U.S. official statistics make it clear: Latina women surge as a powerful force in the country’s workforce, they earn more and more college degrees, making it easier for them to work, and they grow in numbers as entrepreneurs.
This is happening despite Donald Trump’s government’s pressures and restrictions on immigration, and the still significant labor gaps that affect Hispanics women.
According to the latest report (November) on the U.S. employment situation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 61% of Hispanic women participate in the U.S. labor market, which is two points higher than the 59% national rate of all women’s participation.
This means that by 2018, according to this statistics, the Hispanic women participation rate in the whole U.S. labor pool was 7.5%. Projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics say that in 2028 this rate will grow to 9.2%.
Latinos –women and men– currently have a 17.5% sharing in the labor force and in 2028 they will rise to 20.9%.
” For Latinas, the impulse to go to school and work, as with many immigrant groups, often comes from watching their parents sacrifice as their families struggled to find a foothold in the economy,” Craig Torres, Viviana Hurtado and Alexandre Tanzi analyze in an thorough Bloomberg news report, which also accounted for statistics from the Bureau of Labor.
As a matter of fact, Hispanic women recorded a high growth in college attendance and in obtaining degrees in diverse areas, the three journalists elaborate in this report, based on the U.S. Census.
In the last decade, Latina women with college degrees in the United States doubled to 4.8 million (they were 2.4 million), which increases their ability to enter the workforce.
In the article the reporters tell the story Mayra Macías as an example. She is a daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up in Chicago watching her father work 14 hours a day as a garbage man. Macías graduated from Yale University with a degree in American Studies and Ethnicity, Race and Migration, and she is now the executive director of the Latino Victory Project.
” The U.S. needs immigration to supplement its labor pool if policy makers desire higher economic potential over time,” the journalists write. “While immigrants share of the United States is just below the historic highs set more than a century ago, some estimates of unauthorized immigration are declining,” they add.
They quote Randy Capps, director of U.S. research at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington: “Without immigrants, and their children, our labor force would actually shrink.”
Latina entrepreneurs are also rising asa force for the U.S economy, as we reviewed in November in IQ Latino. The latest report on the State of Latino Entrepreneurship, which Stanford University makes since 2015, states that Latina women own 25% of the businesses run by Hispanics, with an annual growth of 10%, which 4% more than businesses run by Latino men. Hispanic women’s companies generate $66 billion in annual sales and employ 600,000 people.
The three Bloomberg’s journalists, on the other hand, add figures from an American Express report that says companies run by racial minority women have risen to nearly double since 2014 among all businesses run by women. They report on figures by a New York City government program that serves women entrepreneurs: since 2015, between 35% and 40% of the 9,000 women who participated in this program are Hispanic.
It is not at all rare that Hispanic women proceeds from doing jobs to survive to owning their own businesses. Reporters tell the story of Ramona Cedeño, 43, who came to New York from the Dominican Republic when she was 18. She then worked at a shoe store to help her mother with the bills and to raise money for her three sisters to emigrate as well. She now owns a financial services business.
In addition to the cultural factor, there is that very common situation among immigrants: working can mean not only keeping accounts up to date, but having a roof over their head –not being on the street.
That is what Leslie Rangel, a daughter of Mexicans from Austin, experienced herself. ” For us, failure means literally being on the street,” she says quoted in the Bloomberg’s news report. Rangel lived in a homeless shelter when she was eight years old and is now a 30-year-old television anchor.
“I knew that college would equal never being homeless again,” she says.