Race and Sex in the Job Market

Life’s experience and intellectual research are often, maybe always, intertwined in a scholar’s interest and work, and Bergmann’s was not an exception. She faced discrimination as a Jew and as a woman in her job search as well as in her career (see Chapter 2 ). In fact, the economic analysis of discrimination was constantly at the center of her research from the beginning of her career to the end. In doing so, Bergmann fundamentally reshaped the way scholars and policymakers understood discrimination in the labor market. Her central contribution was the formalization of the crowding hypothesis, which she applied to the American job market. Her analysis of discrimination was first developed to understand the limited access that Black workers had to job opportunities, likely inspired by the episode at her job in the New York Bureau of Labor Statistics, where her Black male colleague was forced to stay at the rear to prevent customers from seeing him, as well as by reading Myrdal’s pivotal book on racial discrimination (Myrdal, 1944). Later on, she extended her crowding hypothesis to the female workforce.