Organizational demography and inequality

The “minority power” perspective in stratification maintains that inequality between minority and majority groups can be attributed to the former's lack of power. Students of inequality tend to reject this conjecture on the strength of consistent findings showing that the minority earnings level is negatively related to its group size. A valid test of the minority power hypothesis requires an organizational analysis where a distinction can be made between (1) minority size and (2) minority share in managerial positions. We examined these two effects on wage inequality between females and males as well as between blacks and whites in 117 work organizations. For reasons specified in the article we cannot conclude that the findings lend support to the minority power argument.