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Title: Racial and Gender Disparities in the Wage Returns for Educational Attainment
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Budig, Michelle Jean Lim, Misun Hodges, Melissa J. |
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Racial and Gender Disparities in the Wage Returns for Educational Attainment Presented: Philadelphia PA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2018 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: American Sociological Association Keyword(s): Earnings; Educational Attainment; Gender Differences; Racial Differences Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. How do race and gender intersect with educational attainment to influence earnings? Do women and minority men earn less than white men because of lower educational attainment or degrees in less lucrative majors, or because they receive lower returns to the same qualifications? Using a longitudinal national probability sample, we test whether earnings returns to education differ among white men, black men, white women, and black women. To examine the role of racial and gender segregation in field of degree, we consider multiple specifications of education: years of education, highest degree obtained, and level-by-field of degree obtained. Covariates include local labor market and demographic characteristics, family structure, human capital, and job characteristics. Findings reveal a robust labor market for less educated white men, such that white men's greater returns to secondary and college educational attainment only emerges with controls for human capital, labor supply, and job characteristics. White women also receive stronger wage returns for educational credentials, but only for post-graduate degrees. Black men receive significantly lower returns for most of their educational credentials, and this can be attributed to the disadvantageous sorting of educated black men into jobs with low-paying characteristics. Finally, black women, who appear to receive stronger returns for educational attainment in baseline models, are uniformly undervalued for their educational attainment in more saturated models. This indicates that that educational attainment may propel black women's success in the labor market in terms of human capital accumulation and occupational attainment, but compared to white women and men with equivalent characteristics, black women's education is strikingly under-rewarded in terms of pay. |
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Bibliography Citation
Budig, Michelle Jean, Misun Lim and Melissa J. Hodges. "Racial and Gender Disparities in the Wage Returns for Educational Attainment." Presented: Philadelphia PA, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2018. |