Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century

Abstract

We present new evidence on the long-run evolution of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred after 1960. Longitudinal data suggests that task transitions were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial tasks, though gaps decreased after 1940. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work in all periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks widen Black-white inequality.