TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bailey,Martha J.
AU  - Collins,William J.
TI  - The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10621
PY  - 2004
Y2  - July 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10621
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10621.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Martha J. Bailey
University of Michigan
Department of Economics
611 Tappan Street
207 Lorch Hall
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1220
Tel: 734/647-6874
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: baileymj@umich.edu

William J. Collins
Department of Economics
Vanderbilt University
VU Station B #351819
2301 Vanderbilt Place
Nashville, TN 37235-1819
Tel: 615/322-3428
Fax: NA
E-Mail: william.collins@vanderbilt.edu
AB  - The weekly wage gap between black and white female workers narrowed by 15 percentage points during the 1940s. We employ a semi-parametric technique to decompose changes in the distribution of wages. We find that changes in worker characteristics (such as education, occupation and industry, and region of residence) can account for a significant portion of wage convergence between black and white women, but that changes in the wage structure, including large black-specific gains within regions, occupations, industries, and educational groups, made the largest contributions. The single most important contributing factor to the observed convergence was a sharp increase in the relative wages of service workers (where black workers were heavily concentrated) even as black women moved out of domestic service jobs.
ER  -