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Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Have you checked the jobs report lately? If you don't know

what that is, it's sort of like a monthly economic report card from the U.S. Department of Labor.

It drops the first Friday of every month and explains things from what industries gained and lost jobs

and how many people were unemployed to how much workers earned and how many hours they worked.

And lately, the jobs report has shown some pretty alarming data. Unemployment among black women aged 20 and older jumped from 5.1% in March to 6.7% in August.

To make this feel a little more real, employment among black women fell by roughly 318,000 jobs between February and June 2025.

And Ophronima Bieu, Chief Economist and Senior Research Director at the Maven Collaborative, says that's a serious issue.

Given the trends we've seen historically of black folks being the first fire,

and given that there's a slowdown in hiring, increasing in layoffs,

unfortunately, the news was disheartening to see, but not a surprise.

These changes are what economists are calling a canary in the coal mine moment for the

country's financial well-being. Amid cuts to the federal workforce where we know black women are

overrepresented, amid a destruction of DEI where a lot of black women are also represented. I'm

not super surprised that this is taking place to black women first.

That's Anna Gifty Apoku Ajiman, author of the double tax and a Harvard PhD candidate.

And honestly, really saddening because a lot of these people are folks that we know, right?

They're not just people who are floating somewhere else.

Today, we're sitting down

with Anna and Afronima to take a hard look at the numbers, who these rising unemployment numbers

affect, and why this moment could be an alarm for stormy economic seas ahead.

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