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Privilege and hindrance on the USA earnings distribution by gender and race/ethnicity: an intersectional framework with 12 groups

Olga Alonso-Villar (Departamento de Economía Aplicada, ECOBAS, Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain)
Coral del Río (Departamento de Economía Aplicada, ECOBAS, Universidade de Vigo, Vigo, Spain)

International Journal of Manpower

ISSN: 0143-7720

Article publication date: 21 November 2022

Issue publication date: 31 May 2023

235

Abstract

Purpose

This paper explores the wages of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and “other race” women and men once differences in basic characteristics among these 12 groups are accounted for. The authors aim to extend comparisons beyond those of women and men of the same race or the various races within a given gender.

Design/methodology/approach

To undertake the conditional analysis, first, the authors propose a simple re-weighing scheme that allows to build a counterfactual economy in which workers' attributes for all gender–race/ethnicity groups are the same. Second, the authors use a well-known re-weighting scheme that involves logit estimations.

Findings

Only Hispanic men, Native American men and Asian women have conditional wages around average. Black men and, especially, White, Black, Hispanic, Native American and “other race” women have conditional wages clearly below average, whereas those of Asian and White men are well above average. The wage differential between a privileged and a deprived group is disentangled into the premium of the former and the penalty of the latter, which brings a new perspective to what has been done in the literature based on pairwise comparisons. In this intersectional framework, the authors document that gender penalizes more than race.

Originality/value

This paper examines intergroup earnings differentials using a methodology that allows to examine 12 gender–race/ethnicity groups jointly, which is this work's distinctive feature. The authors' intersectional framework allows to picture the effect of gender and race/ethnicity more broadly than what the literature has shown thus far.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Funding: This study has been supported by the grants PID2019-104619RB-C41 and PID2020-113440GB-100 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.

Citation

Alonso-Villar, O. and del Río, C. (2023), "Privilege and hindrance on the USA earnings distribution by gender and race/ethnicity: an intersectional framework with 12 groups", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 44 No. 4, pp. 635-652. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-12-2021-0705

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited

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