Workers with less education can often face a lifetime of challenges, but not all are disadvantaged in the same way. Research from Berkeley shows that, in the US, Asian and white men tend to do better than Black men and women without a college education. Indeed, the researchers found that young Black men without a college education earn around half what their Asian American and white peers earn.

“Earnings are an important factor to study because they’re related to other outcomes, like health, engagement with the criminal justice system and family development,” the researchers explain. “So we focus on the non-college population at an early age. They are already disadvantaged economically — they have very low earnings. If there’s a sizable racial or ethnic earnings disparity in this population, there may be severe consequences.”

Charting fortunes

The researchers estimate that around 1 million young people enter the job market each year with just a high school education. This is a problem as the labor market increasingly requires advanced skills to even earn an average salary. It’s a group in which Black and LatinX people tend to be over-represented.

The researchers examined data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 and were able to track earnings disparities among men and women across racial and ethnic lines.

The analysis found that young Asian Americans with no college education earned roughly double what young Black men earned. Women’s incomes were also different according to ethnicity, but to nowhere near the same extent.

The size of the gap means that young Black women earned just 44 cents for every dollar earned by an Asian American man, despite having similar levels of education.

Explaining the gap

According to the researchers, the data was not sufficient to identify the causes of earnings gaps. However, it was determined that various factors such as family background, home location, high school grades, and criminal records do not significantly contribute to the disparities.

Discrimination in the workforce cannot be ruled out as a cause. The researchers posit that complex social and economic factors may lead to people of color being placed in lower-paying job sectors, but the significant earnings gaps among people in the same occupation may also indicate employer bias against women and Black men.

“This suggests that, like their more educated counterparts, young non-college-educated women may face pernicious earnings discrimination in the labor market, regardless of their race/ethnicity,” the authors explain.

“The results may indicate that employers devalue the work of young Black men without a college education to a greater degree than they do the work of white, Latinx, and Asian men without a college education.”

Worse than it looks

Sadly, the authors are concerned that their findings might actually be worse than they appear, with the pay disparity larger in reality. For instance, a disproportionate number of young men without a college education are Black, just as a disproportionate number of young men who are incarcerated are also Black. While the former are included in the data, however, the latter are not.

To truly understand the nature of this problem would require more targeted surveys and in-person interviews. Those would allow the researchers to understand whether discrimination is to blame, and if so, how it works.

“We hope the contribution of our research is to make people ask why we have these striking earnings gaps,” the authors conclude. “Then, rather than wasting time blaming workers’ choices or attitudes, we might get further by identifying discriminatory labor market processes.”