If You're a Young Black Woman in Corporate America, You're More Likely to Be Underpaid—And Stressed
It was an enviable dilemma. Two galas on the same night. Luckily, they were at the same place, Manhattan’s gleaming, glass-paneled Time Warner Center. First stop: the fourth floor, for a party raising money for school reading programs. Tickets cost $1K a head for a cocktail reception in a lounge with sweeping views of Central Park.
I wore a one-shoulder black Tahari dress and strappy Stuart Weitzman heels. On arrival I was greeted by an acquaintance known to make five-figure gifts to the organization. After some small talk about summer plans (mine: a rental house with friends in Montauk, the Long Island fishing village that’s become more swanky than shanty—Malia Obama celebrated her 19th birthday there a couple of summers ago), I tucked my Ferragamo clutch under my arm and rode the elevator up to the second event. Also $1K a ticket, this one supported a charter school network. More canapés, more Champagne, more celebrities (hi, Katie Couric!).
Although I was one of very few Black faces in the crowd, I was pretty sure my polished appearance, my degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Georgetown Law, and my career as an attorney signified that I was just like everyone else. I dressed the part, I talked the part. With my Narciso Rodriguez perfume, I even smelled the part.
But here was the reality: A mentor had covered the price of my admission to both events. I attended UNC on a scholarship that included a stipend for living expenses; to complete my JD, I borrowed $100,000. The designer perfume, which has become my signature scent, was a gift from a friend who works in fashion. Those $250 Stuart Weitzman heels? I’d frantically charged them a decade earlier, after a corporate head of diversity pulled me aside at a networking event to warn that my $80 flats would be held against me. And the whole time I was chatting about Montauk, I was fretting about my budget—specifically, the $400 I’d just promised to lend a relative in need.
Even though I make six figures and have a plum job in the Big Apple, I am like many Black women in the sense that my family wasn’t able to launch me financially into the world. It’s simply not in our experience. In so many cases, we’ve had to work harder to get where we are; once we get here, we have to work harder to stay. There’s a lot riding on our success—people are counting on us. And so we live with the unsettling sense that with the slightest tug, our carefully conceived plans for success could instantly unravel.
I’m 33 years old. No matter how much I achieve, it never feels like enough. And in many ways it isn’t enough—to pay off my student debt, buy a home, amass the kind of retirement funds I should have by now. Yet, in the eyes of my rural North Carolina family, I have achieved the American dream.
Anne Price has heard countless stories like mine, from professional Black women who are exhausted from sprinting just to stay in the middle of the pack. A policy analyst who’s spent the past eight years as head of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland, Price says, “I’m listening and nodding my head because what you’re describing—first-generation college student, professionally successful, still struggling to keep yourself and your family afloat—is so common. It really speaks to the issue of why race, and not just class, is so important to understanding financial stability and well-being.”
Price, now also president of the Insight Center, points out that more and more Black women are pursuing college degrees—the most important move we can make to secure a place in the middle class (or so we’re told); 26 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, up from 20 percent a decade ago. Yet we’re running into two major roadblocks, says Price:
“The first is that it’s really hard to build wealth when you don’t have it passed down to you.” Among college-educated Black families, the average amount of inheritance—including cash, home, and other assets—is under $40,000, compared with over $150,000 for college-educated white families, according to a 2018 study in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. About 87 percent of those Black families receive less than $10,000, as opposed to about 59 percent of the white families.
The second roadblock, says Price, is that Black women are more likely to find themselves taking care of family members financially. “This strips away about 27 percent of a Black family’s wealth,” she notes. It also forces some hard accounting. “The choice is, ‘What do I do: Pay off my student loan? Start to save for retirement? Put away money for my child’s education? I can’t do all three and take care of parents or siblings.’”
My white professional peers don’t really get this. When I recently mentioned to one of them that I was considering taking on a second job as an adjunct professor to pay for my eventual wedding, she chided me for doomsday thinking. (Easy for her to say when her parents had come up with $50,000 for her nuptials.) Many of my white classmates have already paid off their student loans, if they had any, and are starting to purchase homes. (A white friend from law school recently lamented her inability to find a satisfactory New York City apartment in her budget—which is $1 million.)
Even white people of more modest means might have parents who could take out a loan for a wedding, or help with a down payment on a house, or at least serve as a guarantor for an apartment. It’s disheartening to know your family can’t—as my friend Maya, a Black media professional in Washington, D.C., could tell you, “We’re supersmart and accomplished and have degrees, and yet we’re still doggy-paddling,” she says. “Sometimes I go on Facebook and look at the profiles of white people from my high school, and they’re visibly rolling in dough. We’re doing good things; it’s just that the gulf between them and me is so striking.”
I was raised by a single mother who worked full-time as a secretary and never made more than $25,000 a year. A heart attack had forced my grandmother to retire from nursing before she turned 40, but somehow, through a combination of loans, credit cards, and putting in extra hours, she and my mother managed to cover our bills.
When I received my first law firm bonus back in 2012 ($10,000 before taxes, a dizzying amount to me then), I had already earmarked a portion for my mom, to help her make a down payment on a new car. I now keep a separate savings account for unexpected family expenses and regularly send money home. Although at 54 my mom is relatively young and putting aside money for her retirement, I’m already worrying that I’ll need to find extra funds to cover shortfalls. I’m right to be concerned: Married Black women age 60 and older with a bachelor’s degree have only $424,000 in median wealth (all assets including cash but minus debts); their white counterparts have $778,000, according to researchers from Duke University and the Insight Center.
Sending money to our parents is something 45 percent of college-educated Black households do, says a 2017 study in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review. (Only 16 percent of college-educated white households do the same.) Take Hannah, whose story will sound familiar to many Black women my age. Hannah always knew her family was working-class: Her parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia and were raising four children primarily on her father’s salary. She was accepted to several prestigious universities; she decided on Dartmouth because of its generous financial aid package. At school, she juggled work-study jobs at a call center, the library, and an administrative office.
“I didn’t want to add more tension by asking my parents for money,” she says. As soon as Hannah graduated and started working at a nonprofit, she began using part of her limited income to help with one-off expenses, like a new computer. She now has a better-paying job in media, but over the past few years, family obligations have become an even larger percentage of her monthly budget; since her dad’s health forced him into partial retirement in 2018, bills have been piling up. Hannah sends spending money to her siblings, two of whom are still in college, and pays for part of her mother’s tuition in a master’s program. The expense that stresses her out the most, though, is the credit cards.
“There was a significant period during which my mom stopped working in order to care for the four of us, and she used credit cards to make up for the shortfall,” she says. “The interest penalty is really high, so paying that off has become my main priority.” Hannah is hoping to save for a down payment on a home of her own—after her family’s credit cards are paid off, after her mom gets her master’s, after her siblings graduate and find jobs.
The obligation to help relatives as much and as soon as possible can taint our relationships with them. An African American professor I know says she doesn’t mind providing financial assistance to her mother, but she does feel uneasy about the way it’s changed their dynamic. “I don’t go shopping with her anymore because I know she’ll ask me to pay for things,” she says. She also thinks twice before sharing success stories with her family. “I once won an award for $10,000, and my mom’s reaction was ‘How much are you going to give me?’”
“There is definitely stress associated with the expectation that you’ll be able to provide,” explains Angela Neal-Barnett, PhD, a psychological sciences professor at Kent State University who runs a program called Sisters Offering Support (SOS), which facilitates meet-ups for Black professional women who may be experiencing anxiety. “Many grew up as the golden child, so their family looks to them to take care of everything. Even in childhood and adolescence, many Black women were placed in a caregiving role. Once they get into the workforce, especially if they have the ‘fancy’ job like attorney or doctor, it’s expected that they will step up: If a person dies, you’re to pay for the funeral; if someone gets in trouble, you’re to pay bail. Extended family members see you as the bank.
“I work with SOS participants to help them set a budget with a line item for requests from relatives, if that’s what they want,” says Neal-Barnett, author of Soothe Your Nerves: The Black Woman’s Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic, and Fear. Sometimes the allocations are for the entire family; some are broken out by person. Either way, she stresses the importance of staying within budget, even if the requests keep coming: “We help people realize that saying no to a loved one does not make you a bad person.” The main lesson: Pay yourself first.
That can be hard to internalize, though. It was my therapist who helped me recognize something that’s been stoking my financial anxiety: No one in my immediate family has gained a foothold in the middle class. As Valerie Jarrett, former adviser to President Obama, likes to say, you can’t be what you can’t see. I’m the first to attend college, let alone law school, and I have no role models showing me how I’m supposed to do everything I want to do, as well as everything that’s expected of me. In many ways, I am the role model.
Education is supposed to be our ticket. Yet even here, Black women are stuck in a hole. The 2019 report Deeper in Debt: Women and Student Loans, published by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), found that Black women amass an average debt load of $30,366 by college graduation, compared with $21,993 for white women and $19,486 for white men.
The same AAUW paper noted that after graduation, Black women struggle the most with repayment: 57 percent reported being unable to afford all essential expenses while dealing with student loans. According to a recent report from the liberal think tank Demos, the typical white male borrower has paid off 44 percent of his loan balance 12 years after beginning college, while the typical Black female borrower has seen her student loan balance grow by an additional 13 percent within the same period. Forty-five percent of Black female borrowers who started college in 2003 defaulted on a loan within 12 years—compared with only 20 percent of white female borrowers.
The report noted the double bind faced by Black people: “As we have slowly made progress opening the college gates over the past four decades, Black students are far more likely to borrow than white students and borrow in higher amounts...Students of color are contending with an increasingly expensive higher education system against the backdrop of centuries in which Black and brown people have been intentionally shut out of the ability to build wealth and pass it along to future generations. In other words, many students are not just borrowing against their future, but borrowing because of the past.”
Those loans can feel like shackles. According to the Duke and Insight researchers, the median wealth of a single Black woman in her 20s with a bachelor’s degree is −$11,000 (meaning that her debts are $11,000 more than her assets and savings). For married Black women in their 30s with a bachelor’s, it’s −$20,500. In contrast, a married white woman in her 30s with the same degree has a median wealth of $97,000. Even more shocking: Single white women without a college degree have $3,000 more in median wealth than single Black women with a bachelor’s degree.
Black women earn only 68 cents for every dollar paid to a white man, while white women earn 79 cents.
Then there’s the crushing fact that Black women are, as a rule, underpaid: We typically earn only 68 cents for every dollar paid to a white man (while white women earn 79 cents). And according to the 2018 Women in the Workplace survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 60 Black women are promoted. Black women account for less than 1 percent of partners at law firms, according to the National Association for Law Placement. On top of this, many Black female employees are forced into the de facto role of “diversity ambassador,” which involves extra work
to make our offices less hostile for other Black employees—often for zero additional compensation, overtime, or bonus.
“Black workers are having to navigate environments where companies say they want more diversity but aren’t putting resources or support into achieving that,” explains Adia Wingfield, PhD, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. Wingfield’s forthcoming book, Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy, explores how the healthcare industry, in particular, relies heavily on Black employees to do the extra labor required to make their organizations and services more accessible to communities of color.
“Organizations are engaging in what I call racial outsourcing,” she says. “They leave the actual work of creating diversity to the Black professionals and rely on those employees to make workplaces more welcoming and supportive for people of color.” Black women are often caught in a catch-22 because “they want to be supportive of colleagues of color, but at the same time, the extra support work isn’t usually compensated.” Many of the women Wingfield interviewed said they were aware their employers were taking advantage of their willingness to be helpful.
Danielle, a friend of a friend, was working as a litigation associate at a New Jersey
law firm when she was asked to serve on a task force to create a diversity website and publication for the firm. Although she was honored to be part of the project, “when you work at a law firm where there’s such an emphasis on billable hours, diversity work distracts from the billable tasks. Yet that’s how the firm valuates associates.” Almost everyone asked to serve on the task force was a minority. Danielle didn’t feel that she could say no: “It would not have been looked well upon if I had declined to participate.” The project involved significant time and intellectual labor—none of which, she feels, was factored into her raises or annual bonuses.
Even when our companies don’t overtly put that kind of pressure on us, we put it
on ourselves. Last summer, when I realized that one of my firm’s interns was a Black student who had just finished his first year at Howard University School of Law, I immediately decided to take him under my wing. As the only Black attorney in my department, I felt responsible for making sure he succeeded at the internship, introducing him to other potential mentors, and connecting him with resources. After he expressed concern about his chances of landing a corporate law firm position for the following summer, I sprang into action, setting up informational interviews with partners and senior in-house counsel who’d be in a position to leverage their network on his behalf.
Over the next eight weeks, I took him out for countless coffees and almost-daily lunches; we even went to a few legal galas. This was satisfying work that I wanted to do—one of my mantras is that it’s okay to be the first but it’s not okay to be the last—but in hindsight, I recognize that some of that time could have been better spent on projects that might lead to a promotion (and in turn a higher salary, and a faster payoff of my law school debt). It’s frustrating that this extra labor is something most of my white counterparts don’t have to think about doing or feel guilty about not doing.
Every time I go to a professional conference, there’s a panel on wealth building, and the advice is usually something like, “Invest in venture capital!” When I asked Anne Price for her opinion on the best way forward, she said the conversation needs to shift from personal responsibility to more systemic fixes. “The bootstrap narrative, in which we tell people that hard work is the best path to success, diverts us from what really landed us in this position—and puts the onus on the individual to haul herself out of it,” she says. “But Black women are already doing everything this country has told them is important to build a good and dignified life. What we need to do is change the system.”
That would mean new, sweeping policies like erasing student loans, or subsidizing real-estate down payments and closing costs for people in neighborhoods historically discriminated against by lenders.
It’s encouraging that presidential candidates are already talking about these ideas; we’ll likely hear even more as the 2020 election approaches. In the meantime, while I’m doing everything I can to increase my net worth, I’m also trying to change the way I evaluate my self-worth. Not long ago, I told my therapist about a recurring nightmare of struggling
to climb to the top of a mountain, only to have a large shoe appear and kick me to the bottom. I didn’t need a mental health professional to explain that this represents my fear of falling back into the poverty of my childhood, but I did require her help in dealing with the near-constant concern it’s been causing me lately.
She encouraged me to stop blaming myself for what I haven’t accomplished and focus instead on what I have. She also gave me a few useful tips: I now write down small achievements (e.g., hitting my savings goals for the month or paying off a credit card balance) and refer to them when I get discouraged. I try to remind myself that I can ask for help (from a boss or a friend or a financial planner). And to find my own inspiring role models, I’m developing relationships with older Black women attorneys who share
how they’ve made it to the top and how they’ve managed their disillusionment with the system.
All very helpful, right? And it cost me only $400—the out-of-pocket price of a month’s worth of counseling.
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