What About This Female Pay Gap?

A black woman with a bachelor's degree earns as much as a white woman with a degree. But with a professional degree, black women earn 30% more than white women (see chart above).

Also from The Economist article "Nearer To Overcoming":

• For every dollar that a white man earns, a black man makes only 70 cents. Such figures are sometimes bandied around to imply that nearly all of this gap is caused by discrimination. That is bunk. If a firm could really get the same work done 30% more cheaply simply by hiring blacks, someone would have noticed and made a fortune doing just that.

• A study by Richard Sander of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when the bar is lowered for black applicants to law school, they are admitted to institutions where they cannot cope. Many who drop out of top-tier colleges might have thrived at slightly less competitive ones. Mr. Sander calculated that the net effect of pro-black preferences was actually to reduce the number of blacks who passed the bar exam. That is, racial preferences for black law students result in fewer black lawyers.