Dive Brief:
- More than 6 million Black women, or 57% of Black women in the workforce, live in “pre-emption states,” according to a March report from the National Partnership for Women & Families, A Better Balance and the 75 Million. This term describes states where laws on the books don’t mandate paid sick leave and bar local governments from passing their own paid sick day laws.
- Overall, 25 million people in the U.S. lack access to paid sick leave, per the report. Just over 40% of the U.S. working population lives in a pre-emption state.
- Black women are disproportionately affected by this phenomenon because they tend to live in the South, according to the report, which is the region for many states with pre-emption laws.
Dive Insight:
These findings about a lack of paid sick leave coverage for Black women are compounded by earlier research from the Economic Policy Institute, which indicated that Black women experienced the greatest job loss out of all groups of women and lost more jobs compared to Black men throughout 2025.
Black women’s employment fell by 1.4% to 55.7%, which EPI noted was the sharpest decline in 25 years. And while a number of external factors can influence employment rates for certain demographic groups, a study by Great Place to Work showed that a concrete way to ensure women stay in their jobs is by providing a healthy workplace culture.
“Instead, [Black women] are being forced to shoulder caregiving and breadwinning responsibilities without the most basic workplace safeguards,” Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families and co-lead of The 75 Million said in a statement. Pre-emption states are harmful for Black women and harmful overall, because Black women have some of the highest rates of labor force participation in the U.S., Frye said.
“Black women are disproportionately suffering from a lack of access to paid sick days, and are often forced to make impossible choices between their health and paycheck as a result,” she added.