There’s been an exodus of Black women leaving the workforce. Both a forced pivot and a deliberate redefinition.
We’ve seen the headline time and time again – 300,000 Black women left their jobs in 2025. In April alone, 106,000 Black women were laid off, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recently, Conde Nast announced that Teen Vogue, the most informed teen magazine, would be folded into Vogue. Every single Black writer was laid off from Teen Vogue’s editorial team. While career coaches and recruiters have commented on how challenging this job market has been, for Black women, the numbers say something different entirely.
Why is the most educated demographic in America so quick to be given a pink slip? And why are so many, in response, choosing to leave behind the careers they often fought so hard to build?
A Surge in Layoffs
For Faisa Ali, a Somali-American maternal health leader, that choice was made for her. “Before everything unraveled, I was in my dream role,” she recalls. In 2019, Ali worked at a major global health association in D.C., where she led maternal health and safe surgery initiatives across East Africa. She was both the youngest person in the room and one of the only people of African descent.
“I traveled. I stood on stages. I sat on panels where people twice my age quoted my work. I didn’t have letters behind my name,” she says. But what she did have was her lived experience and the powerful narratives she was able to build as a result.
On one of her projects, she built a media campaign around safe surgery for mothers and brought visibility to preventable deaths on the operating table. The campaign was so impactful that it caught the attention of the First Lady of Uganda, who endorsed the movement.
“That moment changed everything for me. I felt like I was doing what I was born to do – using narrative to drive systemic change.”
Then one day she got an email. HR had scheduled a meeting for that morning. The office was closing due to the pandemic. Thirty minutes later, she was packing up her desk and returning her ID badge to security.
That was the first time Ali had ever been let go, but it would not be the last. Over the next four years, she was let go twice more. Each layoff came with the same tight-lipped meeting.
“This wasn’t about performance.”
“We had to make a difficult decision.”
“Funding has been cut for this role.”
“Each layoff felt like a shock to my system,” she says. “I poured myself into these organizations. I truly believed in the mission. When the layoffs kept happening, it wasn’t just about losing a job. It was about losing a sense of belonging in spaces I had helped build.”
Redefining Ourselves Beyond Work
At some point, most if not all of us have been fed the narrative that we have to work twice as hard to be half as good. According to psychotherapist Jhanelle Peters, it’s also why these mass layoffs can be so destabilizing to Black women.
“While this narrative [of working twice as hard to be half as good] has helped us excel beyond measures, it has also woven its way around our identity, placing work at the center of how we see ourselves,” Peters says.
“When the title and role are stripped away, after all the hard work, it can leave someone feeling a sense of grief and loss, wrapped in shame, failure, and a missing feeling of self-worth.”
But it can also be an opportunity for realignment.
For Nikki Valentine, a former Spotify project manager and leadership and confidence coach, being laid off allowed her to rediscover who she was beyond the labels she had worked so hard to earn.
“Being laid off has changed my relationship with my career because it has allowed me to identify as myself and not a person who works at XYZ company,” she says. “The first layoff at Spotify was where I had to break that pattern because I identified very strongly with my job and with that company, but after two or three layoffs, you realize you can take your talents anywhere because you are actually the prize.”
She pivoted from project management to working at an advertising agency and building her own company as a coach for Black and Brown women. By stepping outside of the labels she once clung to, she was able to carve a path that was more authentically her.
Ali’s journey took a similar approach. Between her layoffs, she refused to sit in the silence. She created her own momentum, launching a marketing agency devoted to maternal health, participating in tech accelerators, and creating a podcast on maternal mental health.
One night, guided by a mix of faith and purpose, she recorded a TikTok applying for a social media contract role at birthFUND. It received no traction until five months later, when founder Elaine Welteroth stumbled across it. Within weeks, Ali received an offer from the company, but not for the social media manager role. They wanted her as their head of marketing and storytelling.
“Every layoff felt like a free fall,” Ali says. “But each one forced me deeper into myself.”
For Ali, three layoffs in four years allowed her to be honest about who she was, what she wanted, and where she wanted to be. Because once you realize a company will not put you above their bottom line, you start being selective on what you give your all to.
Ali’s experience, as well as Valentine’s, is a reminder that loss can sharpen focus. After being forced to start over more than once, they learned that value isn’t determined by any organization. Instead, it’s defined by the purpose one chooses for themselves. So while there might be an exodus of Black women in corporate America, we are off to greener pastures.