Employment gains and wage declines: The erosion of black women’s relative wages since 1980

Abstract

Public policy initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, including Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity law, helped mitigate explicit discrimination in pay, and the expansion of higher education and training programs have advanced the employment fortunes of many American women. By the early 1980s, some scholars proclaimed near equity in pay between black and white women, particularly among young and highly skilled workers. More recent policy initiatives and labor market conditions have been arguably less progressive for black women's employment and earnings: through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, the wage gap between black and white women widened considerably. Using data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-MORG), this article documents the racial wage gap among women in the United States from 1979 to 2005. We investigate how demographic and labor market conditions influence employment and wage inequality among black and white women over the period. Although shifts in labor supply influence the magnitude of the black-white wage gap among women, structural disadvantages faced by black women help explain the growth in the racial wage gap.

Educational Differences in U.S. Adult Mortality

“…Although not significant, the period trend could reflect a number of processes across this time period that disproportionately affected the mortality risk of low-educated black women. Changing labor market opportunities, for example, have produced absolute and relative loss of earnings for low-educated black women (Pettit and Ewert 2009). Moreover, research shows that the obesity epidemic is both a cohort and a period phenomenon that has disproportionately affected less educated black women (Ogden et al 2006; Reither, Hauser, and Yang 2009).…”

“…In general, though, fundamental cause theory is largely silent with regard to the patterns by which the education-mortality association differs by age and may change across birth cohorts or time periods. Our article adds to this literature by detailing education’s effects on mortality risk during a period of rapid development of health technologies (Chang and Lauderdale 2009; Glied and Lleras-Muney 2008; Lucas et al 2006), rising socioeconomic inequality (Campbell et al 2005; Pettit and Ewert 2009), and decreasing mortality risk (Xu et al 2010). …”

Organized Labor and Racial Wage Inequality in the United States

“…As shown in figure 3, after almost reaching parity by 1980, weekly wage inequality between black and white women in the private sector more than tripled during the 1980s and 1990s (see also Pettit and Ewert 2009, fig. 1).…”

“…Neal (2004, table 4), however, finds that by 1990, large African-American wage deficits among women exist within all educational categories and are greatest among females with a high school diploma or less. Adding controls for average levels of education, age, part-time employment, and marital status reduces the magnitude of black-white wage inequality, but a sizable portion of the gap is due to racial differences in returns to these variables along with unexplained variance (Pettit and Ewert 2009). This growth in returns to unobservable characteristics is echoed in Card and Lemieux’s (1994) earlier investigation of black-white wage differentials, a finding the authors attribute to unobserved skill differences between black and white workers.…”

Single mother families and employment, race, and poverty in changing economic times

“…Although maternal employment can reduce poverty rates (Lichter and Crowley 2004), particularly when the economy is strong (Iceland 2003), the relationships between race, employment, single-parent births, low education levels, and a lack of work experience (Alon and Haberfeld 2007; Ciabattari 2007; Musick 2002; Pettit and Ewert 2009) may make employment less effective in pulling some groups of women out of poverty. Women who become single-mothers generally have less human capital to bring to the labor market due to having less education and fewer work experiences than their peers (Ciabattari 2007; Musick 2002).…”