Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Almost half of the Black US workforce is in lower-paying, frontline-service industries
Diversity & Inclusion | Organization | North America
March 2, 2021 – In the United States, 45 percent of Black private-sector employees work in industries—healthcare, retail, and accommodation and food service—that have both large frontline-service presence and high shares of workers earning less than $30,000 annually.
To read the report, see Race in the workplace: The Black experience in the US private sector, February 21, 2021.
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Visual form
Button-driven dot-matrix sequence.
Layout / body structure
The chart opens as one active race view at a time, with buttons across the top for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and White and a two-row grid of six circular dot matrices underneath. Reader can switch racial groups, then scan the six circles left to right across the top row and left to right across the bottom row, using the bracketed callouts on the left and right to notice the extreme low-pay and high-pay cases.
What is being compared
It compares how workers from a selected racial group are distributed across six industry panels and across state wage brackets, with the published page opening on the Black view. The callouts make clear that the comparison is about frontline-service and related industries such as accommodation and food service, healthcare, retail, and transportation, and about how pay levels differ from state to state within those industries.
Measurement system
Each circle works like a state-count dot matrix, with one dot representing one state and the color of the dot representing a pay bracket. The legend on the right supplies the wage-band colors, while the industry callouts anchor the interpretation with salary ranges such as less than $30,000, $40,000 to $70,000, and more than $70,000.
Visible structure inside the graphic
The six circles all use the same size and dot count, so the visual comparison comes from how much of each circle shifts into different wage-band colors. Two thin boxed brackets highlight one low-pay circle and one high-pay circle, and the top buttons signal that the same six-panel layout can be reloaded for four different racial groups.
Main takeaway from the visual
In the default Black view, a large share of dots stay in the lower wage bands for frontline-service industries, while transportation is the strongest-paying panel but still not overwhelmingly concentrated in the highest bracket. Across the as a whole, the side-by-side race buttons make the point that the wage pattern changes materially by racial group rather than by industry alone.
Key standout values or extremes
The published Black panel calls out accommodation and food service as the lowest-paying and third-largest employer of Black workers, and it calls out transportation as the highest-paying industry for Black workers, with 21 states paying Black transportation workers $40,000 to $70,000. The alternate Asian and White views visible through the buttons show much heavier upper-band clustering in healthcare and transportation, including 23 states above $70,000 for Asian healthcare workers and a District of Columbia callout in the White transportation panel above $70,000.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
The visible controls change the chart view while keeping the same graphic structure.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart is the full visual on this page.