Working Paper: NBER ID: w31641
Authors: Ashley Jardina; Peter Q. Blair; Justin Heck; Papia Debroy
Abstract: Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper, we contribute to this literature by calculating a dissimilarity index to examine racial occupational segregation between 1980 and 2019, comparing Black and white workers with and without bachelor’s degrees and by developing a Monte Carlo simulation, where we compare the observed levels of segregation to predicted levels of racial occupational segregation by education under race-neutral conditions. First, we find that considerable racial occupation segregation in the labor market persists today regardless of educational attainment and that observed segregation is substantially higher than would be expected at random, conditional on educational attainment, gender, and geography. We compare the types of occupations in which Black and white workers are disproportionately situated, and we show that this segregation has significant consequences for wage inequality between Black and white workers with and without four-year degrees. Overall, our results show that racial occupational desegregation has stalled in the past two decades despite rising educational attainment amongst Black workers.
Keywords: occupational segregation; racial inequality; educational attainment
JEL Codes: J22; J24; J7
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Educational attainment (I21) | Racial occupational segregation (J79) |
| Racial occupational segregation (J79) | Wage inequality (J31) |
| Rising education levels among black workers (J79) | Occupational segregation (J79) |
| Discrimination and labor market dynamics (J79) | Occupational segregation (J79) |