According to a recent study by the National Women’s Law Center, black women have lost more jobs during the recovery — 258,000 — than they did during the recession — 233,000

Put another way, black women represented 12.5% of all women workers in June 2009. But between then and June 2011, black women lost 42.2% of jobs lost by women overall. “For women as a whole, and particularly black women, cuts in public sector employment have been devastating,” said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center in Washington. “When it comes to job growth in the private sector, women are also doing less well than men. Whether employers feel it is more important to put men back to work first, we just can’t say at this point.” While the nation’s overall unemployment rate declined from 9.0% to 8.6% in November 2011, the unemployment rate for black women increased from 12.6% to 12.9%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Worse, more than 150,000 black women gave up looking for work. Counted out of the job market, they were categorized as simply “discouraged workers.” In a sad irony, the Obama administration’s first cheery news about a drop in the nation’s unemployment rate had resulted largely from the broken spirits of black women. “The jobs report was like an onion: Peel back the layers and you start crying,” said Donna Addkison, president and chief executive of Wider Opportunities for Women. According to a recent study by WOW, about 42% of women — including 62% of African American women and 66% of Hispanic women — do not have enough income to pay for basic household expenses. “We’re not just talking about households moving from crisis to catastrophe,” Addkison said. “The deprivation experienced by children in these homes means the loss of jobs and income will have a multi-generational ripple effect.”