So, who are the working women out there?

I searched out the data on working women in the U.S. labor force and found a helpful release on theWomen’s Data Center of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research website.  This data provided the rate of women’s participation in the labor force, conveniently broken down by ethnic background.

My reason for seeking out this data is simple—the depictions of non-working women in the media are usually women of color, and I wanted to see whether these images are backed up by the numbers.

They’re not.

First, I should provide a bit of an overview about what these statistics mean.  When we think about the rate of participation, we can understand it as the number of working women in a particular group as a percentage of all of the women within that group. For example:

# of Group X women that are working / # of Group X women

So if we take 100 Black women and 50 of them are working, then Black women’s rate of participation in the labor force is 50%.  This is not to be confused with representation in the labor force, which is the group of working women as a percentage of the entire labor force:

# of Group X women working / # of entire labor force

In this example, if the entire labor force is 10,000 people and 1,500 are Asian-American women, then Asian-American women’s representation in the labor force is 15% (all of these examples use, of course, hypothetical numbers).

So I examined the rates of women’s participation in the labor force, and not their rate of representation.  Through this, I was able to determine that the stereotypes about women of color with respect to work are not backed up by the numbers.

Here’s what I found:

Participation Rates

African-American/Black women have the highest participation in the labor force at 63.1%. This rate is 4-6% higher than any other group of women.  This means that 63% of all Black women are working.  White women and Native American women participate in the labor force at around 58% (58.8% and 58.2%, respectively), followed by Asian-American (57.5%) and Hispanic/Latinas (56.6%).  The majority of all groups of women are working, including women of color.

In light of these statistics, I ask this: what’s with the welfare queen stereotype, generally used against African-American and Hispanic women?  Well, the numbers just don’t back it up.  These statistics indicate that a higher percentage of Black women are working than any other group of women—the majority of Hispanic women are also working.

Mind the Gap!

There are also fairly broad perceptions generally that men work more than women, so I figured I’d examine those statistics, as well. Below are the rates at which men and women in different ethnic groups are working. I’ve focused on the gap (or difference) in their labor participation rates:

African-Americans – 5.6% difference between the men and women’s participation rates. This is the smallest gap across all ethnic groups, meaning that almost as many Black women work as compared to Black men.

Asian-Americans – 15.8% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Whites – 13.7% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Latinos/Hispanics – 22.7% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

Native Americans – 10.6% difference between the men and women’s participation rates.

These numbers remind us that the majority of women of color (and women) are participating in the labor force, and underscores the need for programs and initiatives related to their professional development and career advancement.  It also means we ought to reject images of women of color as lazy, and unwilling to work.

Because, actually, most of us are working already.