Businesswoman looking at data visualizations on a glass wall in a modern office
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Hundreds of thousands of black women have left the American workforce this year. A growing number of them have no intention of returning as workers.
The exit is easy to miss if you only read the top line. The unemployment rate for black women fell from 7.07% to 5.73% between March and July, which looks like a recovery until you look at the denominator. Their labor force shrank by 387,000 during this period. The number of black women not working at all increased by 454,000. The rate improved because people were no longer counted.
Brookings calls this the exit economy. The frame is correct and incomplete. Being pushed out is not a choice. What you do on the other hand is, and the data on this page tells a different story: Black women are now the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country, with employer businesses led by Black women increasing 13% between 2024 and 2025, compared to 4.4% for women-owned businesses overall.
Amanda Spann has a name for the turning point. “These layoffs subsequently led to disinvestment,” she says.
Spann wrote I have an app idea: The essential guide to building an app without any technical knowledge for Simon & Schuster and founded The App Accelerator, the program based on the book. She has coached more than 30,000 entrepreneurs in the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean over two decades and says she is the only Black woman with a top 10 bestselling software design and startup title. Your students are not 23-year-olds in hoodies. They are estate planners, speech therapists, thirty-year gynecologists, and corporate veterans who are tired of asking for permission.
“The labor market caused the break,” says Spann. “AI has removed the barriers to building. In this gap, women decided they deserved better than what they were given and began redistributing their capital, time and trust from a system to themselves.”
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Competence was never the problem
The layoffs that created this cohort were not random. College-educated Black women were the hardest hit of any educational group in 2025, with their employment ratio falling 3.5 percentage points as federal layoffs and buyouts hit a sector in which nearly half of Black workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher. The ID card that was supposed to isolate them had the opposite effect.
Spann reads this as the end of an argument.
“When the opportunity presented itself, we over-indexed, educated ourselves, built the experience, checked every box, only to watch the rules change and the entire game be redesigned right from us.”
So the question has changed. “Do we even want to continue playing a game that was never designed to reward us fairly, fairly and honorably,” she says, “or would we rather build something that is ours?”
What sets 2026 apart from any previous round of this question is the toolset.
“This is one of the first times in American history that we actually have the formal training, know-how and tools to change the outcome ourselves,” says Spann.
Where the AI tools let you down
Creating software no longer requires learning to code. Lovable, Replit and Bolt have mastered this. Spann points out that a0.dev is worth keeping an eye on for anyone developing mobile devices, as the majority of the space is optimized for the web. Their timeline numbers are the headline: What took a non-technical founder six months to two years now takes six to eight weeks, sometimes days. Costs, which run into the tens of thousands, now start at around $20 a month, with more sophisticated builds costing between $300 and $700.
Then she tells you where it breaks.
“The tools have focused on speed, not strategy,” says Spann. “Very few of them tell you whether your idea is worth developing, who your user is, or what to do after you develop it.” The second failure is quieter and more expensive. “The tools for building software have gotten insanely good, but the tools for deploying that software still assume you’re a developer. Many founders can build the front end just fine and then hit a wall trying to actually get it into production.”
Her ID³ framework is the answer she developed for this gap: four phases, ideation through design, development and deployment, executed in sequence. The playing field is not speed, but order. “Most advice in this area, including AI tools, assumes you already know what’s worth building and goes straight to how,” she says. “ID³ starts a step earlier when deciding what is actually worth building, and this is where non-technical founders historically lose the most time and money.”
She clearly expresses the contrast with startup canon: “Lean Startup assumes you can build and asks you to validate. ID³ assumes you can’t build yet and gives you the validation, the strategy and the build path in one sequence.”
The stakes are not abstract. Spann puts the cost of such a mistake at up to $50,000 and nearly two years for the average non-technical founder. Skip the basics and AI will simply get you there faster: “You may still end up with a product that you can’t monetize, a build with real security vulnerabilities, and a tool that you ultimately can’t ship.”
The founders who prove it
Steve Lowe ran an estate planning practice with spreadsheets that limited the number of clients he could serve. He built a client management dashboard for himself and then licensed it to other estate planners. Since launching in October 2024, Spann said, Lowe’s has brought in more than $500,000 in additional revenue and 17 corporate partnerships and is headed toward $1 million this year. “I had no idea about app development and felt that nothing was impossible in this field, even though I didn’t have a software background,” he said.
Coming from sales with no product experience, Erica Bunton and her husband built GoodRoots, a maternal health platform that allows postpartum women to scan products at home and in the supermarket to clarify their diet. She brought the problem and lived experience with her. The AI did the rest.
Anthony Small and his team developed Wagabond Pets, a pet medical records app that won $15,000 in the University of Maryland Business School pitch competition. He never gave up on anything.
“We’ve had the idea for Wagabond Pets for years and kept finding reasons to wait,” Small said. “While we’re building Wagabond, I’m still working on my day job, and the ID³ framework has made that possible.”
Spann would like to highlight this detail. Nobody moved. Nobody raised a round. “This is not a sideline story,” she says. “This is a people-to-people infrastructure for innovation in life that is already working.”
The part that should worry you
If someone can ship an app within eight weeks, the obvious risk is that the market will drown in mediocre apps. Spann’s answer is validation, not volume. “A lot of mediocre apps come from building what you think people want rather than what the data supports,” she says. She argues that its founders “gradually gain clarity before they build, not after.”
The harder problem lies outside their curriculum. Black-owned startups accounted for 0.3% of total venture funding in the U.S. in 2025. And the entrepreneurial boom has a scale gap: Too few Black women-owned businesses ever become employer firms that manage payroll and anchor a local economy. Ownership without capital is a lonelier version of the same trap.
Spann’s institutional partners assume that training itself is the infrastructure. The App Accelerator is now operating in HBCUs, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the city of North Miami through a partnership between Howard University and the PNC Foundation. She reports that 73% of participants arrive with no knowledge of product development, 92% expect to complete an app by the middle of the program, and 100% advance their idea before the end of the cohort. Robert F. Smith called the program “a bridge to opportunity.”
The macro case is easier to make than it should be. Nearly one in three American workers lack basic digital skills, in an economy where they are now required for 92% of jobs.
The door that was never built
Spann refuses to take her own rarity as a compliment.
“I am the only Black woman with a top 10 bestselling title in software design and startup, and that fact says less about me and more about what’s left on the table,” she says. “This is not a diversity problem. This is billions of dollars of unrealized economic potential hidden in people for whom the industry never built a door.”
Your five-year call is a bet against the card. “The most compelling startups don’t come from Silicon Valley,” she says. “They will come from people with deep expertise who know their industry intimately and are now able to learn product development and build the future they know they deserve.”
The women leaving the workforce this year were counted as they left the workforce. Whether they are included in the return depends on what they build and who decides on the financing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasminebrowley/2026/07/16/laid-off-then-locked-in-millennial-women-are-building-software-instead-of-rsums/
