You may have seen the headlines in the past 24 hours about how all of the 140,000 jobs lost in the United States last month belonged to women. “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December,” it said CNN. “They were all held by women.” Fortune similarly framed the news: “Women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs the US economy lost in December.”
While that is certainly true, it is not the whole story to think of those losses as losses to “women” as a whole. When broken down further by race and ethnicity, the Data from the National Women’s Law Center behind the news cycle, it turns out that white women just like men, really won jobs in December, meaning all those tens of thousands of jobs lost last month were filled by women of color.
As reported by CNN, black women and Latinas lost jobs in December, while white women made “significant gains” in the labor market. That doesn’t mean that white women didn’t lose their jobs last month, just as it doesn’t mean that not a single man has lost their jobs in recent weeks. What it means is that white women as a whole got more jobs than they lost in December, while black women and Latinas lost more than they earned.
This inequality in job losses reflects broader employment trends for American women, CNN adds. Black women and Latinas are disproportionate employed in industries that have been most difficult by the economic downturn of the pandemic, those who tend to miss things like remote working and paid sick leave policy. Latinas and black women too 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%).