When I stepped out on my own as an entrepreneur earlier this year, I decided to pay it forward and offer free one-on-one career coaching sessions. I threw up a link to a form on Instagram and within 48 hours, more than 200 applications poured in.

The vast majority of the bunch were Black women and a whopping 90% said they were looking to quit their jobs by the end of the year. Now, I’m the first to admit this survey sample is far from nationally representative. My social media following comprises largely women of color between the ages of 25 and 44 and since the majority of them know me from my podcast Brown Ambition, they tend to be an especially career-driven group.

But, with some additional research, I realized my rudimentary survey was really a snapshot of a much larger trend in corporate America: Black women really are leaving traditional 9-to-5 jobs at staggering rates. Here’s why.

Our jobs were ravaged by the pandemic

Black women saw the slowest job recovery since January 2020 and suffered the largest decline in labor force participation, according to the Labor Department. This was largely because women of color over-indexed in the types of jobs most susceptible to cutbacks such as travel, tourism, and service jobs.

Today, the unemployment rate for Black women sits at 6.9% compared to an overall unemployment rate of 4.8%.

“It took until 2018 for Black women’s employment to recover from the Great Recession, and now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased,” wrote Janelle Jones, chief economist for the Labor Department.

We’re tired of working twice as hard for unequal pay

It will take more than a century for Black women to reach pay equity in the U.S. and, honestly, a lot of us just don’t have that kind of patience.

Among the women who filled out my career coaching application, the overwhelming majority (84.5%) said higher pay was their top reason for quitting. The reality is that quitting one job for a new opportunity can often lead to much higher salary increases than remaining with your current employer.

As a Black woman who had the added economic disadvantage of graduating during a national recession, I learned to aggressively pursue jobs with higher pay in order to catch up to my peers. On average, I increased my income 38% each time I quit for a new opportunity.

This won’t be the case for everyone, of course. But when the labor market is as desperate for talent as it is these days, I encourage working women to consider leveraging their skills for new, higher-paying opportunities elsewhere.

We’re launching our own businesses and starting side hustles

Black women are among the fast-growing group of entrepreneurs in the country. Between 2014 and 2019, women-owned businesses grew by 21%, but Black women-owned businesses grew at a whopping rate of 50%, according to a recent study by American Express. The number of Black women running a side business outside of regular work increased 99% compared with an increase of 32% for all ‘sidepreneurs’.