Depending on what you define as pay gap, black women get paid about the same as everyone else or much less. The information commonly reported regarding the racial pay gap does not factor in many elements unrelated to race or gender.

I have always thought PayScale does the best compensation studies of the workplace. So, let's look at the differences between those two measures. If you don't control factors unrelated to gender, then women earn $.83 for every dollar earned by men. But if you control for factors unrelated to gender, women earn $.99 for every dollar earned by men. In other words, the controlled gender pay gap is 1%. Very different than what you read in the papers. And the messaging is totally different.

Women can expect to earn the same as men all things being equal. On the other hand, other factors create 16 out of 17 percentage points of the pay gap.

Is that bad, maybe. All an employer can do is offer competitive rates of pay, for the same work. And for the most part the studies say they do. So, the problem is not hiring black women or paying them fairly. It starts much sooner.

PayScale does a racial/gender pay gap and it does show the lowest paid group are black women, who are paid around 2-3% less than white men after controlling for non-racial and gender factors. However, the fact that Asian women earn around 2% more than white men, suggests this pay gap is likely not gender or racially based.

One of the largest contributors to the racial gender pay gap for Black women is education.

This is a structural problem, it may be cultural, it may be economic, it may be ideological, but something structurally is producing the huge pay gap for black women.

And that something is education. For example, black women represented only 5.8% of engineering graduates in 2021-2022. Overall, black women represent around 2.2% of STEM undergraduate students.

Now it's time to dig deeper, it is not the employers producing the uncontrolled racial pay gap, and a major factor does appear to be the education black women are getting. Why is our education system not generating equitable outcomes.

Before jumping to conclusions, it appears much more complex public school funding issues. The issues are cultural, ideological, and funding related. But without addressing the cultural and ideological factors holding black women back, fixing any funding issues won't fix the problem.