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Title: Black, Latina, and White Female Employment in the Public Sector: 1970-2000
Citation Type: Conference Paper
Publication Year: 2007
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Abstract: Early work identified benefit of public sector employment for workers, particularly minority and female workers (Hout 1984, Pomer 1986), but the vast majority of these studies focused on male workers, or use public sector work to explain gender differences in pay (Gornick and Jacobs, 1998; Blank, 1985), leaving the intersections of these categories unexamined. The current study extends this work through a comparative study of the effect of public sector employment for different racial/ethnic groups of women to determine whether the role of the public sector in women's employment has shifted between 1970-2000, a period of substantial change in women's labor market experiences, and to what extent this public sector premium has remained constant over this same time period. We use a large and nationally representative sample of Census data drawn from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) to answer the following research questions: Does the public sector premium vary across race/ethnic groups, over time? Is the premium concentrated at a particular section of the occupation/pay scale? Do sectoral differences in worker characteristics and occupation composition explain public sector wage premium? We find that the public sector premium varies substantially for the different race/ethnic groups, that the premium has changed substantially for all groups over the period of study, and that once controlling for individual characteristics the premium disappears for white women and is strongest for black women.
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Authors: Dickerson, Niki; Davis, Katrinell
Conference Name: American Sociological Association
Publisher Location: New York, NY
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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