Sex, Race, and Ethnic Inequality in United States Workplaces

Abstract

The last third of twentieth century witnessed revolutionary reductions in sex and race inequality in the workplace. At the beginning of the 1960s, employers legally could refuse to hire people, assign them to jobs, and set their pay on the basis of their sex and race. The first signs of change were already present: married women had begun to catch up with their single sisters in their participation in the labor force, and African-Americans with their migration North were also pursuing different kinds of work from when they were in the South, especially women who were abandoning domestic work as other opportunities opened to them. But it took the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, and a series of federal and state laws to challenge the race and sex discrimination that were customary in the United States. As we will see in this chapter, sex, race, and ethnic inequality persist in the kinds of paid work that people do, their advancement opportunities, and their earnings. We shall also see, however, indications of the erosion of these forms of inequality since 1970. We focus on two forms of employment inequality: the differential distribution of workers across occupations and jobs based on their sex, race, and ethnicity, and pay disparities associated with these characteristics. In a departure from most research, we consider three important bases of inequality: sex, race, and ethnicity. Although workers' sex, race, and ethnicity jointly affect their work experiences, few quantitative studies have simultaneously considered both sex and race, and only a handful of studies have examined the