these decreases are the result of greater occupational diversity and reductions in unobserved or residual differences. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the wage gap has fluctuated in terms of the ratio between black and white wages: 67.7 percent in 2000, 64.0 percent in 2005, 67.5 percent in 2008, and 64.5 percent in 2009. The absolute difference in black and white wages, however, has decreased over this period. Black Americans now number 36 million, 12.9% of the total population. As of 2009, the median black male income was $23,738, compared to the median white non-Hispanic male income of $36,785. While progress in wage inequality for blacks has been made since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, inequality and discrimination still exist. A study conducted by Major G. Coleman (2003) reports that as black and white men have more similar competitive performance ratings, racial wage differences increase rather than decrease. He also found that black wages are less than white wages in the same industry. When no factors other than race are considered, Coleman predicts the black hourly wage to be $7.49 and the white hourly wage to be $8.92, 19 percent higher than the black hourly wage. When Coleman controlled for human capital, such as education and skills, the difference decreased to 11 percent. Coleman attributed this 11 percent difference to racial discrimination. Grodsky and Pager also calculated wage differences, and found blacks to make $3.65 less per hour than whites in the private sector and $2.85 less in the public sector. Using statistical regressions, they found that human capital, region, and marital status account for 55 percent of the wage gap difference. An additional 20 percent of the wage gap was attributed to differences in occupational distributions between blacks and whites. Thus, 25 percent of the wage gap was unaccounted for by their model. Black women experience more wage equality in comparison to white women than black men do to white men. By the mid-1970s, wages for black and white women were almost equal; however, since then, black women's wages have decreased about 10 percent relative to white women's wages. This difference that emerged has been attributed to the increase of white women in the labor force following the mid-1970s. It has been suggested that when more white women began working, the advantages of black women from unmeasured differences in labor force attachment disappeared, revealing