Black women are the fastest-growing demographic of entrepreneurs, but what’s driving the trend?
TheGrio...
Wells Fargo’s latest report reveals Black women-owned businesses grew by 13% in 2025, and revenue rose by 6%.
Black women have become the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country.
According to the latest The Impact of Women Businesses report from Wells Fargo, between 2024 and 2025, Black women-owned employer businesses grew by 13%, and their revenue was up almost 6%. Meanwhile, Black women-owned businesses without employees grew by 13%, and revenue surged by 8%. (This compared to female-owned businesses, which grew at a rate of 4.4% during the same period of time.)
However, beneath the story of this growth is the fact that it’s happened not just out of ambition but also out of necessity.
After the American workforce was badly hit last year from mass layoffs across a variety of sectors, cuts to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and the growing embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) further fueling a reduction in the workforce, it’s no secret that Black women were among the most impacted. Unemployment among Black women climbed in 2025 from 5.4% to a rate of 7.3% by December, as federal job cuts disproportionately hit them. And, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, over 300,000 Black women lost their jobs. All of this has forced Black women to find other means to support themselves.
“You don’t see that same loss with Black men, you don’t see that same loss with other groups of women,” Valerie Wilson, a labor economist, told the New York Times of the drastic change. “It was a sharp and unique decline in employment for Black women,” Wilson added.
Speaking out about the rising job loss among Black women in September, Rep. Ayana Pressley called it “discriminate harm.”
“None of this is by accident,” Pressley said, per NBC News. “This is discriminate harm. It is precise and it is targeted. And eventually this harm will come for everyone. But the patterns of it, the precision of it, it’s a predictable playbook. It is not happenstance.”