Latinas and African American Women at Work: Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality

There is limited research specifically focusing on the labor market outcomes of African American women and Latinas. According to Irene Brown, this is understandable given that those two groups saw increases in their participation rates and wages compared to those of white women during the 1970s and early 1980s. Later in the 1980s, however, that progress began to slip. This book, written mainly by sociologists, is successful at documenting the economic and social conditions that have led to the current labor market disadvantage facing African American women and Latinas. It is divided into three sections: an assessment of the earnings and employment situation among Latinas and African American women; case studies of specific groups and specific topics relevant to Latinas and African American women; and the research and policy implications of the research completed in the earlier sections. The first five chapters of the book document the trends in the employment and earnings of African American women and Latinas relative to men, white women, and within their own ethnic groups. In the 1970s, the gap in labor force participation and wages between white women and both African American women and Latinas was declining. However, as this section of the book documents, in the late 1980s this growth rate slowed for Latinas and reversed for African American women. While most of this work focuses on trends in earnings and labor force participation, Paula England et al. examined hourly wages for six different ethnic and gender groups, and found that although job characteristics figure prominently in genderbased wage differentials, nonjob characteristics such as education, cognitive skills, and access to jobs with high cognitive demands had greater influence in the race and ethnic wage differentials. The second section takes a narrower approach to this topic, and its conclusions are difficult o generalize. There are two chapters on Latinas; the first is a narrative on multiple generations of Puerto Rican women who either migrated to New York City themselves or were the children of these migrants, and the second is an analysis of how Mexican-origin women fare in the southwestern labor market. While I found the stories in the first of these chapters interesting, their application to other ethnic groups seems limited, and the chapter seemed somewhat out of character with the rest of the book. However, this anecdotal evidence may open the eyes of some students to the hardships some in our society endure. The second of these two chapters is of value in documenting intra-ethnic dynamics; for example, how the increase in the number of Mexican immigrants affects the labor market status of American-born Mexicanorigin workers. The three chapters that focus on African American women are more general in focus. They examine differences in the ability of white and African American women to get off and stay off welfare; how African American women in the labor market are perceived and how this perception affects their labor market outcomes; and, finally, how the perception of both racial and gender discrimination differs between white and African American professional women in Atlanta, Georgia. The last section does a good job of synthesizing the information from the earlier chapters and identifying avenues for future research and implications for social policy. Delores P. Aldridge provides suggestions for actions at the individual level to help reverse the declining wage and employment status of African American women. Barbara F. Reskin and Camille Z. Charles point out the problems of assuming that such variables as education and work experience are exogenous in labor market research and make some suggestions for future research. Finally,Joya Misra does a goodjob of summarizing the earlier chapters and linking them to policy recommendations. Overall, the information in this book provides good insight into the problems facing African American women and Latinas in the work force. I found the analysis simple but informative and worthwhile. However, there are a few shortcomings. For example, in the first two chapters, which document the labor market status of African Americans, the emphasis is employment and earnings, with no mention of the number of hours worked. The importance of this issue is documented by England et al. later in the book. They found that while there is an appreciable positive return to full-time xperience and seniority, there is very little return to experience or seniority in parttime work, and white women were most likely to be working part-time. This implies that ignoring the hours of work issue may actually lead to an understatement of the wage differential beSage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Industrial and Labor Relations Review