Michelle Holder is an associate professor of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She was also distinguished senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth in Washington, DC, through February 2023. Holder has worked as an applied economist for more than a decade in the nonprofit and government sectors, and her research focuses on the statuses of Black workers and women of color in the American labor market. Her economic policy reports have been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Amsterdam News, El Diario, and Dollars & Sense. Holder has also appeared on, or been quoted in, major media outlets including CNN, CBS, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, PBS, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, TheGrio, Al Jazeera-English, The Guardian, USA Today, Marketplace, Bloomberg.com, and Vox.com. She has testified before Congress on issues such as infrastructure investment and family caregiving. Her first book, African American Men and the Labor Market during the Great Recession, was published in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan, and her second book, Afro-Latinos in the U.S. Economy, coauthored with Alan Aja, was published in 2021 by Lexington Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield. Holder received an MA and a PhD in economics from The New School for Social Research, a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Fordham University.
Research Summary
In original research Holder conducted in 2020, she quantified the aggregate earnings loss to Black women in the US attributable to racial and gender wage gaps; she estimated that working Black women lose a total of approximately $50 billion (in 2017 dollars) in salaries and wages each year because of the “double gap” in wages this group experiences. Her research suggests that an individual full-time Black female worker is underpaid, on average, by approximately $20,000 each year. Building on this research, Holder’s goal is to explore and highlight the connective tissue between individual gender and racial wage losses that Black women experience and individual racial wealth gaps their households experience. In doing so, her goal is to bring urgency to the issue of the undervaluation of Black women’s work in that it not only contributes to income gaps between Black and white households, but also wealth gaps. The case can thus be more effectively made that policy measures designed to address wage gaps have the potential to address wealth inequities too.
