Double Jeopardy or Compensating Disadvantage? The Interaction Effect of Gender and Race on Earnings in the U.S.

There are sizeable earnings differentials by both gender and race in the U.S. labor market, with women earning less than men and most racial/ethnic minority groups earning less than whites. It has been proposed in the previous literature that the effects of gender and race on earnings are additive, so that minority women suffer the full disadvantage of each status. We test this proposition for a broad range of minority groups in the U.S. We find that women of all minority groups in the U.S. suffer a smaller gender penalty than white women. Exploring the potential role of racial variation in gender role specialization in producing such differentials, we find some empirical evidence suggesting that white families specialize more than families of most other races. Interaction of Race and Gender on Earnings 3 In the United States, two ascribed characteristics stand out for their strong association with labor force outcomes: gender and race/ethnicity. A large body of literature in both sociology and economics has been devoted to documenting the earnings differentials by gender and by race/ethnicity in the U.S. In general, such work has found (1) that women earn less than men, (2) that most racial/ethnic minority groups earn less than whites, and (3) that such differentials cannot be fully attributed to human capital factor