We evaluate the causes of the wage gap at the intersection of race, ethnicity and gender over time in the United States. We analyse the wage gaps for women of colour along three dimensions: relative to White women, relative to men of their respective race/ethnicity, and relative to White men. Using the American Community Survey, we replicate earlier findings based on the Current Population Survey data which show that, on average, Black women face an unexplained wage gap relative to White men that goes beyond the simple addition of the separate unexplained gender and racial wage gaps. This can be seen persistently between 1980 and 2019, and we find it is true across the entire wage distribution but especially notable at higher centiles. From 1990 through 2019, Black and Hispanic women saw stalled progress, while White women continued to make steady progress closing the wage gap relative to White men.
Despite numerous criticisms that the "pipeline" metaphor does not adequately address the complex forces that shape women's decisions to not only enter science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields but to also persist in the field once they have entered, the pipeline narrative persists in today's discussions of the lack of representation of women and minorities in the STEM workforce. In Pathways, Potholes, and the Persistence of Women in Science, Branch and the volume's contributors argue that in order to tackle the problem of women's underrepresentation in STEM, we must shift our focus away from getting more women "in the door" and instead on understanding why some women stay while others leave. Without this crucial piece of the puzzle, our efforts may create a "revolving door of women in science" rather than sustainable diversity in the field. The chapters in this volume offer evidence to support an alternative "pathways" metaphor in which we instead envision women as drivers navigating the road to a scientific career. This approach accounts for the fact that individuals experience the path to a scientific career differently (e.g., they drive different cars with different features) and puts more focus on the structural barriers that women face to successfully navigating the path to a scientific career (the potholes).I found this approach to be quite refreshing. Too often the solutions proposed to address the challenges that women face in the workforce focus on fixing perceived "deficiencies" in the women themselves rather than addressing the larger structural problems at play. This was exemplified in Fox and Kline's contribution, which compared the pipeline and pathways perspectives on getting more women faculty into advanced positions. They argue that the pipeline perspective focuses on increasing the supply of women interested in STEM and correcting the deficit of women's interest in working with "people" rather than "things." The pathways perspective, however, focuses on changing the culture in computing so that it is seen as less masculine and addressing
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