Black women started 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5.4 percent. They ended it at 7.3 percent " the highest rate in four years. Black women's unemployment is now equivalent to White women's rate during the bleakest moments of the Great Recession. "The labor market that Black women live in is what White women would think of as the worst labor market they've ever been in," said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist. Without counting the pandemic, White women as a group have only experienced unemployment rates this high three times since 1954, when that monthly data started being collected.