How Racial Disparities Hurt Retirement for All: SSA Official

What You Need to Know

Minorities earn far less on average than their white counterparts at all levels of educational attainment.
According to Kilolo Kijakazi, a researcher and Social Security Administration official, this has the potential to worsen retirement outcomes for all.
Only by confronting lasting employment discrimination can all Americans get a fair shot at a dignified life at work and in retirement.

All Americans working today have a direct stake in leveling the economic playing field for people of color, and a failure to address longstanding disparities in employment for women and minority groups is all but certain to result in worse retirement outcomes for all.

This was the forceful conclusion of a speech given Tuesday by Kilolo Kijakazi, the Social Security Administration’s deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy, during a summit put on in Washington by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Milken Institute.

Kijakazi emphasized early in her presentation that her remarks did not represents the views of either the SSA or the Biden administration as a whole. Instead, Kijakazi was speaking from her perspective as a scholar and a concerned American citizen, and she explained how her work and that of other researchers should leave little doubt about the causes and effects of racial bias in the workplace.

It may be hard for many Americans to hear, she said, but the fact is that Black Americans, Latinos and other minority groups earn far less on average than their white counterparts at all levels of educational attainment — and that is no accident. It is the result of centuries of overtly racist policymaking that continues to reverberate throughout American society, with perhaps no more pernicious a result today than the ongoing wealth gaps between white Americans (especially well-educated white men) and their fellow citizens.

What is probably more surprising for many, according to Kijakazi, is just how much this state of affairs is a pressing problem for our society as a whole. Such profound inequality not only tends to create sharper political and social divisions, she argued, it also causes strain across key economic sectors that matter in the day-to-day lives of all Americans — especially retirees.

The Playing Field Isn’t Even Nearly Level

Kijakazi said one of the most important points she wanted to make was that the racial economic gap is not a matter of individualism or personal attainment. It is a systemic issue tied to broader social inequality.

“The academic research on discrimination in the labor market is very clear,” Kijakazi said, pointing to a widely cited employment research meta analysis from 2017. “The meta analysis reviewed every single quality field experiment available at the time on hiring discrimination against African Americans and Latinos. The simple fact is that they found serious racial discrimination in hiring has persisted over time, long after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.”

One stat Kijakazi cited from that paper shows white job applicants get 36% more callbacks for job interviews than African Americans with the same level of educational attainment. This figure falls only slightly to 26% when comparing white job applicants to Latino applicants.

Kijakazi further observed that the share of African American workers in the professional sector and management roles actually began to decline after the Great Recession, while their representation in the service sector has essentially remained flat since the late 1960s.

Why We All Have a Stake in Equal Employment

To make the case for concerted and immediate policy action, Kijakazi emphasized not only the moral imperative of fighting bias and racism but also the universal negative effect discrimination has on society as a whole. And the harm is only set to worsen, she warned, as the American population both ages and grows more racially diverse.

What’s the Solution?

In closing her speech, Kijakazi offered up a few practical suggestions for the policy leaders in the room, admitting that such intractable problems will never be solved with half-measures.

“The research shows that, if change continues at the same slow pace as the last 50 years, it will take another 40 years for women to finally reach pay parity with men,” Kijakazi said. “For Black women, it will take us a century to reach employment equality at current rates of change.”

Kijakazi’s remarks continued: “We can’t just do the same old things and put our heads in the sand and not recognize that we have stalled on the fight against employment discrimination. We need policy solutions that address the root causes of economic insecurity, and that is employment discrimination and a gap in access to things like retirement plans. We need to hold to account entities or individuals practicing employment discrimination. Private-sector employers need to hold themselves accountable for any discrimination occurring in their places of business, and public-sector employers need to do the same.”