Why Do Black American Males Earn Less Than Black American Women? an Examination of Four Hypotheses

Four hypotheses to explain why black men in the United States and Britain earn less than black women are examined. These are (1) Sowell's thesis black males have lower average intelligence than black females; this hypothesis is rejected; (2) black males have lower educational attainment than black females; new American evidence on the educational attainment of 8'h grade students in reading, mathematics and science is presented that disconfirms this hypothesis; (3) black males have lower work motivation than black females; evidence on the amount of homework disconfirms this hypothesis; (4) employers are reluctant to employ black males; it is proposed that this is the most plausible explanation for the low earnings of black males compared with black females. Key Words: Earnings, Academic Performance, Work Motivation, African Americans, Gender Differences In both the United States and Britain blacks have lower earnings than whites, but the difference is greater for males than for females. The black-white earnings differences for men and women in the United States for the period 1949-1985 obtained from census returns have been calculated by Farley and Allen (1989) and are given in Table 1. The figures are for per capita incomes and show the incomes of black men and women as percentages of those of whites. It can be seen that throughout the period the earnings differential was substantially greater for men than for women. It can be seen also that both black men and women improved their earnings relative to whites from 1949 to 1969, but from 1969 to 1985 black men achieved only a very small improvement in their earnings while black women lost ground. A similar difference in the earnings of black men and women relative to whites has been found in Britain. In a study of a nationally representative sample of 2,867 whites and 1,205 blacks carried out in the mid-1990s it was found that among employees black men earned 91 per cent of white men, while black women earned 109 per cent of white women (Madood & Berthoud, 1997). There are four possible explanations that have been proposed, or could be proposed, for the fact that black men have lower earnings, relative to whites, than black women. These are that black men have a disadvantage in intelligence, in educational attainment, in work motivation, or that they are subject to discrimination from employers. The intelligence deficit version of the human capital theory has been proposed by Sowell (1994, p.171) who writes that "research findings have consistently shown that black females have higher IQ test scores, and most other test scores, than black males". If this is so, it would explain some or perhaps all of the disadvantage of black men in earnings because intelligence is a determinant of earnings at a correlation of around 0.35 (Brown & Reynolds, 1975; Jencks, 1972; Murray, 1998), and also because intelligence is a determinant of educational attainment at around 0.58 (Jencks, 1972) to 0.72 (Yule, Gold & Busch, 1982), which also determines earnings. A variant of the human capital theory of the disadvantage of black men in earnings is that this is due in whole or in part to poorer educational attainment, caused either by lower intelligence, as maintained by Sowell or by some other factor such as lower work motivation or conformity. A second possible explanation for the lower earnings of black men is that black men have lower work motivation than black women. Some American ethnographic studies of the high rates of unemployment among black men in inner cities have concluded that a major factor responsible for these is unwillingness to work harder. Thus, Anderson (1980, p.75) writes that "there are many unemployed black youth who are unmotivated and uninterested in working for a living, particularly in the dead-end jobs they are likely to get." Petterson (1997, p.605) writes that "it is commonly contended that young black men experience more joblessness than their white counterparts because they are less willing to seek out low paying jobs. …