Why are Black Professional Women Leaving America to Seek Better Lives Abroad?

According to Madamenoire, black women are “leaving in droves because they are fed up, feeling unsafe and betrayed by the system.”

“This is a movement. I think Black women have discovered that the American dream is not necessarily possible in America.”

Stephanie Perry, Founder of ExodUS, a platform that helps black women find opportunities abroad.

Wealth disparity is worsening for Black women. Black Americans in general have only one-sixth the wealth that White Americans have on average. Disparities also exist in terms of access to healthcare, education and social mobility. Bloomberg has reported that since Covid-19 an increasing number of Black professional women are leaving America to find jobs, run businesses and bring up kids abroad.

ExodUS Summit is a digital platform that helps women how to get out of the United States and find better opportunities of life and employment. It was founded by Stephanie Perry, a pharmacy technician who lost her job and decided to leave the US to seek a new life elsewhere. I felt like my life revolved around my work, but traveling around the world showed me that there is another way. You can have a full life in other countries that we don’t necessarily have in the US,” she told Bloomberg.

In 2022, 4,500 women across America signed up for the ExodUS summit. Its Facebook group has 9,000-member where they share tips and host meetups to discuss plans to move abroad.

“This is a movement,” Perry says. “I think Black women have discovered that the American dream is not necessarily possible in America.” According to Perry, most popular destinations for these women moving abroad are Mexico, Portugal, Costa Rica, South-East Asia and the Caribbean. The America dollar provides significant advantages in these relatively cheaper countries in terms of the currency exchange and purchasing power parity.