After 24 years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Sharon Davis never expected to be fired. Losing the job in April 2025 shook more than her finances; it challenged an identity she had built around her work.
Her experience now brings renewed attention to a troubling finding: research shows that Black women who strongly identify with the “Strong Black Woman” stereotype face a greater risk of depression.
“It was a gut punch,” said Davis, who is 55 and was an associate director for operations and quality management. “I’ve never been fired before.”
She is precise about what the job was to her, which is also why losing it landed the way it did. “My job was everything,” she said.
What came after was not only the money. It was the reasoning she and other Black women turned on themselves, and that part now has people studying it.
Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist and the founder and host of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, puts the mechanism in one sentence. “When our value only comes as a function of the roles that we serve, we forget that our value is inherent,” she said.
Christy L. Erving, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, studies what it costs. In her research, “Black women who endorse this notion of being a Superwoman or a Strong Black Woman actually experience greater risk for clinically diagnosed depression and also depressive symptoms,” she said. Where a woman loses identity and control at the same time, she said, “there’s an increased risk of poor mental health.”
Erving’s finding comes from a 2024 study she co-authored using the Health and Retirement Study, with a national sample of more than a thousand Black women aged 51 and older.
That is the shape of it. The work goes, and the story a woman has been handed about being able to carry anything turns around and asks her why she could not carry this.
Davis had been doing that work for 24 years when it stopped being hers.
