A version of this Q&A first appeared in La Fronde’s Sept. 15 newsletter. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sidney Madden, a freelance journalist and NPR Music alum, is set to debut her short film, ‘And Counting,' which explores why so many Black women are struggling to find and keep work right now. According to the latest federal jobs report, nearly 700,000 Black women are unemployed, and more than 240,000 of them have left the labor force between May and August alone.
For the documentary, Sidney spoke with Black women who've been laid off in the last year, including Teen Vogue's former culture editor Kaitlyn McNab, about dealing with financial instability, the stigma of unemployment and the pressure to take the entrepreneurial route when they've felt squeezed out of the job market.
For all the La Fronde readers in NYC, you can catch the premiere of 'And Counting' on Sept. 17 at BRIC. For now, that's the only place where you'll get to see 'And Counting,' but Sidney hopes to secure enough funding to release a longer version of her film. I caught up with her about how the whole documentary came together and what she learned while making it.
Congratulations on this! This is such an important topic that I think often goes understated on how serious things are. To start, how did this all come together?
When I first saw the stat [about the Black women unemployment rate] at the beginning of 2025, it said something like 200,000 or 300,000 Black women had been laid off, specifically in the federal government. But as the year went on — and this is a stat that affects me as a Black woman — it became this convoluted talking point for politicians to say "this is a canary in the coal mine," and it became verbiage and jargon. So what I wanted to do with the documentary is make it a communal conversation and connect this number to the real people living it every day.
The four people featured in this documentary are cross-generational Black women. They all worked in different sectors — the federal government, marketing, media, education — and they were all dismissed from their jobs or laid off in 2025. The circumstances can feel very personal and individual, but the point of this documentary is that this is not a coincidence, and it's not just because the job market is bad and shaky right now. This is a targeted attack on destabilizing Black women as community leaders and the backbone of our communities.
There's so much data to back it up. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that when Black women are laid off, they stay out of work longer than any other demographic — any white woman, Asian woman, Hispanic woman, or any man, period. It's about 30 weeks on average that they're without work or underemployed, and that's just the average. When I dropped the trailer, I wasn't expecting the response it got. So many people shared their own personal stories in the comments, some of them laid off for more than a year, sharing stories of how their position was dissolved during a restructuring and then someone else was hired in their place. It's clear that Black women are the collateral damage in the economic instability we're going through right now.