Black Women In NYC Earn 57 Cents For Each $1 White Men Get Paid

NEW YORK, NY — New York City's local wage gap shortchanges black women even more than in the rest of the nation, a recent city comptroller's report says. Black women working full-time in the city earned just 57 cents for each dollar a white man was paid in 2016 — meaning they got about $32,000-a-year less on average, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer's office.

That 43-cent difference is bigger than the 34-cent and 37-cent wage gaps black women face across New York State and the nation, respectively, according to the comptroller's report. It also means the median black woman would lose an average of more than $1.2 million over the course of her 40-year career, the report says.

The city's more than 350,000 black women working full-time and year-round in 2016 would have put about $11.2 billion into the local economy if the gap were closed, Stringer's report found.

"As a city we're failing to level the playing field for Black women and denying them the opportunity to buy their own home, pursue more education, or have economic security," Stringer, a Democrat, said in a statement. "They should not have to work an additional 30 years to earn the same living as a white man."

The report was published four days before the day black women's earnings nationwide finally catch up to what white men made in the previous year. But that recognition in New York City would take place nearly two months later on Oct. 3, according to Stringer's office.

Women across the U.S. made 82 percent of what men earned in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. But comptroller's report used U.S. Census Bureau figures from 2010 to 2016, the latest year for which data was available, to examine what the wage gap looks like for the city's black women.

"Occupational segregation" is a major driver of the disparity, the report says — black women are underrepresented in big-money fields such as engineering and law and overrepresented in low-paying service jobs, the report says.

More than a third of the city's black women — 34.8 percent — worked in service occupations in 2016, compared with just 10.5 percent of white men, the report says. But more than half of white men — 55.9 percent — worked in business, science, management and arts occupations, while just 34.5 percent of black women held such jobs that year, according to the report.

The wage gap has persisted despite a 14.5 percent increase from 2010 to 2016 in the city's proportion of black women 25 or older with at least a bachelor's degree, compared with 10.9 percent for all women and just 9 percent for white men, according to the report.

At about 60 percent, black women have the highest labor force participation rate among women of color but had the highest unemployment rate among women of all racial and ethnic groups in 2016 at 11.4 percent, Stringer's report says.

And nearly a quarter of black women and girls — 23.4 percent — were in poverty in 2016, up 3.8 percent from 2010 despite a 50 percent increase in the proportion of black women earning at least $100,000 in that time, the report found.

To address the huge wage disparity, Stringer's report recommended bolstering anti-discrimination enforcement; expanding access to affordable child care and paid leave; creating programs to help more black women get into higher education and higher-paying professions; and working to boost wages.

(Lead image: Photo from Shutterstock)