By: Miriam Van Dyke, PhD
On July 10, 2025, National Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, we celebrate the achievements and contributions of Black women, and National Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is a day we call for action. This day represents the approximate day a Black woman must work into the next year to make what a white man made at the end of the previous year. We call for action to address this persistent and significant wage divide faced by Black women. Black women working full-time year-round earn 69 cents for every dollar made by White men. This wage divide is even greater among Black women holding a bachelor’s degree at 63 cents for every dollar made by White men. Based on current trends, it is estimated that 2227 is the year when Black women’s pay will equal White men’s for full-time workers. When considering part-time work, the time to pay equity is even greater, set at 2362. However, our society cannot afford to wait for Black women to achieve pay equity and the opportunity to fully participate in a just and inclusive economy. Black women and their families and communities have waited for generations for pay equity.
Black women have a history of entrepreneurship, strong workforce participation, and attaining higher education. They have continued to shine and achieve even in the face of systemic challenges like occupational segregation, discrimination — both racism and sexism — and higher participation in unpaid responsibilities like caregiving.
Madam C.J. Walker is often named as the first self-made woman millionaire in the United States after developing haircare products for Black women in the early 1900s. However, many other Black women trailblazing entrepreneurs paved the way, and the number of businesses owned by Black women is rapidly growing. In fact, that number is growing faster than that for women of other racial groups. These trends are exciting but do not reflect the reality that Black women disproportionately face challenges starting a business, such as a lack of access to capital, and Black women-owned businesses face continuous uphill challenges with scalability and sustainability with an average revenue that is almost six times less than the average revenue of all women-owned businesses.
Despite historic unemployment rates for Black workers being double the rate of White workers, Black women’s persistent labor force participation is not merely admirable — it is a reflection of generational resilience in the face of enduring labor market injustice. For example, in every Deep South state, the percentage of Black women aged 16-64 years who are employed exceeds that of the percentage employed for Black men (Figure 1). However, because women are often segregated into occupations that are lower paid (e.g. care work), wealth accumulation is challenging for Black women.
Figure 1.
Kindred Futures’ analysis of 2023 Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from nine Deep South states shows that a larger percentage (34%) of families with Black women as a household head have zero or negative net worth compared to families with White women as a household head (20%) (Figure 2). The divide in the percentage of families with zero or negative net worth is even larger at over 4x higher for families with a Black woman (34%) versus a White man (8%) as a household head.
Figure 2.
Stable and equitably compensated employment is a pathway for wealth, through direct income, health benefits, and retirement investments. The need to address significant wealth disparities, in part, through employment and equal pay for work has become even more imperative in recent months. Numbers released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for April 2025 show an extra 106,000 Black women were facing unemployment; and this concerning trend continued in May 2025, with those data suggesting a loss of an additional 21,000 jobs for Black women. The most recent data from June 2025 suggests a potential leveling off of job loss for Black women. Nonetheless, the unemployment rate for Black women in June (5.8) remains high and continues to be almost 2x that of White women (3.1) and White men (3.4).
Notably, the recent data showing continued increases in the unemployment rate for Black women was released alongside an announcement of a sizeable loss of federal government jobs. Government employment has long been a pathway to more equitable pay and economic mobility for Black people, particularly Black women, who make up a larger proportion of the federal workforce than the civilian labor force. However, even in the federal workforce, Black women face barriers to pay equity, earning about $12,600 less yearly than the median pay for civilian Federal employees. The job loss, under- and unemployment of Black people, and segregation of Black women into lower-paying and lower benefits roles, is less the fault of Black women, but instead more indicative of a system that has long discriminated against Black women. As cited in the 2025 Paycheck Fairness Act, “After controlling for educational attainment, occupation, industry, union status, race, ethnicity, and labor force experience[,] roughly 40 percent of the pay gap remains unexplained.” These labor dynamics have implications for Black women, including lower savings, asset accumulation, and retirement preparedness, which impacts intergenerational wealth transfer and the economic futures of their children and families.
However, it’s not all just about numbers and dollar signs. This is about the well-being and health of Black women and their communities. Having a negative net worth is associated with higher levels of blood pressure and hypertension, precursors to cardiovascular disease, the No. 1 killer of Black women. Yet when economic progress is made and Black women achieve higher levels of education and income, data show Black women are not allowed to fully benefit from the promises of upward economic mobility. College-educated Black women report more experiences of everyday racial discrimination than Latina or White women and their lower-educated counterparts, and the impact of discrimination on health appears to be stronger for higher-educated Black women. While this phenomenon is understudied, the health tax paid by higher-educated Black adults is not a new concept. These “costs” linked with higher economic status for Black people can come in the form of not only heightened discrimination or racism-related vigilance and tokenism in hyper-visible environments, but also the need to support less economically stable family members and community members, which hits home for Black women who often feel a need to be “Superwomen” and experience a “cost of caring”. More generally for Black women seeking upward economic mobility, the environments in which they seek to thrive in are not set up to support their success; and local economies rightfully seeking to better support and protect workers through initiatives, such as minimum wage increase, fair scheduling, paid leave ordinances, are often blocked through state law.
Black women have stood day in and day out with resilience out of necessity. As Viola Davis said, “As Black women, we’re always given these seemingly devastating experiences — experiences that could absolutely break us. But what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly. What we do as Black women is take the worst situations and create from that point…”
It is time to act. We must uplift Black women and allow them to thrive as they have continued to raise and sacrifice for the Black community and larger society. We celebrate Black women in all their brilliance and contributions to society. We also recognize the persistent and systemic challenges faced by Black women, contributing to stark and preventable inequities in economic opportunity, wealth, and health.
At Kindred Futures, we are focused on creating innovative community wealth-building solutions to uplift the Talented 90th, the broad base of Black households, including the roughly 2 million Black households in the South with zero or negative net worth. This means advocating for the scalability of innovative and reparative initiatives for families like Baby Bonds, conducting research and developing policy solutions that identify and eliminate wealth extraction from Black communities, like predatory lending practices, and building and supporting an ecosystem of businesses and business support organizations, helping to create wealth in Black communities and support entrepreneurs, including the rapidly growing number of Black women entering this space.
Specific policy initiatives aimed at closing the wage divide and growing wealth for Black women can include, but are not limited to:
- Pay fairness and transparency: Policy initiatives are needed to support more pay fairness and transparency in the workplace for Black women, who despite their best efforts fighting for fair pay, are faced with discrimination, repercussions, and limited access to information on salary standards. In 2019, Alabama passed the Clarke-Figures Equal Pay Act, which requires employers to pay its employees at similar wage rates as employees of another sex or race for equal work and jobs with equal performance requirements. While this is progress, exceptions within the Act allow for employer discretion (e.g., determining seniority system, merit system, or production quantity or quality, or a differential based on any factor other than sex or race). An important provision of this Act includes protecting employees who do not provide wage history, which could perpetuate wage inequities. Most recently, legislation is being considered for the 2025 Paycheck Fairness Act, enhancing enforcement of equal pay requirements for employers, pay equity data collection, and employer prohibitions in relying on and considering prospective employee wage, salary, and benefit histories.
- Minimum wage: Raising the minimum wage would disproportionately benefit Black workers and women and would support a more racially just economy through pay equity. It was estimated that approximately 1 in 3 Black women would have received a direct or indirect pay raise under the proposed Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which aimed to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025. Further, ending the separate, tipped wage would especially benefit women of color who are more likely to work in tipped jobs and receive wages lower than the minimum wage. As of January 2025, most Deep South states (with exception of Florida and Arkansas) have not chosen to raise their minimum wage to higher than the federal minimum of $7.25.
- Paid leave: Paid family leave can provide family economic security and support child and parent health. Several states in the U.S. have implemented some form of a state paid family and medical leave policy. Mississippi recently passed an Act providing six weeks of paid parental leave for eligible state employees who are primary caregivers and two weeks of paid parental leave for secondary caregivers. Alabama passed a similar law for state workers and local education employees, including teachers, that provides up to eight weeks of leave.
- Childcare: Black children are almost 3x more likely than non-Hispanic White children to be raised in single-parent homes, and the majority of Black women are also breadwinners for their families. Despite the pay divide experienced by Black women, single Black mothers face higher average annual childcare costs than single White mothers. In 2022, New Mexico expanded free childcare to families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level, whereas the previous limit was up to 200%. The waiving of childcare copays was coupled with increasing access to childcare and supporting early childhood professionals with a stipend for continued education.
While continued or new support for these initiatives and several others not listed (e.g., Affordable Care Act, among others) can help move us closer towards closing the wage and wealth divide for Black women, it is likely that it is not a single initiative, but the combination of initiatives, that will make the meaningful progress in pay and wealth equity that Black women need and deserve.
Join us as we celebrate and lift up Black women today and every day. Join us in our call to action.