Ethnic differences in women's employment: the changing role of qualifications

We pool eight spring QLFS quarters for 1992-5 and 2000-3 to examine female employment changes by ethnic group. We find that employment has significantly increased for all women except Black Caribbean/Other women. We show that qualifications have played an increasingly important role and there has been further polarization between the employment of women with a degree compared to those without. This is especially large for Pakistani/Bangladeshi women. Our decomposition analysis shows that decomposing White/Non-White mean employment differences demonstrates an increase in the unexplained discriminatory component for most ethnic groups. Hence differences in White and Non-White characteristics explain less of the 2000-3 employment differential than in 1993-5. Furthermore, significant unexplained ethnic penalties of up to 60% still exist for South Asian women.