Project Overview

One Million Black Women: Closing the Wealth Gap is a Goldman Sachs initiative investing $10 billion in direct capital and $10 billion in philanthropic support over the next decade to help narrow opportunity gaps facing Black women. Grounded in research, the initiative forges partnerships with Black women–led organizations and other groups to address the disproportionate gender and racial biases that Black women have faced for generations and that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Goldman Sachs and the Urban Institute launched the One Million Black Women Research Partnership in 2022. This learning community will engage with three impact pillars―child care and early education, housing, and workforce and wages―to guide the partnership's collaborative work.

In the partnership’s first year, we invited faculty and researchers from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to develop new products addressing the persistent racial gaps in earnings and wealth that Black women experience. Each scholar selected for cohort I considers the impact of structural factors, including racism, classism, and sexism, on Black women’s earnings or wealth, examining the intersections of these mutually reinforcing systems of disadvantage.