Progress toward Pay Equity in State Governments?

• Date: 01 May 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12897
• Author: Jonathan Boyd,Rahul Pathak,Gregory B. Lewis
• Published date: 01 May 2018

386 Public Administration Review • May | June 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 3, pp. 386–397. © 2017 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12897.

Research Article

Rahul Pathak is assistant professor

at Baruch College, City University of New

York. He received his doctorate in Public

Policy from the Georgia State University. His

research interests include issues related to

public finance and social policy.

E-mail: rahul.pathak@baruch.cuny.edu

Jonathan Boyd is visiting lecturer in

the Department of Public Management

and Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy

Studies, Georgia State University. His

research focuses on higher education policy,

pay gaps for women and minorities, and

diversity in the public sector workforce.

E-mail: jboyd12@gsu.edu

Gregory B. Lewis is chair and professor

in the Department of Public Management

and Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy

Studies, Georgia State University. He has

published widely on the career patterns and

attitudes of public employees.

E-mail: glewis@gsu.edu

Abstract : Are state governments fulfilling their responsibilities to be model employers of women and minorities?

Using U.S. Census Bureau data on individual employees from 1980 to 2015, this article looks at how much progress

state governments have made toward eliminating racial and gender pay differences. It examines whether differences

in education, age/experience, citizenship, English ability, hours worked, and occupation explain the pay differences.

Patterns and explanations vary substantially by group, but state governments are doing a better job than private firms

of closing pay gaps on almost every measure.

Evidence for Practice

• Race and gender pay gaps in state governments have narrowed over the past 35 years, although progress has

nearly stopped since 2000, except for Asians.

• State governments are doing a better job of achieving pay equity than private sector firms.

• The gender pay gap is narrowing later in the career. Pay disparities used to widen markedly between the

twenties and the forties, but that pattern has largely disappeared in the past decade.

Gregory B. Lewis

Jonathan Boyd

Georgia State University

Rahul Pathak

Baruch College, City University of New York

Progress toward Pay Equity in State Governments?

G overnments have long set their sights on

being model employers. Among other goals,

being a model employer means paying

employees fairly, which includes paying women and

minorities as much as equally productive white men.

Governments have not achieved that goal—women

and minorities earn less than white men in all sectors

of the economy—but previous research suggests

that the federal government, at least, made progress

toward racial and gender equity through the 1990s

and that race and gender pay disparities tend to be

smaller in the public sector (e.g., Asher and Popkin

1984 ; Lewis 1988 , 1998 ; Long 1976 ; Smith 1976b ).

Most research on the public sector has focused on the

federal government, however; we know less about race

and gender pay gaps in state governments (Bishu and

Alkadry 2017 ), even though they employ 50 percent

more workers than the federal service.

Using U.S. Census Bureau data for 1980–2015,

we examine how mean earnings differ among eight

groups (white, black, Latinx, and Asian men and

women) and try to explain both why the gaps

exist and why they are changing. The most benign

explanation would be that white men are more

qualified than women and minorities but that gaps

in qualifications have shrunk over time; if that were

true and we were able to compare equally productive

members of each group, we would find that they

earned the same amounts. To test this explanation,

we examine (trends in) differences in several

characteristics that predict employees’ productivity:

education, age (as a proxy for experience), length

of workweek, and citizenship status and English

ability (as proxies for communication skills in the

workplace). A second largely benign explanation

would be that white men choose occupations whose

skills are more highly valued in the labor market;

occupational differences could, however, also reflect

obstacles that women and minorities face in entering

more highly paid occupations. Third, white men

could earn more than apparently comparable women

and minorities because of unmeasured differences in

other characteristics that affect productivity and/or

because of discrimination. State progress toward pay

equality across races and genders could result because

differences in productive characteristics are shrinking,

because occupational distributions are becoming

more similar, or because unexplained pay gaps are

narrowing.

We find that white men earn more, on average, than

all groups except Asian men, but mean pay for most

groups has gained relative to white men since 1980.

Differences in education, age, hours worked, and

citizenship explain part of white men’s pay advantage

and part of the shrinkage in that advantage, but

women and minorities still typically make less than