Decomposing Vision Earnings Gaps

Abstract

In the United States, about two percent of working-age adults experience vision difficulty, defined as blindness or “serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing glasses.” These individuals face barriers both to and within the labor market, leading to lower employment rates and reduced earnings compared to their counterparts without vision difficulty. For example, in our sample of 977,472 18- to 65-year-old women and 947,786 18- to 65-year-old men from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS), women with vision difficulty are about 23 percentage points less likely to be employed than are women without vision difficulty; among men, the comparable gap is about 30 percentage points. Conditional on employment, on average, women with vision difficulty earn about 22% less than women without vision difficulty while men with vision difficulty earn about 29% less than men without. We estimate separate log earnings equations by gender and vision ability after controlling for selection into employment. We decompose earnings gaps into differential selection into employment, differences in human capital and other observable characteristics, and potential labor market discrimination. Our findings suggest that earnings gaps between individuals with and without vision difficulty are largely attributable to differences in educational attainment, differential selection into employment, and occupational segregation.