The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940's

Martha Bailey and William Collins

No 416, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: The weekly wage gap between black and white female workers narrowed by 15 percentage points during the 1940s. We employ a semi-parametric technique to decompose changes in the distribution of wages. We find that changes in worker characteristics (such as education, occupation and industry, and region of residence) can account for a significant portion of wage convergence between black and white women, but that changes in the wage structure, including large black-specific gains within regions, occupations, industries, and educational groups, made the largest contributions. The single most important contributing factor to the observed convergence was a sharp increase in the relative wages of service workers (where black workers were heavily concentrated) even as black women moved out of domestic service jobs.

Keywords: World War II; domestic servants; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J7 N3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-lab
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http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu04-w16.pdf First version, 2004 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s (2006)
Working Paper: The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:van:wpaper:0416

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