One thing has been true in each single Intelligent Woman Finance survey since we began operating them in 2020: Black girls make up the most important racial group in our neighborhood, constantly outpacing each different group we monitor — 45% of respondents in 2020, 46.1% in 2022, and 50.6% in our most up-to-date 2025 survey. Which means over half the ladies in our most up-to-date survey determine as Black or African American. You possibly can see this development for your self throughout our full Girls & Cash survey sequence.
That’s not a small element. It signifies that after we speak about “what girls instructed us about cash,” we’re, largely, speaking about what Black girls particularly instructed us. And their monetary actuality deserves to be named immediately, not folded quietly into a mean.
The numbers behind why this issues
Black girls are navigating a monetary panorama formed by compounding, well-documented gaps that don’t present up equally for each girl:
Black Girls earn 63 cents for each greenback white males earn
In comparison with white males’s earnings, white girls earn 78 cents on the greenback, however Black girls earn simply 63 cents. That hole alone represents a large quantity of misplaced lifetime revenue earlier than you even account for debt or investing. (Institute for Girls’s Coverage Analysis, 2025)
Black Girls carry the best pupil mortgage balances of any group
Black girls graduate with the best common pupil mortgage balances of any group, and greater than half of Black feminine school graduates report actual problem repaying that debt. Largely as a result of curiosity compounds sooner than the wage hole permits it to shrink. (American Affiliation of College Girls)
Black households maintain simply 10 cents of wealth for each greenback white households have
The median Black household within the U.S. holds roughly fifteen cents of wealth for each greenback held by the median white household. And that hole persists even amongst households with a bachelor’s diploma or increased. (Brookings Establishment, 2024)
The ‘Black Tax’: Supporting members of the family comes at an actual monetary value
Many Black girls supporting members of the family financially every month — typically referred to as the “Black tax” — face an added drain on financial savings that isn’t factored into most traditional monetary recommendation. It’s cash that has to go some place else earlier than it may possibly go towards your personal targets, and it may be genuinely arduous to construct momentum round.
These aren’t summary statistics. They’re the backdrop each Black girl in our neighborhood, and past it, is constructing her monetary life in opposition to.
Professional tip: Plan for the Black tax
In the event you’re financially supporting members of the family every month — the “Black tax” — don’t deal with it as a leak in your price range. Give it its personal line merchandise, identical to hire or groceries, with an precise greenback quantity hooked up. Naming it turns an invisible drain into an actual, seen quantity you may plan round. And it makes it loads simpler to see what you even have on your personal targets, as a substitute of feeling like your targets maintain quietly dropping to everybody else’s wants.
And but, the information on resilience is simply as actual
Right here’s what we need to sit with simply as firmly: regardless of each a type of structural headwinds, the ladies in our neighborhood, nearly all of whom are Black girls, report actively investing, actively constructing emergency funds, and actively working towards turning into debt-free at significant, measurable charges, yr after yr. Discover the numbers behind that resilience in our Girls & Cash survey sequence.
That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not simply particular person grit both — although there’s loads of that too. It’s what occurs when monetary training is definitely constructed to be accessible, judgment-free, and relatable, as a substitute of assuming a place to begin (a wage gap-free one) that doesn’t mirror most ladies’s actual lives.
Associated posts
Need extra of what our neighborhood’s information reveals? Hold exploring:
Why we constructed Intelligent Woman Finance the best way we did
That is precisely the hole we got down to shut from day one. Monetary recommendation that assumes away the wage hole, the wealth hole, or the truth of supporting prolonged household isn’t recommendation that really works for an enormous share of the ladies who want it most.
We wished a unique start line — one that claims: right here’s the place you really are, right here’s what you’re really up in opposition to, and right here’s an actual plan that works from there, not from some assumed clean slate.
If any of this resonates with you, right here’s the place to begin:
- Our 30+ free programs cowl budgeting, debt payoff, and investing; constructed to work no matter your beginning revenue or debt load.
- Our 1-on-1 teaching offers you a plan constructed particularly round your numbers, your loved ones obligations, and your targets — not a generic template.
- Our debt payoff assets are constructed round actual methods for actual balances, with out disgrace hooked up to how you bought there.
The wage hole and the wealth hole are structural issues, and no quantity of particular person budgeting fixes them by itself. That work issues too, and it’s greater than any certainly one of us. However constructing actual monetary confidence and actual, tangible progress within the meantime? That’s completely nonetheless attainable, and the ladies in our neighborhood are proving it each single day.
Sources: Intelligent Woman Finance Girls & Cash Survey Sequence, 2020–current; Institute for Girls’s Coverage Analysis (IWPR), Black Girls’s Equal Pay Day evaluation; American Affiliation of College Girls (AAUW), pupil debt analysis; Brookings Establishment, “Black wealth is rising, however so is the racial wealth hole.”