New Data Says Women and Black Employees Are the Biggest Losers Under RTO and Trump Policies

Ongoing workplace and political policy trends are disrupting, or even eliminating millions of U.S. jobs. But recent data suggests those changes penalize two historically disadvantaged groups of people more severely: women and Black workers. The mix of private and public policies is again widening the gender wage gap and driving unemployment rates for Black workers at a higher rate than the national average.

The trend among employers to tighten return to office (RTO) mandates by requiring increased or full-week in-person workplace timepresence is a major factor in this disruption, which hits women especially hard. Other reasons for this distorted effect include the Trump administration’s mass layoffs of federal employees, and its accompanying drive to eradicate diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) practices by government agencies, contractors they work with, and even private sector businesses.

Those pressures have coincided with — or perhaps directly caused — a widening of the gender pay gap that had been narrowing since the 1960s, and a sharp increase in unemployment among Black Americans.

Return to office, return to pay inequality?

“Are RTO mandates reversing decades of progress on gender pay equity?” asked a recent post by Flex Index, which tracks changes in remote work rules at 9,000 companies. “The timing is striking: the wage gap has widened two years running; women now earn 81 cents on the dollar, down from 84 cents in 2022, the lowest since 2016.”

That broadening of gender pay disparity came as Fortune 100 companies requiring full week in-office presence rose from 16 percent to 29 percent in the past two years, according to Flex Index. It also cited a recent Baylor University study of 3 million employees that found “women are nearly three times as likely to quit when RTO mandates hit.”

But leaving a job over lost flexibile work arrangements — usually a response from working mothers who can’t find or afford childcare for the additional hours they’d be spending away from home — isn’t the only way tightening RTO rules appear to be setting women back.

The Baylor study found that 46 percent of women employees ordered to spend more time in the office had negotiated taking on lower-level positions that allowed them to maintain their flexible working arrangements. Just over 40 percent more opted lateral job transfers with the same goal.

Those moves often involved women employees accepting pay cuts, with one executive participating telling Baylor researchers she took a $30,000 a year pay cut to avoid going to the office five days a week.

Those responses to tighter RTO mandates have coincided with the median income of U.S. men rising by 3.7 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a recent Washington Post report. During the same period, that pay metric remained mostly unchanged for women. The paper also cited data for the first six months of 2025 showing women aged 25 to 44 who have young children dropped by 3 percent as a proportion of the total workforce.

“These results suggest that the cause for leaving a firm after RTO are not the usual reasons for promotion or mobility,” a summary of the Baylor study said. “Instead, they highlight that employees are willing to sacrifice career advancement for remote work options.”

Anti-DEI efforts hit Black workers twice as hard

Many employees taking pay cuts or quitting in the face of new RTO restrictions are Black women, who also facing increasing employment challenges arising from shifting political policies.

The current trend of most companies to limit hiring only to replacing departing workers has hit Black employees harder than most, and may well make bouncing back even harder. In a recent New York Times article, the unemployment rate among Black Americans has risen from 6 percent to 7.5 percent in the last four months, while the rate among white workers dipped slightly to 3.7 percent.

The jobless increase among Black workers has come as the Trump administration slashed over 250,000 positions from the federal workforce, whose composition has more closely reflected the racial makeup of U.S. society than private companies — especially in entry-level positions. The Pew Research Center said 48.3 million people self-identified as Black in 2023. That’s about 14.4% of the U.S. population. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2022 said Black employees made up about 12 percent of the national workforce, and noted that 18 percent of Black and Hispanic men worked in lower-paying service occupations, compared with 12 percent of White men.

Meantime, companies working as federal contractors quickly and meticulously applied new White House bans on DEI policies in order to avoid losing government business. For decades, those same employers carefully complied with federally imposed equal opportunity requirements, including in their recruitment and hiring Black applicants and other minority job candidates.

But with those policies now banned and drawing retribution from the White House when they are applied, those same companies may no longer be as available an option for the rising number of unemployed Black people looking for work. Meaning that as the wider labor market grinds to a near stop, Black job applicants may be facing an even tougher road back to employment than other candidates for the foreseeable future.

“I think the speed at which things have changed, in such a dramatic fashion, is out of the ordinary,” Valerie Wilson, director of the race, ethnicity and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, told the Times. “There’s been such a rapid shift in policy, rather than something cyclical or structural about the economy.”