Representation and Severity in the Distribution of Income

The existence of glass ceilings and sticky floors suggests that disadvantaged workers will be under-represented in some parts of the income distribution, and over-represented in others. We present a new index to measure the representation of population subgroups in different regions of the income distribution. Our representation index is easily generalized to condition on characteristics (such as age, education, etc). Further, it generalizes naturally to an index of the severity (or cost) of under-representation to group members, which is based on dollar-weighted representation. Both representation and severity indices are easily calculated via existing regression techniques. We illustrate the approach using Canadian Census data