Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain

Malcolm Brynin and Ayse Güveli
Additional contact information
Malcolm Brynin: University of Essex, UK
Ayse Güveli: University of Essex, UK

Work, Employment & Society, 2012, vol. 26, issue 4, 574-587

Abstract: The pay gap between white British workers and other ethnic groups is largely in favour of whites, which suggests that discrimination might be a factor. However, discrimination can occur at two points, at entry to the job and within the job. In the former case non-whites might find it difficult to work in well-paid occupations; in the latter they obtain the same sorts of jobs as whites but receive less pay. There is therefore predominantly either job or wage discrimination. We use the British Labour Force Survey 1993–2008 to show that much of the pay gap is explained by occupational segregation while within occupations the ethnic pay gap is far less substantial. Occupational segregation therefore has strong negative effects, but if minorities are over-represented in occupations with a positive wage gap, then there is also a ‘protective’ element to segregation.

Keywords: British Labour Force Survey; ethnicity; occupations; pay gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wes.sagepub.com/content/26/4/574.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:woemps:v:26:y:2012:i:4:p:574-587

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Work, Employment & Society from British Sociological Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().