Imagine a Black Woman walking across the boardroom in depictions from the late 90s and early 2000s. A slickback bun and soft makeup with a light-colored silk blouse and pencil skirt – the uniform of every woman (white or otherwise) striving to make their way atop the corporate ladder. While this wasn’t exactly asked for or mandatory, it was always an unspoken rule for Black women to assimilate into whiteness and codeswitch the best they can to be accepted into these dominant white spaces. For decades, this is how Black women, despite working twice as hard to earn half as much as others, made their employers happy.
But, not anymore.
Black women have long paid the cognitive tax of codeswitching to keep the status quo comfortable and to find their hard-earned, very well-deserved place. In recent years, there has been an ever-increasing trend of rejecting assimilation and complacency of giving in to the white normative expectations. More Black women are standing up to be their authentic selves.
And more Black women are being laid off. The moment Black women stopped playing by the rules and reclaimed their identities, corporate America could not live with that and responded with mass layoffs. What is merely being termed as an economic downturn and financial choices is basically a structural punishment designed to put Black women again in the boxes designed by white people. But there is a big difference between now and then. Black women are not giving in to this anymore.
What’s Happening in Corporate America Right Now?
While working on our first report on the Women of Color, predominantly Black women, in STEM, with data spanning six years, we paid special attention to how the data we collected correlated strongly with the economic results we witnessed across the country. As reported, approximately 600,000 Black women experienced unemployment from January 2025 to the fall of 2025. There has been a significant reduction in the number of employers sponsoring women-, Black-, and Latino/Hispanic-focused organizations. Concurrently, in 2025 and 2026, we have all witnessed the mass exodus of high-achieving, US-born professionals or migrant descent from corporate America.
Between the aggressive pushback and rollback of DEI programs, the targeted layoffs of People of Color, Black people, and Indigenous populations, over 300,000 Black women have been pushed out of the workforce. The unemployment rate rose to a crisis-level 7.3% before the counting stopped being published. While all the economic pundits and tech gurus will tell you that AI is replacing jobs or that the political climate is responsible for this upheaval in the corporate sector, our interactions with the Women of Color and the data for our upcoming report ___ tell a different story.
PositiveHire’s latest study represents a dark reality that has always been on the surface, but has been intentionally relegated to the margins. White America is a patriarchal power structure designed to control generations after generations of People of Color, especially Black women, and treat them as inferior. But when Black women stopped asking for approval to be their authentic selves, it has delved headlong into the ocean to regain its control over them.
We are not paying the Cognitive Tax anymore!
Women in the PositiveHire dataset reported self-doubt, confidence, and insecurity issues before COVID and even during it. However, post-COVID, there is an intense, sharp decline in such language in favor of language centered on self-advocacy, healing, reliance, and community. The behavioral pivot was supported by further shifts toward entrepreneurship, working more on passive income projects, and taking leads and demanding ownership of their ideas within their companies through intrapreneurship as well. Post-COVID, nearly 40% of the women in the dataset reported starting something new within the company, turning record-level profits, designing and executing more meaningful projects, and building new teams from scratch.
The promises of corporate DEI made during COVID turned out to be hollow PR strategies that ended just as things started getting harder politically. This brought a massive change for women of Color, especially Black women, who decided to stop codeswitching, altering themselves, and staying in environments fueling burnout and deteriorating mental health for an extended period of time. These positive changes were witnessed through the change in self-representing language in the dataset.
Reimagining Retention – The Way Forward
In our upcoming report, we discuss in depth how corporate America needs to step up and elevate its diversity management practices. The box of compliance and reliance on code-switching would no longer work. The aggressive pushback and the ever-increasing reliance have helped women, especially Black women, build more independent tables as they take the lead in their own careers and journeys.
To the leaders and managers reading this: retention should be reimagined and redefined as self-determination for WoC. There should be an increase in co-designed opportunities to engage them in skill-building initiatives and to receive support for entrepreneurial aspirations. Read our report to find out more about what your diverse talent needs and why you are losing them so quickly!
And to the Black women reading this: your authenticity is your most prized possession. Keep using your voice and pushing back against the system that was designed to oppress you. We have had enough. We have always charted our own way, and we will continue to do so, but not at our own expense anymore!
