Women - particularly women of color - were hit particularly hard when the job market turned south in 2020, with some estimates pegging the economic impact of these damaged careers at up to $13 trillion in global GDP by 2030.

Staggering economic numbers aside, new data from NEOGOV subsidiary GovernmentJobs.com shows that black women are being routinely discriminated against in the hiring process for government jobs. The research included in the report includes data collected from NEOGOV's applicant tracking system that serves city, county, and state governments across the country. From the beginning of 2018 to the end of 2019, NEOGOV analyzed 16 million applicants by race and ethnicity and 17.4 million applicants by gender. Additionally, data was collected from a survey conducted by NEOGOV in September 2020 that included 2,700 minority job seekers who applied for public sector positions.

The findings are that among candidates deemed qualified for a job in city, county or state government, black women were 58 percent less likely to be hired than white men. Over all, qualified women were 27 percent less likely to be hired than qualified men. This is only made more troubling by data which shows black women are more likely to apply for public sector jobs versus private sector - the former being perceived as a more even playing field for blacks, versus a more discrimination-prone private sector.

The breakdown comes later in the workflow, well after the civil service exam - troublingly, it appears to happen as a result of the interview process, implying bias on the part of the interview team. As a result, the white males are close to 3X likely to be hired versus black women.

This reinforces the importance of paying close attention to the candidate funnel at every stage -seeing drop-offs of this magnitude in key process steps is a clear red flag to any TA leader who is paying attention.

According to an analysis conducted by The Center for American Progress of the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, Black women are far more likely than white and Asian women to be single heads of households and, therefore, the main source of support for their family. "In 2018, households headed by Black women constituted 41.2 percent of Black family households, and households headed by Hispanic women constituted 24.4 percent of Hispanic family households. In contrast, white women headed only 12.7 percent of white family households, and Asian American women headed 11.7 percent of Asian American family households."

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