Is There Intersectional Labor Market Discrimination?

ABSTRACT

We test for intersectional labor market discrimination across five dimensions: gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability. Specifically, we test for “amplifying intersectionality”—negative interactions between the effects of marginalized identities that make wage penalties greater than additive. We make three contributions. First, we resolve contradictory findings on intersectional discrimination in existing research. Second, we analyze more dimensions than have typically been considered in past research. Third, we explore bias from selection on employment. We find little or no evidence of intersectional discrimination in wage differentials among the groups we study, and indeed, most evidence points in the opposite direction.