Fair Wages and Employment

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Economic well-being depends not only on having a job, but on whether that job provides fair pay, opportunities for advancement, and the benefits needed to support a stable life. For women and girls in Forsyth County, especially women of color, longstanding inequities in wages, leadership representation, and access to employer-sponsored health insurance continue to shape their economic realities.

This section examines several indicators that help illustrate these differences, including who holds leadership positions, which workers have access to employer-sponsored health insurance, and how wages compare across demographic groups. Alongside these quantitative measures, the Community Cohort offers insights into how residents experience and interpret these disparities. Their reflections highlight not only the scale of the inequities but also the emotional and historical weight they carry for many women in the community.

Together, the data and cohort perspectives help paint a clearer picture of what fair employment looks like in Forsyth County today and where meaningful change is still needed.

Leadership Demographics

This indicator examines who holds leadership positions in Forsyth County, and how those leaders reflect the broader population they serve. We compared the demographic characteristics of chief executives and legislators with the demographics of the overall labor force, and the demographics of educators to the student population, using data from the American Community Survey. These indicators are disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, race/ethnicity by sex, and relationship status, to highlight differences in representation across groups. By comparing leadership and educator roles to the populations they serve, this measure is meant to help better understand how people of different backgrounds are represented in positions of influence and authority in Forsyth County.

When interpreting this data, it is important to note that relationship status only reflects adults who are cohabitating. It does not necessarily reflect sexual orientation, and it does not reflect the relationship status of people who are not cohabitating adults.

Data Visualization

Demographics of Chief Executives and Legislators Compared to those of the Labor Force & Demographics of Educators Compared to Students (2019-2023)

Rethinking Leadership and Representation

This measure began with a question from the Community Engaged Research Cohort: Who holds leadership in Forsyth County, and who doesn’t?

Cohort members were clear that representation belongs in a Gender Lens report. Leadership shapes workplace culture, policy decisions, access to opportunity, and economic mobility. Who sits in positions of power influences whose voices are heard, and whose futures feel possible.

Our initial approach aimed to make that visible. We identified the county’s largest employers and analyzed who occupied executive leadership roles within those institutions. The goal was clarity, and a concrete snapshot of representation. But as we moved toward publication, we paused.

To estimate race and gender composition, researchers relied on publicly available information such as names, photographs, and stated pronouns. Even when done thoughtfully, this approach requires making assumptions about identity based on observation.

And that raised important concerns. Inferring race or gender from appearance risks reinforcing harmful assumptions and misgendering individuals. We had to ask ourselves whether a measure intended to illuminate inequity might unintentionally replicate it.

So we stepped back and returned to the deeper question: Why does leadership representation matter?

The answer is not just about numbers. Seeing someone who looks like you in a position of authority can shift what feels imaginable. It can interrupt doubt and change a trajectory.

We also recognized that leadership extends beyond executive titles. It lives in classrooms, nonprofits, boardrooms, small businesses, and in everyday acts of mentorship. Leadership is often the person who says, “You belong here,” and makes it believable.

In place of demographic estimates based on observation, we chose to center what motivated this measure from the beginning: the transformative power of representation.

The reflection that follows illustrates that power. It is a story about what it means to grow up without seeing yourself reflected, and what changes when you finally do.

Shamika’s story reminds us that leadership visibility is not abstract. It is personal. And it matters.

What Becomes Possible When You See Yourself

By Shamika Munnings

I was born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn by a mother who migrated from Belize with a dream she was already building before I arrived. She would share stories from when she was younger – going to the market on Saturdays as a preteen, selling coconut oil she’d grated and pressed herself while my granny worked other jobs, hiding so no one she knew would see her there. I often wonder how that experience shaped what she believed was possible. And how that belief, in all its love and all its limits, became the blueprint for the opportunities she fought to give me.

She wanted better for me. Access. Preparation. So at thirteen years old, and thanks to family and community, I received a scholarship to attend Wilbraham & Monson Academy –a predominantly white boarding school in Massachusetts – because she believed that kind of proximity to opportunity would help me “succeed” in the US. And she wasn’t wrong. But she also couldn’t have known what it would quietly cost me to move through spaces where no one in positions of leadership looked like me. Where success had a shape that required I contort myself to find it.

I worked hard – harder, it often felt, than I should have had to. I figured things out slowly, found my rhythm late, rode the Greyhound home alone for summer break while others were greeted by their parents in the parking lot. I sought tutoring and attended study hall when I needed it. I graduated with honors. I had Ms. Rosenwald, the school librarian – a white woman who saw something in me worth investing in. She advocated for me, drove me up and down the East Coast on a college tour when my mother couldn’t, made sure Wake Forest was on my list. I will always be grateful to her.

But even with her advocacy, something else lingered beneath the surface. A current I couldn’t name. A quiet, persistent feeling that my natural way of moving through the world wasn’t quite enough. That I had to mask and prove, constantly, that I was capable and that I belonged. That the scholarship securing my seat was not a mistake. Looking back, I understand it more clearly now. It’s a consequence of spending years as an exception in the room. When you learn, without anyone saying it directly, that you must earn what others simply inherit. That the dream is available to you, but only if you work twice as hard to reach it.

This is what I carried with me when I first visited Wake Forest.

And then I heard Dr. Oakes speak.

I was sitting at a welcome event hosted by the Office of Multicultural Affairs and something in me shifted. It wasn’t just what she said – it was the fullness with which she spoke. The way she held every person in that room like their presence there made complete sense. When she looked in my eyes and embraced me, I felt something I didn’t have language for yet. I felt at home. Like I was supposed to be there, and no matter how hard it got, I would be okay – because she was there. Because she was a Black woman in a position of real authority, and she wasn’t performing it. She was inhabiting it, fully, warmly, without apology.

It may have been one of the first times I let myself feel the possibility of being a Black woman – not as something to overcome, but as something to step into. Like a layer of doubt I hadn’t known I was carrying had quietly lifted.

Each time I sat with her after that, and she spoke truth into me, more of that weight released. I found myself responding from a deeper place. Less about who I thought I had to be, and more about who I actually was.

There were moments at Wake when I didn’t know if I belonged there at all. I was navigating academics alongside my humanity. The weight of being a neurodivergent Black woman on a predominantly white campus, while carrying things no syllabus could touch. Eventually, it caught up with me. I didn’t get into the business school. My GPA dropped. And I found myself on Dr. Oakes’ couch, wondering why I should stay.

She didn’t hand me an answer. She saw me. Truly. And then, in a way only she could, she helped me see myself. Not who I thought I had to become to succeed, but who I already was. She redirected me toward psychology, toward Pro Humanitate, toward a version of success that actually fit my life. Her steady, unconditional belief in my worthiness – even while witnessing my wounds – gave me somewhere to stand when I’d lost my footing.

That is what representation does. It doesn’t just inspire in the abstract. It interrupts something. It reaches into the places where doubt has settled and makes room for a different story.

Years into my career, I found myself on the receiving end of a different kind of gift. A supervisor who saw leadership potential in me before I could see it myself. She encouraged me to apply for a Director role at The Winston-Salem Foundation – not because she was certain I’d get it, but because she believed the act of applying would build something in me. I didn’t get it the first time. Years later, I was offered a promotion for the same role. I said yes – scared, but grounded in the belief that I could rise to the occasion, with the right people by my side.

What I know now is that it was never really about the role. It was about learning to see myself as just as worthy and capable as anyone else raising their hand.

Now, I’m in a position of leadership. And I feel the weight and the gift of that reality, at the same time.

I think about the thirteen-year-old girl who left Brooklyn quietly wondering if she could excel without her momma by her side. I think about what it would have meant for her to see, earlier and more consistently, Black women leading not in spite of who they are, but because of it – because of their softness and their fire, their wisdom and their wounds. Dr. Oakes showed me that. She didn’t hide her humanity to lead. She led through it. And something in me expanded with her.

I can’t know exactly what would have been different if I’d experienced that sooner. But I know what it felt like when it finally happened. And I know I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.

So yes, I feel a sense of responsibility. Not as a burden, as a calling. I try to be, for the people I inspire or mentor, what Dr. Oakes was for me. Someone who tells the truth. Who believes and affirms out loud. Who makes belonging and worthiness feel less like something to be earned, and more like a place to begin.

If I could say anything to a young woman standing at the edge of a room she isn’t sure she belongs in, it would be this: the doubt you feel is not evidence of your limits. It is the residue of systems that were not built with you in mind. The fact that you are standing at that door at all speaks to the power of your light. Embody it.
Walk through the door. We need you on the other side.

Community Voices

Another participant, also the primary breadwinner, describes how her partner’s unstable employment makes her salary the foundation of the household. Every shortcoming in pay, benefits, or job security is magnified. She recounts how her job quietly expanded far beyond her original role—more responsibilities, more people relying on her—without any corresponding title change or pay increase. Because her wages hold up the whole household, this unpaid expansion is not just frustrating; it is destabilizing.

Across interviews, women highlight workplace practices that undermine wage fairness even when base pay appears reasonable.

Several describe role creep—taking on more duties, new projects, or wider portfolios without a corresponding raise or promotion. One hospital worker explains that after more than five years, she took on complex referral coordination across multiple departments—learning providers, codes, and systems across the hospital—yet discovered that a new hire walked in making $2 more per hour than she did. She had gone back to school and expanded her role; her pay did not follow.

Another participant recounts years of work before eventually receiving raises and a salaried role that reflect her contribution. She is proud of her recent progress but clear that recognition arrived late, after she had “been doing this work… for the last seven years, eight years.” In both stories, fair wages function as back pay for long periods of under‑compensation.