This week’s article spawns from a personal outlook on jobs in our country, and my (at least) three-time completion of all the Netflix episodes of the hit show, "Being Mary Jane". This week, I want to address how black women are kicking ass and taking names in the American workforce.

According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, nearly 4.5 million black women hold four year college degrees in the US, more than any other era in this country, and including women from past times.

“At the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, about 10,000 American blacks — one in 1,000 — were college educated… Today the world is different. There are more than 4.5 million African Americans alive today who hold a four-year college degree.”

Numbers don’t lie.

“The breakdown is as follows: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 3,215,000 blacks in this country who have a bachelor’s degree. And there are an additional 1,078,000 African Americans who have both a four-year college degree and a master’s degree,” according to the Journal. “An additional 150,000 blacks hold a professional degree in fields such as law, business, and medicine. Another 136,000 African Americans have obtained a doctorate. Overall, 4,579,000 African Americans possess a four-year college degree or higher.”

In addition, Forbes Magazine described black women as the “fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in America.”

“The number of businesses owned by African American women grew 322 percent since 1997, making black females the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the U.S.,” according to a Forbes article last year. “Overall, the number of women-owned businesses grew by 74 percent between 1997 and 2015—a rate that’s 1.5 times the national average, according to the recently published ‘2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report’ commissioned by American Express Open.”

Black women are today’s corporate masterminds: the country’s executives, reporters and leaders in the making, but despite their credibility, very few are hired for the positions they are qualified for. There is a tremendous gender gap in the states, and several reports say so.

In March, The Washington Post reported that, “Fewer than five percent of the CEOs of companies in the S&P 500 are women. In the current U.S. Congress, women hold just 20 Senate seats and 84 in the House of Representatives.” Those reports and the following were collected this year by the American Association of American Women.

“Just six states have female governors, only 26 percent of colleges and universities are headed by women, and just 18 percent of the largest nonprofit organizations have female chief executives,” said the Washington Post’s Jena McGregor.

So the question is this: How are women, black women, certified and qualified for executive positions, but are almost never promoted to such positions?

Nonetheless, black women are becoming contenders in the fight to contribute and receive reward from America’s economic pool.