While unemployment rates among African-Americans are still sky-high, Black women are inching toward closing the racial unemployment gap.
Amid the cloudy vista of the country’s Black jobless rate exists a silver lining: Black women are gaining jobs faster than any other group, Bloomberg Businessweek reports:
“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 for any single demographic group broken out by race, sex, and age by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
Ladies don’t get all the shine, however. Black men also posted an impressive drop in unemployment, dipping from 15.7 percent in December to 13.6 percent in April.
According to April’s jobless numbers released last week, overall the African-American unemployment ratesaw the biggest improvement with a one percent decrease from 14 percent to 13 percent. Nationally, the unemployment rate fell just one percentage point, from 8.2 to 8.1 percent.
The data also shows that the dip in Black jobless claims can’t just be written off to people simply dropping out of the job search, says Businessweek:
“Falling unemployment among Black women is not a function of people dropping out of the workforce. The employment participation rate of black women has steadily increased over the last few months, from 53.5 percent in December, to 56.1 percent in April. Employment participation has actually fallen among white women, down nearly a full percentage point since April 2011, from 55.6 percent to 54.8 percent.”
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