Giving Compass' Take:

• Brentin Mock explains how CityLab and urban sociologist Junia Howell worked to create a liveability index to rate cities for black women. 

• What can we learn from disparities in index scores between cities? How do cities in your state rank? How can cities be improved for black women? 

• Read about black women succeeding in the workplace. 

Last September, the city of Pittsburgh released a report on gender and race disparities that concluded, perhaps to the city’s own shock, that Pittsburgh is the worst city for black women to live in by just about every metric. The aftermath of that bombshell was a bevy of columns and essays from black women either expressing vindication for leaving Pittsburgh or—for those still stuck there—questioning whether they should stay. Listing the many reactions to the report, local columnist Tereneh Idia wrote for Pittsburgh City Paper:

Then there was the “Should I stay or should I go?” battle among Black Pittsburghers. The shame of leaving, the pitying of those who want to stay. The “self-righteous” stay-camp, the “selfish” go-camp. The “self-preserving” go-camp and optimistic “we-built-this-city” stayers. Which also meant Black folks were arguing among ourselves (again) instead of looking at the systems, policies, and people responsible (again).

For the “should I go?” camp, there’s a question that also confronts many other American black women: Where exactly is a livable place for African-American women? To explore answers to this question, CityLab collaborated with one of the lead researchers of the Pittsburgh disparities report to look at a similar analysis across America’s largest cities. The result is a window into some of the best and worst cities for black women.

Of course, no ranking should obscure the fact that there is no city doing complete justice to black women’s lives. According to “The Status of Black Women in the United States” report, produced by The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, black women overall saw their median annual earnings decline by 5 percent between 2004 and 2014 despite the fact that the share of black women with at least a bachelor’s degree increased by 23.9 percent in that same time period. Today, black women earn roughly 61 cents for every dollar made by white men across the nation.

So the question of where black women move is often a matter of which city will fleece them the least. CityLab worked with urban sociologist Junia Howell to analyze where best metros for black women are located based on a ranked livability index. The index looks at inequities for black women in terms of income status, health conditions, and educational accomplishment. We also took the average values across all three of those categories to see how metros ranked for black women’s overall outcomes.

Unlike the initial research on Pittsburgh, this analysis looks at metropolitan areas rather than just the cities proper. We didn’t examine every urban metro in the U.S. given that population sizes could skew results—the effects might appear exaggerated in small metros with large numbers of black women, such as in some southern, rural places; or, where black women have tinier numbers in larger metros. Instead, we look at the 42 largest metropolitan areas with more than 100,000 black women residents for our rankings.

Read the full article about black women in cities by Brentin Mock at CityLab.