NOT SEPARATE BUT STILL UNEQUAL

Nearly shatterproof, the corporate “glass ceiling” faced by women is not only well documented but also a household name. Earning gaps for other groups, however, are not as commonly understood. Dan Black, a new professor at the Harris School, sought to take this on in a recent paper, examining why educated minority men on average earn lower salaries than their white counterparts.

Using a sample of 52,000 respondents from the 1990 Census, Black and his coauthors found that when compared to non-Hispanic white men, blacks and Hispanics earn approximately 19 percent less, and Asians earn about 10 percent less.

“The earning gap for Asians and Hispanic men seems to almost be solely a function of their language skills,” said Black. Looking at men who speak English at home, Asians and Hispanics earn the same as non-Hispanic white men, suggesting that the discrimination is based on cultural differences rather than race or ethnicity.

As for the lower wages of black men, Black and his colleagues noticed that both southern-born black men and black men with poorly educated parents usually earn less than white men. In fact, northern-born black men with college-educated parents earn salaries comparable to white men.

“We looked at the division between North and South, because what we find is that the parents of these men in the South were educated in an era where we had separate but not equal schools,” said Black. “And the colleges tended to be grossly under-funded historically black colleges, state schools, and universities. There was really a stark difference between what it meant to be college educated and black in 1960 in the South and what it meant in the North.” The effects of this poor education appear to have trickled down to the next generation.

Black believes this paper shows that it will take longer than a single generation for blacks to be economically equal to whites. “I think economic equality in one generation would have been the hope when we started to remove the economic and legal barriers African Americans faced,” he said.

Black’s interest in the economic progress made by minorities is ongoing and one of his current research projects is a “direct outgrowth” of this paper. As principal investigator for the 1997 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, his team has collected detailed data, not only on the parents of the youth in the study, but also on their grandparents. With that information, Black explained, “We’ll try to get a better handle on how parents and grandparents affect the economic progress of both blacks and Hispanics.”

Elizabeth Jenkins

Dan Black, Amelia Haviland, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor, “Why Do Minority Men Earn Less? A Study of Wage Differentials Among the Highly Educated,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 88, no. 2 (2006): 300-13.