The Exit Project (EP)

Since January 2025, more than 600,000 Black women have been pushed out of the U.S. labor market, according to economist Katica Roy; the Institute for Women's Policy Research puts its own figure at more than 250,000 job losses in just the first eight months of that period alone. The Exit Project exists to document what those numbers can't: how the women living inside the stats narrate what happened, and where they draw the line between what was taken from them and what they chose.

*This study was formerly called the Voluntary Exit Project. I chose to drop “voluntary” from the title, because the word assumed an answer the research hadn't earned yet.

Why This, and Why First-Person

A statistic like 600,000 can tell you an exit happened. It can't tell you whether it was a layoff, a resignation forced by an unlivable schedule, a door closed quietly through a DEI rollback, or something the person genuinely chose. Only first-person testimony can locate that boundary, and this wave, the post-2025 rollback of DEI programs and federal downsizing specifically, is where that boundary is being drawn right now, in real time, for hundreds of thousands of women at once.

Method

Responses are coded across four domains: Exit Typology, Decision-Making, Psychological and Emotional experience, and Agency and Self-Framing, how the participant themself narrates their own role in what happened. The project builds its typology inductively, from patterns in the sample itself, and its claims are scoped to what the sample shows, not extended as representative of Black women's exit broadly.

How to Participate

Tell Me How You Left

If you're a Black woman or person of marginalized gender who has left the paid labor force since January 2025, quit, were pushed out, laid off, stepped back, retired early, the Exit Project wants your account, in your own words.