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WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, on Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, government watchdog Accountable.US released a new analysis showing Trump’s poorly designed, poorly implemented Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) gave a disproportionately small share of available funds to businesses owned by Black women.

As the COVID-19 pandemic ravages the economy and millions of Americans have been infected and died, Black communities face particularly acute hardships on both public health and economic fronts. The faulty design of the PPP disadvantaged Black-owned and other minority-owned businesses in the application process — many were boxed out of obtaining assistance altogether, and as much as 41% of Black-owned businesses are not expected to survive the crisis.

New Accountable.US research shows that this disparity was even greater for Black woman-owned businesses — of loans that included demographic information, less than 0.5% went to Black woman-owned businesses, as compared to the 70% that went to businesses owned by white men. In fact, available data shows that just one Black woman-owned business received a PPP loan above $5 million.

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The federal government’s abject failure to provide adequate aid to Black woman-owned businesses is another affront to a community that is fighting crises on multiple fronts. Black women business owners deserve better. Our government needs to prioritize relief for businesses of Black women before we lose them for good.”

Accountable.US spokesperson, Jenna Kruse

Black Women’s Equal Pay Day marks the number of days into 2020 — plus the entire year of 2019 — it has taken Black women to earn the same amount that white, non-Hispanic men earned in 2019 alone.

According to an analysis by Accountable.US of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans offered by the Small Business Administration (SBA) through the CARES Act: 

  • Less than 0.5% of PPP loans that included demographic data went to Black woman-owned businesses while 70% of those same PPP loans went to businesses owned by white men.
  • Just one Black woman-owned business received a PPP loan above $5 million and just 35 received a PPP loan above $1 million. On the other hand, 332 businesses owned by white men received PPP loans worth more than $5 million and 6,636 received PPP loans above $1 million.
  • The average loan for a Black woman-owned business was between $305K and $746K, while they received at a maximum of $313.7 million — by comparison, in just the first several weeks of the program, around 80 publicly traded companies received more than $330 million.
  • In a hypothetical scenario where Black woman-owned businesses received as much as they possibly could and white man-owned businesses received the least amount they could, Black women business owners still only received just 1.5% of the number of PPP loans businesses owned by white men received.

Accountable.US’s analysis may be viewed here.

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