Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report on January employment included more bad news about Black and Latina women in the workforce, writes Jamila Michener, associate professor of government and co-director of the Cornell Center for Health Equity, in a Washington Post op-ed.
“In January, the unemployment rate was 8.5 percent for Black women, 8.8 percent for Latina women and 5.1 percent for White women. Even as a pandemic economy challenges women from all racial groups, these unemployment rates underscore important racial inequities,” Michener writes in the piece with co-author Margaret Teresa Brower. “The U.S. government can alleviate that acute economic distress, our research suggests, if it advances policies that explicitly account for Latina and Black women’s specific vulnerabilities.”
