider access to employment so they have limited wealth or reserves to fall back on compared with other demographic populations. The hit has been disproportionate, full stop. ofc a great many people across the private sector and the wide swath of the middle class have lost their jobs, so this cld easily get overlooked as a drop in the bucket -- but those who study the great gains in social mobility across demographics see this as a catastrophic moment.
some public refs:
https://msmagazine.com/2026/02/05/black-women-jobs-trump-layoffs-doge-cuts-fired/
https://www.ms.now/business-culture/300000-black-women-left-labor-force-3-months-s-not-coincidence-rcna219355
see also Katherine Newman on the benefits of tight markets for entrants.
