Professional jobs almost always offer retirement accounts yet employ few black workers

Evidence

When it comes to who gets what kind of retirement account, the racial divide is stark. The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies jobs outside of service, sales, transportation, and construction as “professional and related occupations”; this broad category includes everything from architect to zoologist, but what these jobs have in common is that they’re the most likely to come with tax-free perks. Almost two-thirds (66.4 percent) of employers in those professional industries sponsor retirement accounts, and their workforce is 80 percent white and 9.4 percent black. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 364

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core goal of naming provisions and quantifying how each widens the racial gap — the sponsorship-rate data is exactly the mechanism evidence sought.