A new survey has found that black women are disproportionately affected by the financial effects of COVID-19. The survey, which was done by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s non-profit organization, Lean In, was conducted between April 1st and April 3rd of this year and included 2,986 adults over the age of 18 living in the United States.
The findings revealed that black women (54%) were twice as likely as white men (27%) to say that they’d either been laid off, furloughed, or had their hours or pay reduced because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Black women were more than three times as likely (34%) as white men (11%) to say they wouldn’t be able to pay for basic necessities for more than a month if they lost their income.
Meanwhile, when it comes to those basic necessities, Black women were more concerned about their ability to pay in all three areas they were asked about than white men were: rent/mortgage (60% vs 24%); groceries (43% vs 18%), and child care (13% vs 3%). Overall, women were more concerned than men about paying for basic needs without going into debt, but when the responses were parsed out by race and gender, Black women (59%) and Black men (54%) expressed the highest concern, followed by Latinx/Asian and other women of color (50%).