Voices + Evidence: What’s Moving the Needle (Vol. 2, No. 3)

By Crissy Chung

The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 3 – “We have to build our own power”: Women’s Fight Endures

What the Data Reveal About Youth Unemployment

According to an Economic Policy Institute analysis published in February 2026, Black women’s employment-to-population ratio fell by 1.4 percentage points in a single year, dropping to 55.7 percent. That is one of the sharpest one-year declines in a quarter-century. By comparison, the decline for Black men and white women was no more than half a percentage point each. Hispanic and AAPI women actually saw employment gains. The losses were not distributed across the economy. They were concentrated.

The most striking finding is where the damage landed. Black women with bachelor’s degrees experienced a 3.5 percentage-point drop in employment, far exceeding the losses for every other education level. Their labor force participation fell by 2.3 percentage points, the steepest decline across all categories. These are not women who lacked credentials. They earned the degree, built the career, and showed up. The economy withdrew from them anyway. A 3.5-point drop in employment for degree holders is not a skills gap. It is a power gap.

EPI’s sector analysis reveals the mechanism. The entire net loss in Black women’s employment was driven by public-sector cuts, with federal government losses accounting for the largest share, over 95,000 positions. The federal workforce has long been the most reliable pathway to middle-class stability for Black women, a sector where nearly half of Black workers hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. When the administration eliminated 277,000 federal jobs, it dismantled one of the few economic architectures that had consistently worked for Black women and their families. Meanwhile, Black men reported a much smaller federal decline and saw a net gain in total employment. The crisis was gendered within race and racialized within gender.

The private sector showed similar patterns. While Black women saw a net increase in education and health services jobs, they lost ground in six of twelve major industries: over 51,000 positions in manufacturing, more than 42,000 in financial activities, nearly 30,000 in professional and business services, and nearly 68,000 in the “other services” category that includes community organizations, civic groups, and grant-funded work. The sectors where women build community-facing stability were precisely the sectors that contracted most.

The generational dimension is equally alarming. The National Partnership for Women & Families reported that Black teen unemployment surged to 30.7 percent by November 2025, nearly double the rate from the same month a year earlier. The overall youth unemployment rate rose to 10.8 percent in July, with young women at 10.5 percent and Black youth at 14.3 percent. Over half of Black households with children depend on women as primary breadwinners. When those women and their daughters cannot find jobs, the challenges compound across generations. Housing destabilizes, consumer spending drops, and educational outcomes weaken. A young Black woman entering the labor market in 2025 inherited a landscape where the sectors her mother relied on were contracting, where her education did not protect her from displacement, and where the community infrastructure that might have supported her transition was itself being defunded.

Evidence That Collaboration Is Working Differently Now

If the data names the failure, it also points toward what works. The clearest evidence comes from models where women set the terms of collaboration rather than waiting for inclusion into systems that have just demonstrated how quickly they discard the people who depend on them.

Globally, women-led cooperatives are demonstrating that when women control economic design, outcomes shift for entire communities. In Morocco, a union of women’s cooperatives has grown to 1,200 members across six provinces, providing stable employment and increasing women’s decision-making power within their households. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, employment programs centered on women placed over 20,000 women in private-sector jobs. The Generation Equality initiative has mobilized nearly $33 billion in pledges for women’s economic justice, with over 440 programs initiated. And in January 2026, a global coalition launched the Accelerate Together campaign to mobilize $600 million annually for grassroots women-led movements. This is an explicit recognition that well-resourced, independent women’s organizations are among the most effective drivers of lasting change.

The pattern across these models is consistent: collaboration works differently when women author the rules. Systems stop filtering for compliance and start building for capacity. Mentorship replaces gatekeeping. Flexibility replaces rigidity. Shared accountability replaces top-down evaluation. The same transformation young adults called for in last month’s newsletter, the end of delayed stability, the rejection of linear pathways, the shift from screening to enablement, becomes structurally possible when the people closest to the problem govern the solution.

The 2025 data make the case that credentials alone will not close the gap. Policy choices dismantled the sectors where Black women had built the most ground. The answer is not to ask women to be more resilient. It is to build economic structures that are cooperative, flexible, and community-governed, where stability does not depend on a single employer, a single sector, or a single policy that can be reversed overnight. The models that exist provide a strong reference point for institutions to consider investment opportunities.

Key Data Sources

• Economic Policy Institute, “Black women suffered large employment losses in 2025,” Valerie Wilson, February 2026

• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Unemployment Among Youth, Summer 2025

• National Partnership for Women & Families, Jobs Day Analysis, December 2025

• Fortune, “The Exit Economy,” November 2025

• International Cooperative Alliance, Women’s Co-ops Around the World;

• UN Women, Generation Equality Accountability Report 2023

• Accelerate Together Campaign, January 2026.

---

Crissy Chung is the Head of Insights, Research and Evaluation at LeadersUp, driving our research initiatives and insights collection strategies.