Dmitriy T.M. sent in this graph from CNN (found at Gawker) using info from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, rating the “best” jobs in America:
I zoomed in so you can read the chart better. The second line under each icon tells you what job sector the BLS categorizes it as and the total number of jobs. On the third line, the salary in regular font on the left is the median salary for that job, while the salary in bold in the right is the highest reported salary. The colored icons represent different things (i.e., highest overall median salary) that aren’t as interesting, at least to me, as the other info:
Labor force broken down by sex and race/ethnicity (notice that the numbers are in 1000s, so there are actually 66,208,000 women in the workforce and so on):
I calculated the percentages of each race/ethnicity by sex and noticed a few differences. Here are the % of the workforce that falls into each racial/ethnic category, broken down by sex (sorry if the formatting’s showing up all weird):
Whites: Women = 80.6 Men = 83.7
African Americans: Women = 12.4 Men = 9.3
Hispanics: Women = 12.1 Men = 15.8
Asians: Women = 4.7 Men = 4.8
So we see differences between men and women for every group except Asians. Notice that African Americans stand out as the only group where women make up a larger proportion of the workforce than men do. I know I’ve read things suggesting that African American men face a tougher job market than African American women do because of negative stereotypes (they’re angry, they don’t work hard, they don’t interact with customers well), leading to more discrimination against Black men than Black women (who clearly also face job discrimination). Other explanations?
And of course, we always have to remember that BLS data is based on official job reporting; off-the-books or informal employment, which some groups are likely overrepresented in, aren’t included.
And notice that in the sex/ethnicity breakdown, we see two icons, one clearly marked as female and the other as male, but in the rest of the chart, where sex is not explicitly discussed, all of the icons are the male version. Just another example of using male icons as “neutral” and female icons only when discussing sex/gender specifically.
Related posts: sex and starting salaries of college grads, joblessness by race/age/sex/education, more on joblessness, race, and education, men in “good” jobs by race, race and the economic downturn, changes in type of work over time, gender and the wage gap, trends in academic employment, science/engineering Ph.D.s for women and minorities, changes in compensation by job sector, more on the male/female wage gap, gender and the recession, gendering jobs, do immigrants work harder?, and the post-industrial economy.
