On Monday, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute had something snarky to say about a new government report on the gap between men’s and women’s earnings.
Economist Mark Perry wrote that the median Asian American woman earns only about 3 percent less than the median American man, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The median Asian American woman also earns significantly more than the median black or Hispanic man in the United States.
“Do those pay disparities reflect gender discrimination against men? Or minority (Asian) privilege?” Perry quipped.
Perry was making a point about how statistics on the gender pay gap tend to be deployed in misleading ways. Full-time working women may earn 79 cents on the dollar compared to men, according to the Census, but that figure doesn’t take into account the gender differences in education and career choices, among other things.
But look within the data, and you see even more striking examples — which themselves reveal the different dynamics that explain why men and women of different backgrounds earn different wages.
Compared to non-Hispanic white men, Indian American women actually earn more on average, and Chinese American women earn about the same. (This is based on data on annual incomes from the 2014 American Community Survey, which are slightly different from the weekly wage data used by the BLS — but the idea is comparable.)
Education has a lot to do with the Asian-woman advantage. More than half of Asian Americans over 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to only 33 percent of non-Hispanic whites. And 21.8 percent of Asian Americans also have graduate or professional degrees, compared to 12.8 percent of non-Hispanic whites.
In other words, Asian Americans are 50 percent more likely to have bachelor’s degrees, and nearly twice as likely to hold PhDs, law degrees, MBAs or MDs.
Educational attainment is even higher for some ethnic groups. About 72 percent of Indian Americans have four-year college degrees, and a whopping 40 percent have some professional or graduate degree.
Think about that stat for a second. Indian Americans are more likely to have advanced degrees than white Americans are likely to have finished college.
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