Business

Future CEOs, erased: the economic cost of losing Black women in the workforce

Published

3 months ago

September 19, 2025

The year 2025 will be remembered for a stunning reversal in workforce equity: almost 300,000 Black women exited the labor force—thinning a pipeline that was already too narrow.

This isn’t a seasonal fluctuation or statistical footnote. It’s a strategic failure with long-term consequences.

Black women have long been a cornerstone of America’s economic engine—driving participation, powering key industries, and anchoring family incomes. Now, that foundation is fracturing. And the fallout is more than short-term—it’s a direct threat to corporate succession planning, innovation, and growth. The U.S. economy has always depended on Black women’s labor. In fact, no group of women in America has historically had higher labor force participation than Black women. Yet today, we’re watching them disappear from the workforce at an alarming rate—with little alarm and even less intervention.

The consequence? A corporate succession crisis in slow motion. Because when companies lose Black women today, they aren’t just losing high-performing contributors—they’re forfeiting the very leaders their future stability depends on.

The leadership cliff Is getting steeper

In 2025, Black women account for approximately 6.4% of the U.S. workforce. But they make up just 0.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs.

That’s not a representation gap. That’s a pipeline collapse.

And the exits we’re witnessing this year threaten to push that collapse into freefall. Between February and June 2025, Black women’s labor force participation dropped by 1.8 percentage points—a decline that translates to an estimated $37.2 billion in lost GDP. In February alone, Black women lost 266,000—the sharpest decline of any demographic that month.

If we’re serious about building inclusive leadership, that number should set off alarms in every boardroom in America.

Because companies cannot diversify the C-suite with talent that’s no longer in the building.

This isn’t a theoretical concern. Today’s middle managers are tomorrow’s senior vice presidents. Today’s directors become future CEOs. And the current rate of attrition is effectively erasing Black women from that trajectory before they even reach the inflection point.

What’s driving the exodus—and why it’s compounding

The reasons Black women are leaving the workforce aren’t mysterious. They’re measurable, structural, and cumulative.

1. Disinvestment in DEI is acting like a demand signal. After years of progress (however incremental), 2025 is the year many companies quietly reversed course. DEI programs were deprioritized or dismantled. Corporate partnerships with Black-led organizations were paused or cut entirely. In the public sector, Black women in federal employment declined by nearly 33%, compared to just a 3.7% drop in the broader federal government workforce. When inclusion becomes optional, Black women read between the lines: you’re not wanted here.

2. Black women are bearing the brunt of layoffs—again. In sectors like education, government, and healthcare, Black women are overrepresented in roles most vulnerable to cuts and underrepresented in roles most likely to be protected. April’s jobs report showed this clearly. These aren’t just job losses—they’re career disruptions. And in a system that rewards uninterrupted tenure, they stall upward mobility.

3. The psychological toll of bias and burnout is accelerating exit velocity. Black women face some of the highest rates of bias, isolation, and microaggressions in the workplace. Many have described being “worn out from discrimination in corporate America,” a key reason why Black women are increasingly choosing entrepreneurship—not as a passion project, but as a survival strategy.

4. Structural inflexibility is forcing unnecessary trade-offs.

More than 51% of Black households with children under 18 are led by breadwinner moms, yet these women earn just 44 cents for every dollar paid to white breadwinner dads. Black women are overrepresented in rigid, low-wage occupations—like home health aide and administrative support—that lack paid leave, schedule flexibility, and caregiving support. As a result, they face impossible trade-offs: they’re more likely than white women to be penalized professionally for caregiving despite being equally ambitious in their careers.

5. Political backlash has made equity itself a liability.

The politicization of DEI has created a chilling effect across sectors. In 2025, companies that once made public commitments to racial justice are staying quiet—or backpedaling. At Walmart, shareholders warned that abandoning equity programs could “erode long-term value.” The cost of retreat isn’t just reputational. It’s financial.

The cost of corporate complacency

Let’s be clear: this is not just a diversity problem. This is a productivity, profitability, and performance problem.

The exodus of Black women from the workforce is draining companies of essential talent, perspective, and leadership potential. It’s also leaving money on the table—lots of it.

Consider this:

● Closing the earnings gap for Black women could generate an additional $300 billion in U.S. GDP and create 1.2 million jobs.

● Companies with more diverse executive teams are more likely to outperform on innovation and earnings.

● 56% of Gen Z workers say they won’t accept a job offer from a company with no visible leadership diversity.

And yet, many companies are minimizing rather than mobilizing. Some are treating this workforce departure as a blip. A moment that will self-correct.

It won’t.

Leadership pipelines don’t bounce back on their own. Once they erode, they take decades to repair. And every high-potential employee who exits the workforce today is one less candidate in the board room tomorrow.

What must change—and why now

Companies that want to compete in the future must act now to retain and accelerate Black women’s talent. That means:

● Tracking attrition and promotion by race and gender—at all levels, not just entry roles.

● Enforcing pay transparency and correcting compensation gaps.

● Investing in sponsorship programs that give Black women access to power, not just advice.

● Standing firm on equity commitments, even when politically inconvenient.

Above all, it means recognizing this moment for what it is: a turning point.

Black women have shown up for the economy time and time again. They’ve led, built, innovated, and persisted. If companies fail to show up for them now, they’ll be gambling with their own future—undermining innovation, growth, and resilience.

Because when Black women leave the workforce, we don’t just lose productivity.

We lose future CEOs.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.

Source link

Business

Crypto wallets now feel a lot more like Venmo

Published

20 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Crypto wallets are having a moment. The latest example is Kalshi announcing an integration with Phantom to offer event contracts to the wallet’s 15 million users. While the prediction market angle is intriguing (these markets are a HUGE story right now), the news also highlights the light-speed advancements taking place in the wallet realm.

Consider how, just three years ago, the only thing you could do with Phantom was access the Solana blockchain. MetaMask, meanwhile, was limited to Ethereum. Sure, alternatives like Coinbase Wallet offered access to more assets but, like other wallets of the time, it suffered from a ghastly interface that required users to run a gauntlet of sub-nets, confusing gas fees, and more. The experience was miserable for crypto natives. For everyone else, it was nigh impossible.

Then something changed. After years of promises, developers finally succeeded in pushing the clunky technical elements to the background, while adding a host of practical features. The result has been an uptick in useful real-world applications, including Phantom’s Kalshi offering, and also in souped-up new offerings like Coinbase’s rebranded Base as well as Robinhood Wallet.

This new generation of wallets offers the best aspects of decentralized crypto by making the customers the ultimate custodians of their assets. At the same time, they offer interfaces that are starting to feel like Venmo or online banking apps—which should be table stakes for any of these products looking to break into the mainstream. The question now is where these wallets will fit in day-to-day life. Will they become the successor to web browsers, as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and others have predicted, or will they be something else entirely?

JP Richardson is the founder and CEO of Exodus, another leading wallet that recently added a suite of stablecoin payment tools. He told me the browser analogy doesn’t really fit, arguing wallets are better seen as a superior type of banking app—one that will be able to bridge disparate financial services. “We believe it should not be three apps, it should be one app. Why can’t you take your brokerage app, and tap and buy groceries?” he asked.

Trevor Traina, the founder of a wallet called Kresus, whose customers include Sotheby’s auction house, has another take. He believes the tools will have a much broader footprint. He sees a world where wallets are not just for managing our assets, but also become repositories for vital documents such as a will, insurance, or a law license.

The technology is certainly there to support Traina’s vision. That includes blockchains, which can supply a permanent and tamper-proof ledger, but also newer privacy tools like zero-knowledge proofs. Together, this tech provides a way to safeguard all of one’s personal data, while also being able to meet the constant need to show identification that modern life demands. All of this could get more interesting still if wallets like Sam Altman’s World App, which includes an anti-bot biometric layer, get more traction.

Now for the cold water: Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come—or come anytime soon at least. I spoke with analyst James Wester, one of the shrewder observers of the crypto and fintech scene, and he pointed out that the idea of an “everything app” has been around for years but shows few signs of getting adopted. A big reason for this is inertia.

Right now, our existing apps and payment tools work pretty well, so it’s unlikely we’ll see mass wallet adoption anytime soon without some sort of external nudge. Wester points out that Apple Pay and Google Pay have been around for a decade, yet a huge number of people keep paying with physical cards—because they can. This will change as younger people who are well versed in tech and crypto make up a greater portion of the economy. But until then, wallet makers may have to find a way to make their suddenly attractive products downright irresistible.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

DECENTRALIZED NEWS

Stablecoins at YouTube: In a landmark moment for crypto in mainstream commerce, YouTube is now giving U.S. creators on the platform the option to receive payment in the form of PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD. (Fortune)

Circle’s new privacy coin: Stablecoin giant Circle is working with an upstart blockchain called Aleo to issue a spin-off of its flagship token called USDCx, which will let banking clients obscure private transaction histories. (Fortune)

Charters for all: The OCC issued national trust bank charters to Circle, Ripple, BitGo, Paxos and Fidelity Digital Assets. The move comes amid a broader move by the agency to issue more such charters, which do not allow taking customer deposits or accessing FDIC insurance. (Axios)

Tokenization tipping point? The SEC issued a no-action letter to the DTCC, which will let the country’s main clearing house custody stocks on the blockchain. The permission applies only to 1,000 of the most liquid stocks, but is a key first step for what is likely to be a wholesale shift toward putting custody and record keeping on-chain. (Bloomberg)

Think I’ll buy me a football team: Tether, whose CEO is Italian and a lifetime fan of Juventus, made a bid to buy the storied football club. Its board rebuffed the offer even as the publicly-traded club struggles to keep up with financial dominance of Premier League teams and Real Madrid. (Reuters)

MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK

Do Kwon in Podgorica, Montenegro, in 2024—before he was extradited to the U.S.

Filip Filipovic—Getty Images

Do Kwon is arguably the second most notorious fraudster in crypto history. Now, the Terra Luna founder, known for his “steady lads” rallying cry, will get to test how steady he is after a U.S. judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison. If it’s any consolation, this earns him Fortune Crypto’s weekly Main Character designation.

MEME O’ THE MOMENT

Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to reinvent finance. Now, he’s at the New York Stock Exchange.

The cult of Satoshi keeps spreading as the New York Stock Exchange becomes the latest venue to install a physical statue of the Bitcoin creator.

Source link

Business

Magnificent 7 isn’t that magnificent: 5 stocks have underperformed the market this year

Published

51 minutes ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

S&P 500 futures were up 0.44% this morning after the index lost 1.07% on Friday, a day after setting a new all-time high on Dec.11.

The index is still up 16% year-to-date—an above-average performance for U.S. stocks. Analysts have long complained that the index is dominated by the “Magnificent 7” tech stocks. Between October 2022 and November 2025 roughly 75% of gains in the S&P 500 came from this handful of companies.

But as we draw near to the close of the year, only two of those stocks—Alphabet and Nvidia—have beaten the market as a whole, year to date:

What appears to be happening is that investors are picking between winners and losers in tech, as opposed to just herding into the index or tech stocks as a whole. That’s probably healthy if you are worried that AI spending is creating a bubble in tech stocks.

The best example of this is Oracle, which is up a respectable 14% year to date but has declined 42% from its high in September. Investors have not liked the extra debt that Oracle has taken on, at increasingly wider interest spreads above the risk-free benchmarks, to fund its AI buildout.

Wall Street is not yet ready to declare the AI gold rush a bubble. “If this is a bubble, it is still in its early stages,” Deutsche Bank analysts Adrian Cox and Stefan Abrudan said in a recent deep-dive research note on AI.

Thus far, the capital expenditure and the revenue is real: it’s hitting the top and bottom lines of Alphabet and Nvidia, and that’s why valuations for those companies are so healthy. “The charge is led by well-established Big Tech companies with multiple revenue streams, who are paying for their investment in data centers mostly out of free cash flow and from which they are generating immediate returns from enterprise customers,” Cox and Abrudan wrote.

“We think that reports of a bubble are exaggerated (for now),” they said.

Elsewhere: Asian markets were down today but markets in Europe largely rose in early trading. The STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.63% at the time of writing; The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.74%.

Here’s a snapshot of the markets ahead of the opening bell in New York this morning:

S&P 500 futures were up 0.44% this morning. The last session closed down 1.07%.
STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.63% in early trading.
The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.74% in early trading.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 1.31%.
China’s CSI 300 was down 0.63%.
The South Korea KOSPI was down 1.84%.
India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.12%.
Bitcoin was at $89K.

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now.

Source link

Business

Visa launches stablecoins advisory practice to keep up with crypto wave

Published

1 hour ago

December 15, 2025

Jace Porter

Another major financial institution is doubling down on stablecoins and on crypto. This time, it’s Visa. The company announced on Monday the launch of its Stablecoins Advisory Practice, a service which aims to aid fintechs, banks, and other businesses with their strategy and implementation of stablecoins.

“Helping our clients grow is frankly the reason we exist in stablecoin,” said Carl Rutstein, global head of Visa Consulting and Analytics, in an interview with Fortune. “What Visa is doing in this space is just one more area where our clients have a need.”

Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a constant value by means of reserves that peg them to a fiat currency, typically the U.S. dollar. They have recently been embraced by a wide range of companies from the traditional financial sector following President Donald Trump’s signing of the Genius Act in July, legislation which creates rules for issuing the digital asset. In the months since, other payments powerhouses like Paypal and Mastercard have boosted their stablecoin capabilities.

Rutstein said that Visa’s stablecoins advisory has dozens of clients, among whom are Navy Federal Credit Union, the credit union VyStar, and a financial institution called Pathward. He said the practice will help businesses with their strategy, tech and operations, and implementation of stablecoins. Its clients use cases for stablecoins include cross-border transactions, especially to countries with volatile currencies, and business-to-business transactions. After using Visa’s advisory, Rutstein said some businesses may push forward with stablecoins, while others may conclude there is not a customer need. The company said that it expects the practice will grow to hundreds of clients.

Visa is by no means new to crypto. In 2023, the company piloted stablecoin settlement using USDC, and it now has over 130 stablecoin-linked card issuing programs in more than 40 countries. Visa also has about $3.5 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume.

“Stablecoins may represent an opportunity to enhance speed and lower cost in payments,” said Matt Freeman, senior vice president of Navy Federal Credit Union, in the statement. “So with the support of Visa, we are evaluating how this technology could fit into our broader strategy to deliver meaningful value to our 15 million members worldwide.”

Source link