Black Women Continue Making Jobs Gains
Digging through the demographic data in the latest jobs numbers, one of the clear winners of the last few months has been black women. Since December, they’ve knocked more than 3 percentage points off their unemployment rate, from 13.9 percent to 10.8 percent. That’s the biggest drop over the last five months out of any single demographic group broken out by race, sex and age by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Education, healthcare, and retail appear to be factors. All three sectors were among those that posted the largest job gains last month.
Unemployment among black men dropped from 15.7 percent in December to 13.6 percent in April. For white women, the rate has essentially remained unchanged at 6.8 percent, which is the same rate as white men. Total white unemployment remains well below total black unemployment, though the gap has narrowed over the last year. In April 2011, white unemployment was exactly half that of black unemployment, 8.1 percent compared with 16.2 percent. Now the difference is 6.8 percent compared with 13 percent.