![]() 5 Indeed, Black male employment is lower than that of Black females despite the fact that women also provide the vast majority of the child custody and care in this population. And, if the undercounted (but not currently incarcerated) population of Black men has worse employment outcomes than those counted – which appears likely to be the case – then the employment of Black men falls below that of Black women. For instance, adding the currently incarcerated to the populations of Black men and women renders their employment-population ratios roughly equal – at about 59 percent and 56 percent in January 20 respectively. Including those incarcerated in population counts with no employment or labor force activity lowers the measured education and employment outcome statistics of Black men relative to Black women and all other race/gender groups. Of the 15 percentage-point gap in the Black male and female populations for ages 25-54, about 7 points are due to incarceration and 8 to the undercount among those non-incarcerated. ![]() There appear to be two additional factors accounting for the lower observed civilian noninstitutional population of Black men: 1) The “undercount” of such men in such surveys and 2) The large population of Black men incarcerated at any time. Differential mortality rates and immigrant arrival by gender can account for just a few percentage points of the observed gaps in population between Black males and females. 4 Male-female population gaps among white and Latino groups are not remotely as high. The fact that so many Black men are missing from the official data is evident when we compare the reported population sizes in the BLS data between Black men and women, where we find that the former are 17 percent below the latter. While these Black male employment outcomes are already disturbing, they obscure another important fact: the official BLS statistics don’t count many Black men with low employment, and adjusting for this fact further reduces measured Black male employment and earnings rates.
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