Doctoral Dissertation Research: Interrupting Inequality: The Effect of Antidiscrimination Law on Race/Gender Wage Gaps

这项拟议的研究评估了联邦反歧视就业法对基于种族和性别的工资不平等的影响。这项分析使用当前的人口调查数据来衡量年度、州一级的工资差距，并使用各种政府来源来构建该法律的覆盖面、执行和解释的措施，该分析将评估该法律从1972年到2000年对种族和性别工资差距的影响。将利用合并横断面、时间序列回归技术来评估这些影响。通过包括劳动力、经济和政治因素随时间和各州的变化的衡量标准，分析将确定该法律对种族/性别工资差距的独特影响。当前的分层理论将种族/性别工资不平等与工人的属性、雇主的行为和工作场所的结构特征联系起来。然而，该法律的作用还没有得到系统的评估。同样，现有的反歧视法律分析在很大程度上与分层理论无关，通常是理论上的。因此，重要的理论问题--包括关于法律对不同种族/性别群体的影响和法律不同组成部分的影响的问题--没有得到回答，现有经验文献在很大程度上没有将其理论化。拟议的研究将借鉴自由主义和批判性的法律理论，以便更全面地了解法律如何影响种族和性别工资不平等。因此，拟议中的研究的一个重要的学术价值是，它将综合这些独立的文献，并对法律和劳动力市场不平等之间的关系形成新的理论理解。除了这些智力贡献外，拟议研究的更广泛影响是：1)它将导致开发一个独特的数据集，其中包含反歧视法的原始措施，供未来的研究人员使用；2)它将为关于平权行动和其他反歧视措施的效用的公共辩论和政策决策提供信息。

The proposed research assesses the effects of federal antidiscrimination employment law on race- and gender-based wage inequality. Using Current Population Survey data to measure annual, state-level wage gaps and using a variety of governmental sources to construct measures of the law's coverage, enforcement, and interpretation, this analysis will evaluate the law's impact on race and gender wage gaps from 1972 through 2000. Pooled cross-sectional, time series regression techniques will be utilized to assess these effects. By including measures of variation in labor force, economic, and political factors over time and across states, the analysis will identify the unique effect of the law on race/gender wage gaps. Current stratification theory links race/gender wage inequality to workers' attributes, employers' behaviors, and structural characteristics of the workplace. The role of the law, however, has not been systematically evaluated. Similarly, existing analyses of antidiscrimination law are largely unconnected from stratification theory and are typically atheoretical. As a result important theoretical questions-including questions concerning the impact of the law on different race/gender groups and the impact of different components of the law-have been unanswered and largely untheorized by the existing empirical literature. The proposed study will draw on liberal and critical theories of the law in order to develop a more complete understanding of how the law impacts race and gender wage inequality. Thus, an important intellectual merit of the proposed research is that it will synthesize these separate literatures and forge a new theoretical understanding of the relationship between the law and labor market inequality. In addition to these intellectual contributions, the broader impacts of the proposed research are that 1) it will lead to the development of a unique data set with original measures of antidiscrimination law for use by future researchers and 2) it will inform public debates and policy decisions about the utility of affirmative action and other antidiscrimination measures.