Racial Occupational Inequality, 1940-1980: National and Regional Trends

We replicate previous research investigating changes in racial occupational inequality disaggregated by age and level of educational attainment (Hare, 1965; Siegel, 1965; Johnson and Sell, 1976) and then extend this research in four ways. First, wre update previous analyses by examining change in inequality between 1970 and 1980. Second, wre perform separate analyses by region as tell as analyses for the nation as a whole. Third, we investigate race differences in occupational attainment using the Index of Net Difference, a measure of ordinal inequality, as well as the more familiar Index of Dissimilarity (used in previous research), a measure of nominal differentiation. Fourth, wae investigate changes in inequality over the period 1940 to 1980 using constant age, education, and occupation categories. Our analyses reveal a number of significant findings including: (a) the Index of Net Difference reveals patterns of change in racial inequality over time that cannot be detected using the Index of Dissimilarity; (b) change in inequality favored whites for the nation as a whole and the non-South during the 1940s, andfavored blacks during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and (c) change in inequality favored whites for the South during the 1940s and 1950s andfavored blacks during the 1960s and 1970s.