Existing work suggests that black‐white gaps in potential wages are much larger among men than women and further that black‐white differences in patterns of female labor supply are unimportant. However, panel data on wages and income sources demonstrate that the modal young black woman who does not engage in market work is a single mother receiving government aid whereas her white counterpart is a married mother receiving support from a working spouse. The median black‐white gap in log potential wages among young adult women in 1990 was likely at least 60 percent larger than the gap implied by reported earnings and hours worked in the Current Populations Surveys.

Many attempts to measure the wage effects of current labor market discrimination against minorities include controls for worker productivity that (1) could themselves be affected by market discrimination and (2) are very imprecise measures of worker skill. The resulting estimates of residual wage gaps may be biased. Our approach is a parsimoniously specified wage equation that controls for skill with the score of a test administered as teenagers prepared to leave high school and embark on work careers or postsecondary education. Independent evidence shows that this test score is a racially unbiased measure of the skills and abilities these teenagers were about to bring to the labor market. We find that this one test score explains all of the black-white wage gap for young women and much of the gap for young men. For today's young adults, the black-white wage gap primarily reflects a skill gap, which in turn we can trace, at least in part, to observable differences in the family backgrounds.

The authors regress young adult wages on current age and the score of a basic skills test that was administered over ten years earlier, when respondents were preparing to leave high school and embark on work careers or postsecondary education. Controlling for this one measure of premarket skill greatly reduces the measured black-white wage gap for young adults. The authors' results suggest that the black-white wage gap primarily reflects a black-white skill gap that exists before young men and women enter the labor market. This skill gap in part reflects measured black-white differences in wealth and family background.