You may have seen these headlines over the past 24 hours talking about how the 140,000 jobs lost in the United States last month belonged to women. “The U.S. economy lost 140,000 jobs in December,” it read CNN. “They were all in the hands of women.” Fortune framed the news in the same way: “Women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs launched by the U.S. economy in December.”
While this is true, defining these losses as losses for “women” generally does not tell the full story. When further broken down race and ethnicity, the Data from the National Center for Women’s Rights behind the news cycle reveals that white women, like men, in reality won jobs in December, meaning all those tens of thousands of jobs lost last month were filled by women of color.
According to CNN, black and Latino women lost jobs in December, while white women made “significant gains” in the labor market. That doesn’t mean no white woman lost her job last month, just as it doesn’t mean no man has lost her job in recent weeks. What this means is that white women as a whole got more jobs than they lost in December, while black and Latino women lost more than they gained.
This disparity in job loss reflects broader trends in American female employment, CNN adds. Black and Latino women are disproportionately employee in industries that have been more difficult by the economic recession of the pandemic, which they tend to miss things like remote work and sick leave policies. Latinos and black women too have the highest unemployment rates in between all women in the country (9.1% and 8.4%, respectively), while white women are the lowest (5.7%).