We’ve known for a while that black Americans aren’t making economic progress. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, shows that the black-white wage gap is now the widest it has been since 1979. What’s more interesting, though, is how inequality has been increasing, and for whom.
It used to be that low-skilled black workers suffered the greatest disadvantage relative to their white counterparts. But there has been a strange reversal in the past 40 years. EPI finds that the black-white wage gap has become wider — and is widening faster — among those with more education.
This chart illustrates the history of the wage gap among men with less than 10 years of job experience. The early years are the most crucial in a person’s career, and also the most sensitive to fluctuations in the job market.
In 1980, black men entering the job market with just a high school diploma earned 15 percent less than similar white men on average. In contrast, black men with bachelor’s degrees or more earned only 5 percent less than similar white male college graduates.
College, in other words, once seemed a surefire route to something approaching racial equity. Nowadays, the picture is more complicated.
While the racial wage gap among less-educated men has held steady at about 15 percent, that gap for men with college diplomas increased significantly in the 1980s, and now hovers between 15 and 20 percent. In 2014, the penalty for being educated-while-black was about 18 percent. The penalty for less-educated black men was 16 percent.
A similar pattern exists for women. Among less-educated women with less than 10 years of job experience, the black-white wage gap was 6.2 percent in 2014. But among college-educated women, the wage gap was closer to 12 percent.
The authors of the report — Valerie Wilson, director of EPI’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy, and William Rodgers III — calculate how different factors have contributed to these changes.
Among early-career men, for instance, the earnings disparities between white and black workers have widened by about 3 percent since 1979. These disparities would have been even wider had African Americans not made gains in college attainment during this time. But that educational progress was overshadowed, the researchers say, by two major forces: increasing discrimination and increasing income inequality.
Source: Washington Post | Jeff Guo
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