Women of color make up growing share of direct care workforce

In 10 years, women of color went from representing 45% of the direct care workforce to 53%, according to new data from consulting firm PHI. The sector added 1 million women of color to the payroll from 2009 to 2019, the data show.

Overall, 87% of direct care employees are women and 61% are people of color, PHI said.

Direct care jobs—positions like personal care aides, home health aides and nursing assistants—are often hard to fill because they are low-wage jobs with little room for career advancement, PHI analysts said. PHI's research estimates that long-term care employers will have a need for 7.4 million workers from 2019 to 2029, including 1.3 million new jobs.

"For too long, direct care workers have faced a range of systemic inequities that harm their quality of life and devalue the direct care job," PHI President Jodi Sturgeon said in a news release.

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Even though women and people of color make up the majority of the direct care workforce, they have less financial stability than male and white workers in the space, PHI found. Forty-eight percent of Hispanic workers and 47% of Black workers in the sector live in low-income households, while 41% of white workers do. For women, that number is 40%, compared to 38% for men, PHI said.

"It's clear that in an already marginalized workforce, women, people of color and immigrants generally fare worse than their counterparts, which means that we must focus significant support on these critical populations," said Robert Espinoza, vice president of policy at PHI.

To tackle these inequities in the direct care workforce, PHI on Tuesday launched a new institute, The Direct Care Worker Equity Institute, that will conduct studies, perform advocacy and develop workforce interventions.