What Black Women's Labor Is Actually Costing the World

Dr. Jade Singleton launched the first global study on Black women's labor. The early data is already naming a cost that institutions have spent centuries refusing to calculate.

By: Dr. Lisa Marie Lee

The Global State of Black Women's Labor Survey

The cost is not abstract.

It shows up in wage gaps that compound annually. In unpaid labor that never appears on a payroll. In burnout rates that are quietly draining the most productive workforce on the planet. In businesses that get launched out of necessity because the institution failed to retain the person who should have been running it.

Dr. Jade Singleton did not set out to build a global study. She started with a documentary about Black women and labor in the United States. When she went looking for the women she most wanted to interview, they were gone. Not temporarily. They had left the country entirely. One was in Rwanda. One in Mexico. More had relocated, building lives somewhere that was not extracting everything they had and offering nothing sustainable in return.

At every screening the same thing surfaced from the room. This is not a U.S. story.

So she built the Global State of Black Women's Labor Study to find out how far the pattern actually goes. It is currently active and collecting responses from Black women across the United States, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and beyond.

I sat down with Dr. Singleton to talk about what the study is already revealing. What follows is drawn from that conversation.

What is already surfacing from the early data is not what anyone predicted.

The dominant story is not burnout.

It is rebuilding.

That distinction matters. Burnout is what institutions produce. Rebuilding is what Black women are doing despite them. The study is mapping both. And the picture forming is not one the world's institutions are going to be comfortable seeing.

The Cost Institutions Will Not Name

One word sits underneath everything this study is surfacing.

Access.

Not in the way that word travels through corporate diversity decks. Something more foundational. Across every region where responses are coming in, Black women describe the same condition: they have built something. They have the skills, the market, the demand. What they do not have is the capital, the networks, or the institutional backing to scale what they have already constructed on their own.

In some markets the language is capital. In others it is sponsorship or career advancement. The vocabulary changes. The condition does not.

"It sounds like differentiated problems. But they are actually saying the same thing. I have all the components. I need the ability and resources to fuel what I have already built." ~ Dr. Jade Singleton

This is not a pipeline problem. It is a resource withholding problem. Those require different solutions. A pipeline problem gets addressed with a recruiting initiative. A resource withholding problem requires institutions to examine who gets capital, who gets sponsored, who gets the assignments that change careers, and then hold themselves accountable for what they find.

Most have not done that. Black women lose an average of $20,400 per year to the wage gap alone, before a single dollar of uncompensated labor is counted. Globally, women earn approximately 77 cents for every dollar earned by men across every region where this study is collecting data. That is not a regional condition. It is a structural one.

And it does not stop at the paycheck. Withheld access limits what Black women can build, how far they can lead, and how much of their potential ever reaches the market. It is the root condition underneath the burnout, the invisible ceilings, and the gap between what Black women produce and what they receive for it.

The Cost That Is Burning the West

The early data is surfacing something that stopped Dr. Singleton mid-analysis.

Black women in Western contexts are reporting significantly higher levels of sheer, bottomed-out exhaustion than respondents in other parts of the diaspora. Tiredness exists everywhere in the data. Real economic pressure exists everywhere. But the depth of burnout in Western responses is not registering at the same level elsewhere.

And running alongside responses from other regions is something that is largely absent from the West.

Hopefulness.

Women in other parts of the diaspora describe being tired. They describe barriers. But they also describe a sense that another way is possible. That thread does not disappear under the weight of their circumstances the way it does in Western responses. Dr. Singleton attributes part of that difference to the racial component Black women in the West carry daily, a weight that does not exist in the same form elsewhere. And part of it to the communal infrastructure that still exists in many of those societies and that was systematically stripped from Black communities in the West.

Dr. Singleton is careful. This is preliminary data from a study still in progress. But the signal is consistent.

"They are not seeing the same racial component in their daily experience. And the communal nature of their societies may also be contributing to why we are not seeing the same levels of burnout." ~ Dr. Jade Singleton

That is a finding with structural implications. The racial weight Black women carry in Western workplaces is not a personal condition. It is an organizational one. It shows up in performance review calibrations, in promotion decisions, in every calculation a Black woman makes about how much of herself to bring into a room before being labeled a problem. That weight has a measurable price in attrition, disengagement, and the departure of talent institutions spent years developing and never adequately paid.

The communal infrastructure that could buffer some of that weight was not lost by accident. It was dismantled. And the same manufactured scarcity that exhausts Black women in Western workplaces does not stop at the institution's door. It follows us in.

Institutions built the conditions.

This is not an accident. When politics overrides policy, this is the outcome.

Black women's employment rate fell 1.4 percentage points in 2025, one of the sharpest one-year declines in 25 years, with the steepest losses among college graduates and public sector workers. EPI researchers described these as casualties of anti-equity backlash in action. And inside the institutions they left, only 54 Black women are promoted to manager for every 100 men, down from 60 in 2018. The leadership work Black women perform informally is not being counted in the rooms where those decisions get made.

The Cost We Are Paying Each Other

That same scarcity logic does not stay inside institutions. It gets internalized. And then it shows up inside the community in a way that compounds the damage institutions already caused.

Black gatekeepers exist. Dr. Singleton is among the few willing to explain the behavior rather than simply condemn it.

"They are operating in reality. They know that two of us is too many of us in that space. They are fighting for their resources and their livelihoods. It is ugly. It keeps you away from your people. But I understand it." ~ Dr. Jade Singleton

Gatekeeping is a scarcity response. And scarcity is manufactured. When generations are told there is only room for one of us, survival instinct turns peers into competition. Black employees are already 23 percent less likely to receive promotions than white employees. The scarcity is not imagined. It was engineered.

The tragedy is that the logic of the institution gets carried into the community and called wisdom. Every Black professional locked out by another Black professional in survival mode is a node in a potential global network that never forms. That is economic loss compounding on top of economic loss, with no line item and no accountability.

Dr. Singleton's answer is structural. Expand opportunity until there is nothing left worth gatekeeping. The global marketplace is not a concept. It is the alternative that already exists for Black women willing to stop fighting over the same shrinking room.

The Tool That Make Cost Undeniable

Dr. Singleton is not building a report. She is building a mechanism.

The conversation turned to women on tea plantations where labor conditions were documented as abusive and wages were nearly nothing. She sat with one question: knowing this, does she still buy the product? Then she made it larger. What if enough of us asked the same question at the same time?

"Think about the Mo Ibrahim Index, which ranks African governments on governance and integrity. If you had something like that for how corporations treat Black women, a mechanism, a badge with consequences, I think people start to listen." ~ Dr. Jade Singleton

We already badge corporations for cybersecurity, environmental standards, and governance ratings. There is no principled reason a comparable mechanism cannot be built for how institutions treat Black women across the entire supply chain, not just at the headquarters level where the diversity statements live. Organizations that operate with dignity get recognized and receive the economic loyalty of one of the fastest-growing consumer and entrepreneurial groups in the world. Organizations that do not face the organized pressure of that same group.

The purchasing power behind that pressure is real and growing.

Black women are the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S. with 13% business growth between 2024 and 2025. That is not a diversity statistic. That is purchasing power and market signal in one number.Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report, 2025 to 2026

The study is building the data foundation for that index. And the more voices it captures globally, the harder the findings become to ignore.

What It Is Costing The Future

DEI programs are being dismantled and deemed unconstitutional. Black women are losing jobs at rates that outpace every other demographic group. The UN has recognized slavery as the gravest crime against humanity. Pope Leo XIV, the first Black pope, has spoken publicly on it. All of this is happening at the same time.

That is not a coincidence.

That is the strategy.

And the future of work is being built inside all of it.

The women leaving Western workplaces are not disappearing. They are launching businesses, relocating, building global networks on their own terms. That is a workforce trend with compounding consequences for any institution that cannot answer why it keeps losing its best people and where they are going.

AI is sharpening the contradiction. Women in Kenya are being paid two dollars an hour to label images that train the technology powering some of the most profitable companies in the world. Those same companies are announcing diversity-focused pipelines domestically and calling it investment. The cost of that gap is being paid by the women whose labor makes the technology possible and who will never see the returns.

"Nobody can make a dollar holler like a sister can. I would rather we keep some of that for ourselves." ~ Dr. Jade Singleton

The organizations that lead the next decade are not going to be the ones that wrote the best diversity statement. They are going to be the ones that measured the cost of undervaluing the people who held their culture, carried their invisible labor, and rebuilt anyway when the institution gave them nothing.

That cost is now being calculated. Globally.

Companies in the top quartile for ethnic and cultural diversity are 39% more likely to outperform their peers on profitability. That research is not new. The execution gap is a choice. By 2030, women globally are projected to control $72 trillion in private wealth, and Black women represent a growing and intentional portion of that trajectory. They are directing it toward organizations that recognize their value. And at the current global rate of progress, gender pay parity will not be achieved for 134 years. Every workforce strategy built on the assumption that this will self-correct is 134 years away from being right.

The cost is not abstract.

It never was.

The study is putting a number to it.

Participate and make sure your experience is in the data.

The Global State of Black Women's Labor Study is open to Black women globally across the United States, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and beyond. Anonymous. 7 to 10 minutes. Your responses shape the inaugural IKONI Institute Report. 👉🏿 https://ikoniinstitute.org/