Trump’s anti-DEI policies are hurting college-educated Black women
Faced with a sluggish job market, American workers got a bit of good news on February 11 with the release of the latest jobs report. Employers added 130,000 jobs in January—more job growth than the economy has seen in months—and the unemployment rate dropped ever-so-slightly to 4.3%. But not all workers stand to benefit equally from this surge in job creation.
A new analysis from the Economic Policy Institute this week captures how Black women have been uniquely impacted by fluctuations in the economy and repeated cuts to the workforce over the past year—including Trump’s directive to trim headcount across the federal government. That decision drove out about 277,000 workers. In 2025, the rate of employment among Black women dipped to 55.7%, a decrease of 1.4 percentage points. This is a particularly steep decline over the course of a year—among the “sharpest one-year declines” in the last 25 years, according to the EPI.
As unemployment steadily climbed from 5.8% to 6.7% during 2025, Black women’s overall labor force participation dropped from 60.6% to 59.7%, indicating that more Black women have either left the workforce or stopped looking for a job.
This shift in employment also appears to have largely affected Black women with college degrees. “I was surprised at the magnitude of the decline for college-educated Black women,” says Valerie Wilson, director of the EPI’s Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. The employment rate for Black women with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than 3.5 percentage points in 2025—significantly more than among Black women who are not college graduates.
Wilson puts forth two potential explanations for the marked impact on Black women. “One could be that this is just the leading edge of a broader slowdown,” she says. “A lot of people believe that Black workers, broadly speaking—in this case Black women—are sort of the canary in the coal mine.” Black workers are often the first to feel the effects of a looming recession since they tend to hold lower-wage jobs in higher numbers. These jobs are more susceptible to economic headwinds.
The losses among college-educated workers, however, point to another likely reason for the drop in employment. “Perhaps the more insidious explanation would be that this is some clear demonstration of anti-equity or anti-DEI backlash in action,” Wilson says. “In the federal government, I think that’s pretty explicit—the first departments they cut were DEI departments.” Women and people of color are reportedly overrepresented at many federal agencies, and nearly half of Black federal workers have at least a bachelor’s degree.
But even beyond the public sector, the broader retreat from corporate DEI programs has likely contributed to those job losses, both because Black women were more likely to hold DEI-related roles and because those programs helped promote more diverse hiring across corporate America. The Trump administration’s attacks on DEI—enshrined in a number of executive orders—have driven many companies to disavow DEI and walk back their diversity commitments.
In the private sector, Black women did see some gains in certain sectors, namely education and healthcare. But they also suffered job losses across a number of other industries like manufacturing and professional and business services, which saw a dip in employment for women overall. The umbrella category of “other services” also showed losses for Black women, which Wilson attributes to the greater share of those workers across nonprofit roles and religious organizations.
Perhaps the most unusual element of the current employment picture is that far more Black women have lost jobs than their male counterparts, per the EPI analysis. In fact, there has been an uptick in employment for Black men in the private sector, particularly across retail and professional and business services. “You don’t usually see a huge gap like that,” Wilson says.
Even the new jobs report—which shows a clear improvement in Black unemployment—does not necessarily signal a major turnaround for this group of workers, who seem to be at a particular disadvantage in the current labor market.
“I can’t say this is a racial story [about] Black workers, broadly speaking,” Wilson says. “I can’t say it’s a women’s story, where it’s hitting all women the same. It is very specific to Black women.”