Equal incomes produce wildly unequal wealth between black and white healthcare workers

Evidence

Meschede and her colleagues found that while black workers made up 16 percent of the healthcare labor force, they are more than three times as likely to work as lower-paid health aides than their white counterparts. And even when black and white healthcare workers earned comparable salaries, there were huge discrepancies in their overall wealth, which Meschede’s report attributes to the lack of access to “asset-building benefits”—the health insurance and retirement benefits that make up one-third of total employee compensation. Black health aides earning 23,100 in income had median wealth of 900; white health aides earning 23,600 had median wealth of 5,300. Among registered nurses, black and white nurses reporting comparable incomes near 55,000 reported median wealth of 20,000 and $93,500, respectively. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 368

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the book’s core thesis that income equality does not close the racial wealth gap because wealth derives from asset-building benefits, not wages.
• SHARE: The stark 20,000 vs 93,500 median wealth comparison among equally paid registered nurses is exactly the kind of concrete stat to send to someone working on economic inequality.