Racial Differences in Access to High-Paying Jobs and the Wage Gap between Black and White Women

Abstract

The authors examine the role that racial differences in access to high-paying occupations played in determining the racial wage gap in the 1980s. Analyzing data on black and white women aged 34–44 from the National Longitudinal Surveys for 1968–88, they estimate the effects of human capital characteristics and discrimination on segregation into high- and low-wage jobs by race. They find that differences in workers' measured characteristics explain little of either the observed occupational segregation by race or the racial wage gap in 1988. Further analysis suggests that several changes in the wage structure for women during the 1980s, notably a widening of occupational wage differentials and an increase in the returns to education, abetted direct discrimination in enlarging the racial wage gap among women.