DEI Rollback: White Women Gained 142K Jobs. Black Women Lost 319K.

Send us Fan MailWhen DEI programs were rolled back in 2025, white women were quietly the biggest losers of leadership ground we had spent a decade gaining. But Black women lost almost everything. In this episode, Jonelle pulls the receipts on the first full year of the DEI rollback, including a McKinsey and Lean In Women in the Workplace finding that C-suite representation for women dropped from 29 percent to 25 percent in a single year, and a Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies report showing 200,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce in 2025 alone. Karen and Jonelle work through why white women have been the number one beneficiaries of DEI without realizing it, why patriarchal assimilation made it easy for white women to vote against the very programs that lifted them, and what it actually looks like to defend DEI as white women instead of waiting for white men to do it. The episode also uncovers the buried Black origins of Memorial Day, traced by Yale historian David Blight to a May 1865 ceremony organized by formerly enslaved Charlestonians.CALLS TO ACTIONAudit one thing this week. Pull up your company's last DEI report, your alma mater's diversity statement, or your favorite retailer's supplier diversity page, and notice whether the language has quietly disappeared.Pick one Black woman-owned business in your zip code and spend money there before the end of the month. Then tell a friend why you went.Have one DEI conversation with another white woman in your life this week. Not a fight. A real one. Bring the 142K versus 319K number and ask her what she thinks it means.We would love to hear from you! Contact us at [email protected] want to create more ways for this community to connect, learn, and take action. Tell us what you actually want here: https://www.whitewomenwakeup.com/community-surveySupport the show