ABSTRACT
As indicated in Chapter 9, wages (and many other indicators of economic success) differ by education, job market experience, hours worked, the possession of special skills, and English-speaking ability because each of these factors influences a worker’s productivity. Wages also differ by race, ethnicity, gender, weight, beauty, religion, skin tone within a race, national origin, national origin within a race, and sexual orientation. The former differences are often viewed as “legitimate,” while the latter differences are inherently suspect. If wages differ on the basis of race, ethnicity, and other “irrelevant” personal characteristics among workers with the same productivity, we label the difference discrimination. This suggests a strategy for detecting and measuring the extent of discrimination: select workers of equal productivity who differ by race, ethnicity, and so on, and measure what differences in wages (and other indicators of economic success) remain.
