More than one in five Black women (23 percent) in the U.S. workforce are employed in healthcare and are most likely to hold the lowest-paying, most hazardous jobs, according to a study published Feb. 7 in Health Affairs.
The study — by Janette Dill, PhD, associate professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Mignon Duffy, PhD, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell — examined data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. Researchers used data from 2019, the latest year available.
They found that Black women represent 6.9 percent of the U.S. workforce and 13.7 percent of the healthcare workforce.
Black women also have a higher likelihood of working in the healthcare sector (23 percent) compared with white, Hispanic and Asian women and are more concentrated in the lowest-wage direct care jobs (licensed practical nurse and aide occupations), according to the study.
"Care work is a critical arena in which Black women are located at the intersection of racism and sexism," researchers concluded. "Investing in Black women through targeted investment in care infrastructure can begin to undermine some of the ideological constructions and structural barriers that have devalued both."
They recommended actions such as raising wages for lower-paying jobs in healthcare, ensuring adequate opportunities for low-wage healthcare workers to advance, and addressing racism in the pipeline of healthcare professions.
Study limitations included that researchers used only one year of data and had constraints because of certain coding in the American Community Survey.