Indian American women earn more white men

While full-time working women in the US may earn 79 cents on the dollar compared to men, Indian American women actually earn more on average compared to non-Hispanic white men, according to a media report.

Mark Perry, an economist at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, came to this startling conclusion based on an analysis of a new government report on the gap between men's and women's earnings.

The Chinese American women earn about the same as white men, he concluded based on data on annual incomes from the 2014 American Community Survey, which are slightly different from the weekly wage data used by the of Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS).

The median Asian American woman earns only about 3 percent less than the median American man, according to the latest Bureau of Labour Statistics data (BLS), Perry wrote as cited by the Washington Post.

The median Asian American woman also earns significantly more than the median black or Hispanic man in the US.

Education has a lot to do with the Asian-woman advantage, Perry wrote, noting more than half of Asian Americans over 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to only 33 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

And 21.8 percent of Asian Americans also have graduate or professional degrees, compared to 12.8 percent of non-Hispanic whites.

Asian Americans are 50 percent more likely to have bachelor's degrees, and nearly twice as likely to hold PhDs, law degrees, MBAs or MDs.

Educational attainment is even higher for some ethnic groups. About 72 percent of Indian Americans have four-year college degrees, and a whopping 40 percent have some professional or graduate degree.

Indian Americans are more likely to have advanced degrees than white Americans are likely to have finished college.

It's not surprising then, that Asian Americans tend to out-earn other groups, the Post said.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in <mailto:arun.kumar@ians.in>)