Black Women’s Breakthrough into Clerical Work: An Occupational Tipping Model

In the past 35 years, black women workers have experienced a dramatic improvement in their labor market status, both absolutely and relative to other workers. Since 1955, black women's earnings have increased from one-third to two-thirds those of white men.1 This progress was achieved by a drastic redistribution among occupations. In 1940, two-thirds of black working women were employed in domestic and agricultural work, the lowest-paid rungs of the American labor market, as shown in Table 1. Had black women remained concentrated in these occupations, their relative earnings would be little better now.2 In 1988, only 3 percent of black working women were engaged in domestic and agricultural work. Now more black women are in clerical work than in any other occupation, as is true for women of all other ethnic backgrounds [U.S. Bureau of the Census 1988]. Access to occupations with better pay and promotion possibilities has been the key to economic advancement for white women and minority workers. Trieman and Hartmann [1981] estimate that occupational differentiation accounts for some 35-40 percent of the wage gap between men and women. Cunningham and Zalokar [1992] show that differential allocation among oc-