Yesterday, pre-orders opened for our new volume, Black Women in the U.S. Economy: The Hardest Working Woman, edited by Nina Banks and me, with a ship date of September 29. This book started as an unlikely collaboration. Nina and I were colleagues in Bucknell’s economics department during the 2014–16 academic years, a rarity given that fewer than 1% of the roughly 35,000 economists in the United States are Black women. Our colleague Marcellus Andrews had been encouraging me to write a book on Black women in STEM, and while I was reluctant, that push led to Nina and me co-authoring a paper for an International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) conference, where Routledge editor Emily Kindleysides invited us to contribute a volume on Black women to be part of IAFFE’s book series.
We invited Cecilia A. Conrad to join us as a third co-editor to bring deeper expertise in public policy. Cecilia once described our three approaches this way, back when we still planned to write the book together as three co-authors:
“Three economists walk into a supermarket. The first observes that the price of apples is lower at this store than other recently visited stores and collects data on the price of apples, the prices of other fruits, the quantity of apples sold and the demographics of shoppers for a cross-section of stores and proposes that the data will tell a story. The second asserts that the apples are fresher and cheaper in this market than in the corner stores that serve predominantly Black neighborhoods and argues a need for improved public transportation, public safety, and tax breaks to provide Blacks access to lower priced, fresher apples. The third cites changes in the social and historical context of the apple industry and of grocery retailing and speculates that there has been a shift in power among the supermarket chain, the owners of the apple orchards, apple pickers, and consumers. The three economists who are the authors of this book arrive at a study of the economic status of Black women from three different perspectives. Collectively, we agree that a study of the economic status of Black women requires an understanding of market forces, social relations among countergroups, and political economy.”
Can you guess which economist is me? (Hint: I’ve never met a dataset I didn’t want to disaggregate first and theorize about second.)
As often happens, life intervened before that three-way collaboration could be finished. Instead, Nina and I shifted our own roles to editors and invited Black sociologists, political scientists, and education scholars to contribute. Even after our roles changed, it was Cecilia who outlined the theoretical framework that places Black women’s economic well-being at the center rather than treating the individual or the household as a neutral unit of analysis. Her framework guided our decision about what chapters to include in the volume.
In our proposal for Black Women in the U.S. Economy: The Hardest Working Woman, Nina Banks and I confronted a persistent cultural myth: Black women are stereotyped as “lazy,” “bad mothers,” “welfare queens,” “angry,” and “unattractive as marriage partners.” These tropes distort a foundational economic reality: in the United States, Black women have always had the highest labor force participation rates relative to other women.
Forty Years Later
Forty years ago, Julianne Malveaux and Margaret C. Simms published Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women to document that exact reality. Introducing the employment section, Julianne observed that work is so central to Black women’s legacy that “it is frequently jested that Black women are born with a broom in hand”—humor masking the chattel slavery and Reconstruction labor regimes that made market work mandatory. In the education section, Margaret introduced the education and training section that same year and extended that analysis forward: Black women pursued education at rates matching Black men, yet remained underrepresented in Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) and Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) programs relative to their eligibility, disproportionately funneled into the least desirable program components even after completing training.
In Section I, “Black Women in the Market Economy,” introduced by Cecilia A. Conrad, we dismantle the neoclassical claim that educational attainment automatically yields equal economic returns. In Chapter 1, Susan Williams McElroy and I analyze data from 1970 to 2024 to show that while Black women’s bachelor’s degree attainment surged from 3% to 30%, their credentials face persistent wage penalties and structural discounting across every single field of study. In Chapter 2, Valerie Rawlston Wilson shows that forty years of deunionization have left the productivity-adjusted wage gap between Black women and white men virtually unchanged since 1990. Even upward mobility carries a price: in Chapter 3, LaToya Council and Kris Marsh document the “race uplift tax,” showing how middle-class Black women must continually transfer their personal economic gains back to extended families to buffer against systemic disinvestment.
In 1986, Margaret introduced the single-parent families section of Slipping Through the Cracks to refute prevailing welfare-dependency tropes, highlighting Harriette Pipes McAdoo’s research on how Black women relied on extended family networks to survive systemic resource deficits. Four decades later, Margaret introduces Section II, “Family and Community,” which focuses on the unpaid labor classical economics ignores. In Chapter 4, Nina Banks uses a Historical Black Womanist Theoretical framework to examine the crisis of social reproduction, showing how the state and private employers externalized the cost of community survival onto Black women following welfare retrenchment and the incarceration of over 1.5 million Black men. In Chapter 5, Banks details how Black women mobilize unpaid collective labor to produce essential public goods in abandoned communities. In Chapter 6, Crystasany Renée Turner shows how home-based childcare providers perform “community mothering,” absorbing unreimbursed material costs and emotional burdens to keep low-income families working through crises such as COVID-19.
In Section III, “Politics, Public Policy, and Its Effects,” introduced by Julianne Malveaux, we trace how policy regimes actively discipline Black women’s survival strategies. Slipping Through the Cracks’ health section analyzed healthcare employment, and Fred McKinney warned that raising nursing credential requirements would lock Black associate-degree nurses out of professional status. In Chapter 7, Lily S. Johnson and I show that this sorting mechanism now operates through immigration policy: U.S. licensing systems recognize Jamaican nurses trained under British curricula, while channeling Haitian women with comparable healthcare skills into stratified, lower-wage home health work. Similarly, in the development section, Willene A. Johnson’s examined women’s self-employment in Tanzania as a necessary survival response to locked formal markets. In Chapter 8, research by Princess Dandoo, Daniya Edmond, and me finds the exact same dynamic in the United States, where Black women’s entrepreneurship is driven by labor-market exclusion, only to be starved of capital, with loan denial rates double those of white firms and less than 1% of venture capital. Completing the section, Jerry Pender Jr. and I examine the criminalization of survival under mandatory minimum sentencing in Chapter 9, while Atiya Kai Stokes-Brown illustrates in Chapter 10 how Black women continue to defend American democratic infrastructure at the ballot box with virtually zero institutional reciprocity.
The Invisible Woman
In 2011, when I organized the “The Invisible Woman: The status and challenges facing black women” conference, I did so because it was what I knew. For years, I worked with William “Sandy” Darity, Jr., and learned the value of bringing a diverse set of scholars together and the importance of intergenerational interactions – creating space for undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty of various ranks and disciplines to interact. Bennett undergraduate students introduced each panel; graduate and junior faculty presented on the panels; and full professors served as discussants. I organized the conference because I was at Bennett College, a historically black women’s college; Jullianne Malveaux was the president, and it was the 25th anniversary of the edited volume. I didn’t organize it because I understood the gap in the literature or policy.
Oh, what a difference 15 years, grey hairs, personal loss, and professional challenges and growth make for how you understand your place in the world and in the US economy. My collaboration with Nina to edit “Black Women in the U.S. Economy: The Hardest Working Woman” was intentional. The weekly WISER Wednesday conversations I have as the leader of an organization whose underlying mission is to make “The Invisible Woman” visible have shaped how I have thought about the chapters I co-authored and the discussions about which chapters to include. As I looked at the pictures from the “The Invisible Woman” conference, I was struck by how I wore a pink suit one day and a brown suit another, colors that are the Women’s Institute for Science Equity and Race’s brand colors.
I understand that providing data that examines the life experiences of Black women and then using that data to shift and inform narratives is not enough to influence policy. I am learning, a disheartening lesson, that data narratives and storytelling matter if your audience is open to having their thoughts challenged and willing to use their power and agency to craft policies that may be political suicide but advance their constituents’ needs. Yet I am hopeful that the next generation of feminist and race scholars will use data, lived examples, and theory to advocate for economic and social policies that increase the well-being of the hardest-working women in the U.S. economy: Black women.
I also better understand the contributions of Black women economists, like Barbara A. P. Jones, the oldest living Black woman economist and the first to write a doctoral dissertation centering on Black women’s work. We are grateful that she agreed to write the foreword. “This book, edited by Nina Banks and Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, offers work that both scholars have long presented. They have refused to accept aggregate data that obscure what disaggregation makes plain, and a commitment to putting Black women at the center of the analysis rather than in a footnote. The result is a volume that addresses the question I raised fifty years ago and carries it forward with new data and new frameworks.”
Pre-order Black Women in the U.S. Economy: The Hardest Working Woman ahead of its September 29 release and use discount code 26ESA2 for a 20% discount. If you are interested in reviewing the book, please email me, and I’ll share instructions for getting a review copy.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, STEM diversity, and the demographics of higher education.