Several news orgs chime in on the latest press release from the Census Bureau. As reported on CNN:
Black and Asian women with bachelor’s degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.
A white woman with a bachelor’s degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to data being released Monday by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less at $37,600 a year.
The bureau did not say why the differences exist. Economists and sociologists suggest possible factors: the tendency of minority women, especially blacks, to more often hold more than one job or work more than 40 hours a week, and the tendency of black professional women who take time off to have a child to return to the work force sooner than others.
I like the way the media has focused on the (relatively) small differences between wages among different women rather than focusing on this part of the article:
Yeah- over 65K. That’s a much more striking difference to mull over, IMHO, though I think all the data are rather confounded by a bunch of factors that have not been accounted for here.
Another reason: Since white woman has more chances of getting married to rich white man, there is less pressure on white woman to earn.
brimful, that ‘s a good point and I was thinking about the confounding factors as well (the differences between salaries of men and women) what are the four year degrees (BAs vs BS, etc) and can some of the difference be accounted for by what kind of job they have, over-time, different types of jobs? In my field, a lot of the women I know go into areas of medicine that will give them more free time if they want a family, but unfortunately, are also less well paid. But I also know there are studies that try to iron out these factors and still find difference.