> Black man vs. white woman Hillary Clinton contends with gender
> stereotypes, and Barack Obama with racial ones. Which bias runs
> deeper in the American psyche? The answer does not bode well for
> Clinton.
Complicated issue. Income differences are only *one* element in these asymmetries. And there are many possible ways to slice and dice the data. The picture that emerges will depend somewhat on how you slice it and dice it. I've looked at these things a lot. And this piece of information seems robust to me and it may be useful in pondering these issues.
Take the latest U.S. Census data on the *family* income of White vs. Black individuals (adults). The White-Black ratio is 1.6 to 1. Now take the *family* income of men vs. women (adults). The male-female ratio is 1.1 to 1. These are national averages (geometric or log averages).
Now let me warn against a simplistic reading of this. For the most part, Whites and Blacks don't share the same *family*. (Mixed families are still rare in the U.S.) But women and men do. Most families have females and males in them. How is power distributed inside a family between males and females?
The *individual* income of males and females may be some sort of a proxy for the relative power that men and women have in their families. The *individual* income ratio between males and females is 1.8 to 1: for every $1.8 a man makes, a woman makes $1.
But I don't know how good this is as a proxy of the relative power of men and women in the family. With the Census data one cannot know how income -- and other rights and obligations -- are distributed within the family. That's really tricky. (Let alone the issue of single parent families.)
Even though as a guy (and Mexican) my perception must be distorted by my vested interest, I can admit that my wife takes a bigger responsibility (as if by default) in planning and executing a host of tedious domestic chores, child care, etc. -- and we both have full-time jobs. I'm talking about a low-stress "equilibrium" between us. I can always slack off, but then the stress will increase accordingly. Anyway, the division of labor (and fun) in the family is crucial in understanding the social-power dynamics between men and women.
Still, it seems to me that altogether, on average, intra-family politics doesn't amplify but actually reduces the power asymmetry that individual income reflects. Why? It's not only that women have longer lives and claim (in all sorts of surveys) to be happier than men with what they do. What tips me is that, the richer and more educated women and men are in a given family, the higher the *relative* (and, of course, absolute) gap between their individual incomes.
A narrative of this would be: Imagine a young couple with above college education making rather similar annual incomes. Once one member (typically the man) makes over $100K (in his mid 30s at this point), the other member (the woman, in her early 30s) will go part time, unemployed, or drop out of the labor market. But isn't it true that this coincides with couples having their first or second child? Well, actually, if you control for presence of children, you still get a substantial increase in the gap about these same age points. Its total family income that makes the difference. Children just make it slightly greater.
It still puzzles me, but without some coercive mechanism, it's not clear to me why more educated women would accept relationships with men that would put them at a much greater *relative* disadvantage compared to poorer women in relation to poorer men. If highly educated women are willing to give up such high individual incomes for more family work/life/leisure, then what they get out of this tradeoff cannot be that terribly bad. The dilemmas may be agonizing to them in some sense, but it's not like they are cornered to make them. That's why, to me, the income gap between men and women in families appears like a "superior" good: a luxury.
FWIW.