Gender wage gaps, as conventionally measured, understate the extent of gender inequality in the labor market. When gender differences in wages are examined in conjunction with gender differences in labor force participation, fringe benefits, and self-employment income, men’s average labor earnings are 75 percent higher than women’s. Under this fuller accounting, women thus earn 57 cents for each dollar earned by men. Although women have come to comprise almost 50 percent of the formal labor market, their representation in top labor income groups has risen very slowly.

The male-female life expectancy gap, which favors females, fell from 7.6 years in 1970 to 4.8 years in 2010, a reduction of more than one-third. Most of this convergence was caused by asubstantial decline from 1990 to 2000 in HIV-AIDS mortality and in the homicide rate. Because HIV-AIDS and homicide affect men more than women, a decline in these underlying rates had the effect of reducing the male-female life expectancy gap. Life expectancy has stagnated for the last several years for men and women, primarily due to increases in drug poisoning deaths and in the suicide rate. 

The idea that people may not identify with traditional binary gender categories has gained acceptance in the United States, but the lack of recognition of transgender and nonbinary citizens in administrative records, identity documents, and national surveys restricts people’s ability to self-identify and limits our understanding of patterns and trends in well-being.

The gap between white and Hispanic poverty has remained stable for decades despite dramatic changes in the size and composition of the two groups. The gap, however, conceals crucial differences within the Hispanic population whereby some leverage education and smaller families to stave off poverty while others facing barriers to citizenship and English language acquisition face particularly high rates. In this paper, we use Decennial Census and American Community Survey data to examine poverty rates between Hispanic and non-Hispanic, white heads of household.

The growing diversity of the U.S. population raises questions about integration among America's fastest growing minority population—Hispanics. The canonical view is that intermarriage with the native-born White population represents a pathway to assimilation that varies over geographic space in response to uneven marital opportunities. Using data on past-year marriage from the 2009–2014 American Community Survey, the authors demonstrate high rates of intermarriage among Hispanics.