Occupational segregation impacts workers of every race, ethnicity, and sex. Black and white workers with similar levels of education are concentrated in different jobs, creating a persistent salary and economic mobility gap.
Occupational Segregation Limits Black Wages
Black and white workers have different jobs for different pay, regardless of education. Despite progress in past decades, the labor market has become more segregated over the past twenty years despite increased college attainment.
Further, this chart shows the differences in both jobs and pay between Black and white workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs). Only two of the 10 jobs with the most Black STARs pay above the median wage. For white STARs, eight of the 10 pay above median wage.
While Black workers with bachelor’s degrees are in higher-wage jobs than Black STARs, there is a similar difference in jobs and pay for Black and white workers with bachelor’s degrees.
Below is a common career progression for retail salespeople into higher wage roles. The current state is a costly waste of talent. By adopting a skills-based approach, more STARs–particularly Black STARs–could be on a path to higher wages and increased mobility.
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More on Occupational Segregation
This paper introduces a dissimilarity index to measure racial occupational segregation between Black and white workers with and without bachelor’s degrees from 1980 to 2019, and uses a Monte Carlo simulation to compare observed segregation levels to predicted levels under race-neutral conditions.