Black workers. Between 2018 and 2019, the vast majority of black workers had stronger wage growth than in any other year since 2000; however, black wages at the top have not seen improvement since 2018, while 95th-percentile wages for Hispanic and white workers have risen 2.9% and 2.5%, respectively, since 2018. (Again, when looking at all of these numbers, we need to keep in mind that the CPS data is subject to a certain amount of volatility from year to year; for data on black wages, that volatility is likely to be even more pronounced because of the smaller data sample represented by the black population.)
Before 2019, what was particularly striking about black wages was slow wage growth since 2000, nearly across the board. In 2019, the tide turned and all deciles have finally exceeded their 2000 and 2007 levels. Even so, white and Hispanic workers had much faster growth across the board since 2000 than black workers, while black workers have just been making up for lost ground as opposed to actually getting ahead.
From 2000 to 2019, the overall black–white wage gap grew, while the overall Hispanic–white wage gap narrowed slightly.
The bottom section of Table 3 displays wage gaps by race/ethnicity. Wage gaps by race/ethnicity track how much less African American and Hispanic workers are paid relative to white workers; here, black and Hispanic wages are shown as a share of white wages at each decile of their respective wage distributions. Compared with white workers, black workers have been losing ground since 2000, with larger black–white wage gaps across the entire distribution.
7 In 2000, black wages at the median were 79.2% of white wages. By 2019, they were only 75.6% of white wages, representing an increase in the wage gap from 20.8% to 24.4%. Conversely, Hispanic workers have been slowly closing the gap with white workers at the bottom 70% of the wage distribution. In 2000, median Hispanic wages were 69.7% of white wages and, by 2019, they were 74.6% of white wages, representing a narrowing of the gap from 30.3% to 25.4%. The 95th-percentile Hispanic–white wage gap still remains significantly wider than its 2000 level.
The regression-adjusted black–white and Hispanic–white wage gaps (controlling for education, age, gender, and region) both narrowed over the last year (Appendix Table 1). While the regression-adjusted Hispanic–white wage gap narrowed a bit, from 12.3% in 2000 to 10.8% in 2019, the regression-adjusted black–white gap was much larger in 2019 (14.9%) than it was in 2000 (10.2%). In 2000, the Hispanic–white wage gap was larger than the black–white wage gap. In 2019, the reverse was true.
