Business Insider: The wage gap between blacks and whites is the largest since 1979

The report found that black men make 22 percent less money than do white males, while black women make 34.2 percent less.

Factors such as experience, location, and education were controlled for in the report, which also found that the racial wage gap is growing primarily because of discrimination, or "racial differences in skills or worker characteristics that are unobserved or unmeasured in the data." Growing income inequality is also a contributing factor.

Of all the groups evaluated by the EPI, it found that black women with less than 10 years of experience have been affected most by the racial wage gap. It also found that black male college graduates who entered the workforce in 1980 had less than a 10 percent disadvantage compared to white college graduates; today, black male graduates are at approximately an 18 percent disadvantage.

The report found that wage growth has lagged significantly behind productivity growth for everyone except those in the top 5 percent since 1979. For workers in the top 1 percent, wage growth has exceeded productivity growth. And while lagging wage growth has affected workers across all demographics, growth has been even slower for African Americans, compared to white men and women. [...]

While the report also found that the racial wage gap is smaller between women than between men, it notes that this does not necessarily imply that black women do not face as many obstacles as black men, but that the disadvantage they experience may be more associated with the gender pay gap.

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