Returns in the Labor Market: A Nuanced View of Penalties at the Intersection of Race and Gender in the US

Mark Paul, Khaing Zaw and William Darity

Feminist Economics, 2022, vol. 28, issue 2, 1-31

Abstract: There have been decades of research on wage gaps for groups based on their socially salient identities, such as race and gender, but little empirical investigation on the effects of holding multiple identities. Using the Current Population Survey, this study provides new evidence on intersectionality and the wage gap in the US. This article makes two important contributions. First, there is no single “gender” or “race” wage penalty. Second, the evidence suggests that holding multiple identities cannot readily be disaggregated in an additive fashion. Instead, in a comparison of Black and White workers across gender, this study documents that the penalties associated with the combination of two or more socially marginalized identities interact in multiplicative or quantitatively nuanced ways. Further, the findings demonstrate that the presence of an additional intersectional penalty for Black women persists across time.HIGHLIGHTS When it comes to earnings, Black women face distinctive penalties for holding their race and gender identities simultaneously.The intersectional wage gap persists across time and during both tight and slack labor markets.The unexplained portion of the wage gap has contracted from 1980–2017; however, it remains large and significant.Intersectional analysis provides a useful framework to disentangle nuances in the labor market.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2022.2042472 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:femeco:v:28:y:2022:i:2:p:1-31

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2022.2042472

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().