Annual Earnings

• Generally, additional education pays off equally well for black and white men and women. Black and white women who completed high school earned about 50% more in 1998 than those who did not; the comparable pay-off for black and white men was about 40%. Completing some college beyond high school increased annual earnings by 20 to 25 % above those who stopped at high school, except among white men (only about 12% higher). Workers with bachelor's or advanced degrees earned about 50% more than those with only some college, except among black men, who earned about one-third more.
  

• Although education pays off in higher earnings, the inequalities in the annual earnings of comparably educated black and white men and women remained substantial. In 1998, black men earned, on average, 71 cents for every dollar earned by white men. Black male college graduates earned 72 cents for every dollar earned by comparable whites. The ratio among black men was better only for high school graduates (75 cents) and those with some college (80 cents). Black women's median earnings were about 91 percent of white women's, primarily due to differences in educational attainments: comparably educated black and white women had virtually equal annual earnings.
  

• Both black and white women earned substantially less (76 cents and 60 cents respectively) for every dollar than their male counterparts earned, and the differences are large at every educational level. Even among college graduates, black women's median annual earnings were 87% of black men's, and the ratio for whites was 63% (71% among full-year, full-time workers, data not shown here).
  

Weekly Earnings

• Differences in the number of weeks and hours worked contribute to the gender differences in earnings. Among full-year, full-time workers, the male-to-female ratio for usual weekly earnings for black women improves to 84%of black men's weekly earnings, and those of white women improves to 76% of white men's weekly earnings.
  

• The high ratio (91%) of black and white women also actually in part reflects the greater number of weeks and hours that black women worked during the year: among full-time workers in 1999 the usual weekly earnings of black women ($483) were only 86% of those for white women ($477).
  

• The usual median weekly earnings for black men working full-time ($483 per week) was 77 percent of the median for white men ($629). Working fewer hours and weeks thus contributes to the lower ratio (71 percent) in the annual earnings of black and white men. The median weekly earnings of Hispanics who worked full time ($387) were lower than those of blacks ($443) and whites ($560).
  

• The median weekly earnings of the nation's 95.6 million full-time wage and salary workers was $538 in the first quarter of 1999. This was about 1.5 percent higher than a year earlier.

References

Prepared by Roderick J. Harrison and Cassandra Cantave, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. June 1999.