Friday, July 30, 2010
Six Figure Salary Gap Amongst African Americans
When I read this article I was shocked that only 3.3% of African Americans earning six-figure salaries; and that much of the short fall is due to educational achievements. Which probes me to find out how much more do Africans get paid in certain professions relative to White Americans. I mean, I am under the assumption that African Americans who hold doctorate degrees particularly in the technology field should be making six-figures at the minimum. Now I am beginning to realize that African Americans holding advanced degrees are being slighted. For instance, recently this guy from Cameroon holding a PhD from Morgan State left international business machines to go to Fujitsu. The reason he left said company after contributing 4 patents was because he never received a promotion since he joined the company and had not been making six-figures to begin with (the compensation/benefits & stock options does not add-up to six-figures either). I would like to hear your opinion on this and how do you overcome being under-valued in this climate... BTW, here's the article: Six-Figure Salary Gap
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its all education based.... even educated advanced degree black folks are under-educated compared to their similarly qualified counterparts. the good ol boy network is still in a effect and important. its slowly breaking down but its still prevalent everywhere.
ReplyDeletewhat i'm saying is alot of black people are stil the first in their family to do something productive (an array of things: earned an advanced degree, own a home, running a business, teaching college, becoming partner, invest in retirement, send their kids to better schools, fly on an aircraft, visit the dr regularly) meanwhile white people have a huge network of them doing something productive. they are not really learning the inner workings of anything; they have been told and groomed since youth. whereas we are sometimes are learning things on our own and thus incur pitfalls that others do not.... i see the same thing in career development...
Considering this fact of a lot of black folks breaking common cycles in education (overcoming the lack of it) and acquiring a better way of living, it isn't cool to accept this kind of treatment in any level.
ReplyDeleteThe reason why I say this is because I have always realized that as black people good enough will never cut it, we have to be completely dominant in order for white folks to give us a shot. So we shouldn't accept anything less than what our counterpart Caucasian counterparts have been offered.
From the example I gave earlier, this African dude has contributed 4 patents to this company in a 3 yr span with no promotions while folks with Master's are surpassing him, that's just utterly ridiculous....
It may not necessarily be a race thing, another component is the salary one starts off with and the economic conditions at the time. Its not uncommon for someone to start off at a certain pay grade and the natural rate of pay increases (including exceeds expectation) would be the same as someone thats new person because the market conditions or demand for the new person is different. This is especially true if someone was hired during a down turn and a new employee was hired during a better economy.
ReplyDeleteEven if someone is a super talent and they invent the world typically they can move up in grade which comes with a maximum pay increase percentage, but this can still be less than someone walking off the street because of the demand.
To me this is part of the issue with corp america not so much a racial thing.
I don't know your friend but having the ability to brag about your accomplishments is critical, managers don't care about people's success. I think we tend to have an issue with the politics of corp america.