Chapter 12: Gender, Race, and Ethnicity

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Chapter 12 Gender, Race, and Ethnicity
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Gender wage differences

• Full-time female workers have weekly earnings
  that are approximately 75 of the weekly earnings
  of full-time male workers.

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Reasons for gender wage differences

• educational attainment,
• prior work experience,
• average weekly hours of work,
• occupational choice, and
• discrimination.

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Discrimination

• Discrimination exists if wage is related to
  factors other than a workers productivity.

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Occupational segregation

• index of dissimilarity - a measure of the
  proportion of one group that would have to change
  occupations to equalize the gender proportions in
  occupations.

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Racial earnings differences

• black/white wage gap is larger than the gender
  wage gap,
• this gap cannot be explained by differences in
  occupational choice,
• very different patterns of employment, labor
  force participation, and unemployment rates,
• differences in cognitive ability (as measured by
  the AFQT) appear to explain much of the gap.

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Ethnic differences in earnings

• primarily appears to be due to differences in
  human capital and language proficiency.

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Theories of discrimination

• employer discrimination,
• customer discrimination,
• employee discrimination, and
• statistical discrimination.

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Noncompetitive models of discrimination

• crowding, and
• dual labor markets.

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Search-related monopsony

• the existence of discriminatory employers raises
  the expected cost of job search for members of
  groups that are the targets of discrimination,
• this results in an upward sloping labor supply
  curve for members of the affected group,
• leading to MFC gt w and some degree of monopsony
  power.

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Legal restrictions

• Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to offer
  different pay to men and women performing the
  same tasks. (It did not, however, prohibit
  discrimination in hiring or promotion.)
• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 filled
  in this gap by prohibiting discriminatory hiring
  practices.
• disparate treatment
• disparate impact

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Comparable worth

• jobs are assigned points according to a variety
  of criteria,
• pay is based on the number of points.

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Federal Contract Compliance Program

• created in 1965 to ensure that firms doing
  business with the federal government engage in
  nondiscriminatory employment behavior.
• firms doing business with the federal government
  are required to maintain a mix of workers that is
  proportionate to their representation in the
  relevant labor market.