Part 1: Research Question
Why the employment discrimination between African American and white American women with the comparably same characteristics, as skills, experience, and educational degree, exists in the USA and what is the income gap among managerial, sales, and service work occupations?
Nowadays, it is hard to be in the minority group due to the discrimination in the access to education, employment, housing, and healthcare. It is even more difficult if the person belongs to two minorities groups, which are women and African Americans. My topic of interest builds on the fact that after the university each woman will search for the job, including me, but black women will struggle with this more not only comparing to men but also to white women.
In the USA, the wage gap between white and black women started to grow since 1980, so it will be interesting to observe this phenomenon with the aim of finding the causes and ways of improving the situation. To be more specific and descriptive in the research, the focus will be on the three occupations, based on which, will draw comparisons between black and white women. Generally, it is significant to the field of sociology because previously there were no articles with such a big range of time, from 1968 to 2005, which takes into account here.
Part 2: Process
The process of searching the sociological articles in the database started with keywords, such as the income gap, black and white women, USA. Most of the found articles were reporting the time period of the 1980s due to the dramatical shift from the shrink of the wage gap to the rapid increase right after occurred. That is why the five chosen articles all together are within the time range from 1968 to 2005 in order to observe the fluctuation of the wage gap. Each paper describes and compares different periods in this range, so the data in the research is different. However, every chosen article designates at least the period of twenty years. Secondly, the articles needed to have the comparison between African and white American women and their income gap. Many pieces were drawing distinctions between black men and women, but the interest was in the intersect of two minority groups. Otherwise, the research will be too broad, not exemplifying and not consistent enough. The next key point in the articles was the presence of the data on the service, sales and managerial occupations since the research question focuses only on those three for the reason of being able to contrast black and white women based on these features. The age element, in addition, was not the crucial aspect, but rather the college degree and experience of women. Nevertheless, the age in the research ranges approximately from 20 to 65. Lastly, it was significant to make sure that the researches were done in the USA because women fought for their rights and equality in this country for a long time. However, achieving the government law was not enough due to the continuation of racial and gender discrimination.
Out of the five articles, the choice fell on the one by Anderson and Shapiro. The first reason for choosing this article is the time period between 1968 and 1988, so the research looks at the different stages of black and white women’s occupation. At first, the distribution of their employment is almost the same, and then it changes dramatically after the 1980s. It is crucial to observe this change, but other articles start their research by describing the increase in the gap right away. The second explanation is a large number of tables and data that are calculated in different ways. The unique feature that is not present in the other four articles is the comparison of measurements through various equations, including short-form, intermediate-form, and long-form wage equations, as well as the Duncan measure and segregation index. The next rationale is the fact that the same women are being studied throughout twenty years, which makes it distinctive, so the researchers are able to draw precise comparisons based on different characteristics of these women. This leads to the next point. The data collected makes it possible to calculate the number of job tenure and experience years. Thus, all these factors allow comparing black and white women’s access to different types of occupations, while having similar characteristics as education and experience.
Part 3: Annotations On One Article
Anderson, Deborah and David Shapiro. "Racial Differences in Access to High-Paying Jobs and the Wage Gap between Black and White Women." Industrial and Labor Relations Review 49, no. 2 (01, 1996): 273-286, http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https:// search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/61531344?accountid=14771.
In this article, the authors ask the questions of racial difference in accessing high-paying occupations by comparing African and white American women’s job positions, its ratio and the difference in incomes. It is crucial to conduct this research and bring awareness to people about the issue between white and black women in the USA, so through the employment inequality is one of many ways. Moreover, in their introduction, the authors reassure that this is the first study of women of different races accessing the high-income jobs. Anderson and Shapiro also use the previous literature to show the interest of other researches in this field of inequality, thus, highlighting its significance. Then, the authors compare their conclusions with the previous researches to agree or disagree with the other studies.
As a method, the authors used the existing data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience of Young Women(NLS). Through surveys, the researchers studied the same women within the period of 20 years. They started with 5000 at the age of 14-24 and finished with 2007 women, aged 34-44. The reason and main advantage of using this method is the preciseness of women’s characteristics, such as education, experience, employment status and tenure, so the wage gap percentage due to racial discrimination will be accurate. The authors convince the reader that these human capital variables together with racial discrimination were not present in the previous researches. They do not state the disadvantages, but it is clear that the working age is not limited to 44 years, so the research is not extensive enough. The data collected, however, was not purposely for conducting this research because many scholars use NLS source to determine the inequality in the US based on sex, age and race, so it is easily accessible.
The next step is the operationalization. In this study, there are three ways of finding the hourly wage, in which the dependent variable is lnwage. The first one is the short-form equation that incorporates the independent variables like work tenure, experience, and education. Secondly, the intermediate-form wage equation includes part or full-time status and public sector employment as the independent variables. Lastly, the long-form equation represents the independent variable, which is the women’s occupations. Many would agree with these methods of operationalization because this makes obvious the effect of inequality that can be accounted for racial discrimination due to the results of three equations, which show that white women are rewarded more than black. All in all, it is crucial to use these methods because of the finding of the wage gap by using different characteristics, which was the purpose of this research in the first place.
Finally, Anderson and Shapiro conclude the article with the confirmation of racial discrimination in the area of employment through giving statistics on the percentage of the income gap between white and African American women due to their race. In addition, they found out that white women mostly hold the high-paying occupations like managerial and sales, while the black females mainly have the low-paying jobs like services. This also caused more returns to education between 1980 and 1988. As authors state, they make a huge contribution to the existing researches due to being the first accounting the wage gap for racial discrimination, together with human capital factors. Despite the fact that the authors do not mention the limitations of their study, it is obvious that women studied only until the age of 44, but the working age does not stop there. Therefore, the study design calls into question the findings because it would be more precise if the authors used the whole working age of women.
Part 4: Bibliography
Anderson, Deborah and David Shapiro. "Racial Differences in Access to High-Paying Jobs and the Wage Gap between Black and White Women." Industrial and Labor Relations Review 49, no. 2 (01, 1996): 273-286, http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https:// search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/61531344?accountid=14771.
Dozier, Raine. "Accumulating Disadvantage: The Growth in the Black–White Wage Gap among Women." Journal of African American Studies 14, no. 3 (09, 2010): 279-301, http:// myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/754038710?accountid=14771.
Dozier, Raine. "The Declining Relative Status of Black Women Workers, 1980-2002." Social Forces 88, no. 4 (06, 2010): 1833-1857. http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login? url=https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/751299872? accountid=14771.
Headlee, Sue. "Income and Wealth Transfer Effects of Discrimination in Employment." Review of Black Political Economy 32, no. 3-4 (Winter, 2005): 39-64, http:// myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/875675033?accountid=14771.
Pettit, Becky and Stephanie Ewert. "EMPLOYMENT GAINS AND WAGE DECLINES: THE EROSION OF BLACK WOMEN'S RELATIVE WAGES SINCE 1980*." Demography (Pre-2011) 46, no. 3 (08, 2009): 469-92, http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login? url=https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/222932438? accountid=14771.