ABSTRACT
Comparisons between men and women, blacks and whites, and other groups show different patterns of employment and different average levels of compensation for work. This chapter describes common points of reference and topics of interest for both the empirical literature and the philosophical literature on discrimination in the job market. It explains empirical social scientists' efforts to explain race- and sex-based patterns of labor market outcomes. The chapter provides a brief overview of three leading theoretical explanations for the observed patterns, namely: human capital theory, taste discrimination, and statistical discrimination. Human capital theory assumes that employers allocate jobs according to job seekers' capacities to make productive contributions, also known as their 'human capital'. The chapter provides an overview of several philosophical debates about how to define discrimination in the job market and explain when it is wrong. It describes an approach to defining wrongful discrimination on the basis of the discriminator's mental state and the costs imposed on others.
