Gender & Racial Pay Gaps
U.S. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D–TX) claims that “Black women are STILL only making 65 cents on the dollar” and don’t get the “same pay” for the “same work” as other people.
IN FACT, Americans of all genders and races have been receiving equal pay for equal work for decades, and pay gaps blamed on sexism and racism are actually due to factors like education, productivity, work hours, and fringe benefits. Here are the specifics:
- A gender pay gap study published in 1995 by the journal Industrial Labor Relations Review found that women favor jobs with higher fringe benefits, neglecting to measure “fringe benefits may produce misleading results as to the existence, magnitude, consequence, and source of market discrimination,” and when “total compensation is measured, “women between the ages of 26 and 34 in 1990” received “96.4% of male compensation” in the same age group.
- A study published in 2004 by the Stanford Law Review found that blacks who pass the bar exam “earn 6% to 9% more early in their careers than do whites seeking similar jobs with similar credentials, presumably because many employers (including government employers) pursue moderate racial preferences in hiring.”
- A study published in 2006 by the American Institutes for Research found that 40% of whites and 5% of blacks graduating from four-year colleges were proficient in quantitative literacy, which is the ability to “identify and perform computations … using numbers embedded in printed materials,” such as “balancing a checkbook, figuring out a tip, completing an order form, or determining the amount of interest on a loan from an advertisement.”
- A 2009 analysis of gender wage studies conducted for the U.S. Department of Labor by CONSAD Research Corporation found, “It is not possible to produce a reliable” estimate of how much of the “raw gender wage gap” is due to “explanatory factors” like “skill, education and productivity,” but “it can confidently be concluded that, collectively, those factors account for a major portion and, possibly, almost all of the raw gender wage gap.”
- A gender pay gap study published in 2011 by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that an “important reason for the gender gap is the difference in labor force attachment between men and women. Women are likely to leave their careers temporarily for childbirth and raising children. Such leaves may be associated with a decrease in human capital and with temporary delays in training and promotion, which consequently lead to lower wages.”
- A study published in 2013 by the Journal of Applied Psychology found that more than 28% of U.S. workers are in physically challenging occupations (like construction, law enforcement, firefighting, and the military), and most men have significantly greater muscular strength and cardiovascular endurance than most women.
- A 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that black college students are “highly concentrated in lower-paying majors” like administrative services and social work and are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering, and math, even though they “can earn as much as 50 percent more than African Americans who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.”
- Full-time male workers average 5% more workdays per year and 8% more workhours per workday than full-time female workers.
- Among high schoolers who graduated in 2024 and took the ACT college readiness exam, 47% of Asians, 27% of whites, 11% of Hispanics, and 5% of blacks met the test’s college readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math, and science).
- Public K–12 schools are mainly run by local governments, and Democrats have dominated the local governments of minority communities for decades.
- School districts with large portions of black students spend about the same amount per student as other districts but have worse outcomes that are strongly associated with leftist policies and mindsets.
- Contrary to racist views that minorities are intellectually inferior or that their parents are to blame for their poor academic performance, empirical facts show that students of all races excel when they have competent schooling and aren’t inculcated with victim mentalities, as they often are in Democrat-run schools.
