To understand the origins of the gap between Black and white women, one need only look back as far as the 1970s, the decade that saw the first series of victories in pay and other gender-discrimination cases, says Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy. That decade also saw major increases in the number of women, particularly white women, in the full-time workforce. In fact, the growth rate for women in the workforce was twice that of men.
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But in the 1990s, a second pay gap, one between white women and other groups of women, emerged, Wilson, an economist, says, as white women experienced a faster rate of wage growth than Black women and other groups of women. That means that the pay gap is the handiwork of people who are, in many cases, still hiring and firing, promoting and making pay decisions today. Some of the deciders are themselves women.
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But the racial wage gap among women isn’t just about which industries which women enter. To be clear, Valerie Wilson says, it is also about bias, about stereotypes and notions of who deserves to earn what. The individual can try, and may sometimes succeed, in asking for fair pay. But there’s almost no way to negotiate past bias to eliminate all wage gaps. Pay disparities exist between white women and other groups of women at every rung of the income, experience and education ladder.