Accumulating Disadvantage: The Growth in the Black-White Wage Gap among Women.

The black-white wage gap among women grew from 7 to 17% between 1980 and 2002, increasing despite the improving economic conditions of the 1990s. This paper uses decomposition and relative distribution methods to evaluate this marked growth. Although the majority of the mean log wage gap was due to compositional difference, differential returns played an increasing role over the observation period. Decomposition finds that differential attainment of a college degree and changing labor market conditions have increasingly disadvantaged black women relative to white women. Changing returns to the health care industry, professional, managerial, and sales occupations, working part-time, and being paid hourly contributed most to the growth in the black-white wage gap. Relative distribution methods examine the entire wage distribution and indicate that compositional difference is primarily responsible for the declining fortune of black women across the wage distribution. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]