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African American Males in the
Front Door but out the Back
Door: Monitor Discharges
by William M. Slonaker, Associate Professor of Business Law; Ann C.
Wendt, Associate Professor of Management, and Scott David Williams, As-
sistant Professor of Management, all at Raj Soin College of Business, Wright
State University, Dayton, OH 45435-0001, U.S.A.
Abstract
While every instance of race-based employment discrimination is important,
this study finds that managers need to devote extra attention to the discharge
of male, African American employees. During the past three decades, efforts
to create fair procedures and promote perceptions of fair treatment have fo-
cused on hiring activities, the “front door.” However, this study of actual em-
ployment discrimination claims finds that discrimination against African
American men may be particularly acute in the realm of employee discharge,
the “back door.” In addition, this study suggests that the employees’ imme-
diate supervisors should be trained and monitored in order to reduce this
form of racial discrimination.
Introduction
Pragmatism and conscience make avoiding employees’ perceptions of racial
biases and civil rights claims of discrimination a high priority for proactive
managers. Racial biases are particularly harmful to individuals when they af-
fect hiring and discharge processes—the points where people gain and lose
employment in an organization. Employees’ civil rights claims are also dam-
aging to employers in many ways. Defending against civil rights claims de-
creases workforce morale and leads to negative publicity, both of which are
very costly. Race discrimination also exacts a psychic toll on any manager
with a moral conscience.
This paper examines claims of discrimination in hiring and discharge
with attention to race as a factor. All instances of perceived discrimination
are unfortunate, but this study finds that a critical target for managerial inter-
vention is discrimination during discharge. Greater attention to discharge
procedures and policies might yield the greatest improvement in fair treat-
ment of African American men. Furthermore, training of immediate supervi-
sors to improve fairness of the procedures may be particularly useful as
organizations strive to eliminate discrimination.
Race Discrimination and Civil Rights in the Workplace
Whether African Americans agree or disagree with President George W.
Bush’s approach to dealing with racial injustice, most agree with him that
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 1
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
discrimination is a problem in the U.S.: “Our Constitution makes it clear that
people of all races must be treated equally under the law. Yet, we know that
our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a reality in
America” (President George W. Bush in a speech on January 15, 2003.). A
recent poll found that while perceptions of race relations are becoming more
favorable, only 44% of African Americans describe race relations as “good”
or “excellent,” and only 39% believe they have “an equal chance at jobs”
(Langer, 2003). A lack of confidence in fair treatment can undermine career
motivation and thereby create somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy
(Clarke, 2000; Greenberg, 1996).
Civil rights legislation prohibits discrimination on the basis of race. Ti-
tle VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination in hiring, com-
pensation, and terms, conditions or privileges of employment on the basis of
race, religion, color, sex, or national origin. The law affects most public and
private organizations. Disparate treatment (intentional discrimination) oc-
curs when minorities receive different treatment than majorities. Adverse
impact (unintentional discrimination) is the result of the same treatment ap-
plied to both minorities and majorities, but when the outcome of that treat-
ment is substantially less favorable for minorities. When individuals believe
they have been subjected to discrimination they have a right to file a claim,
which triggers a multi-step investigation and enforcement process.
Injustice at the Front Door: Unfair Hiring
Discrimination in the hiring process can take many forms. Clearly, manag-
ers who consciously intend to discriminate against racial minorities can re-
ject their applications outright (Le and Kleiner, 2000). Also, they can search
the application forms and interviews to find any rationalization for rejecting
the applicant.
A variety of perceptual and judgment biases can lead to discrimination
as well (Peppas, 2002; Tomkiewicz, Bass, Adeyemi-Bello, & Voicys, 2002;
Wexley & Nemeroff, 1974). Stereotyping of minority applicants causes
evaluators to selectively perceive and retain information that confirms their
existing beliefs about people from that group. The similar-to-me error
causes evaluators to have more favorable impressions of applicants with
whom they share personal characteristics. Cultural differences in perceived
appropriateness of behaviors and desirability of attributes can also cause un-
fair evaluator judgments.
Effective management of a diverse workforce certainly does not end
with fair hiring procedures. Once minority employees are invited into the
front door, they must be accepted by the organization, given the same oppor-
tunities as white employees and held to the same standards. Despite the at-
tention that a lot of organizations devote to fairness in hiring, much of the
discrimination employees experience occurs after they enter the front door.
2 Equal Opportunities International
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Males in the Front
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Back Door
Injustice at the Back Door: Unfair Discharge
While difficult to prove conclusively, the authors’ findings suggest that man-
agers and management scholars pay much less attention to maintaining fair-
ness at the back door than at the front door. Consider, for instance, the
coverage of staffing versus termination in the “body of knowledge” identi-
fied by the Human Resources Certification Institute and codified in the Soci-
ety for Human Resource Management’s Learning System (Society for
Human Resource Management, 2000). Nineteen pages of the staffing mod-
ule are devoted to employee selection with an entire page on compliance is-
sues and several references to discrimination issues throughout. In contrast,
only four pages are devoted to involuntary terminations including one para-
graph on discrimination issues.
The authors are not aware of a comparable body of knowledge for the
broad class of the workforce that has supervisory responsibility—employees
who have the authority to direct the efforts of others and terminate those indi-
viduals’ employment relationships. There is no preeminent professional cer-
tification for supervisors. (Supervision is not technically a profession; it is a
function performed by people of diverse vocations in all industries.) How-
ever, we have attended and delivered training for supervisors, and our experi-
ence is that avoiding discrimination and maintaining perceptions of fairness
is not a major focus of such training. Moreover, many supervisors have never
received formal training for their supervisory duties. This is noteworthy be-
cause supervisors are commonly involved in hiring and discharge processes
in organizations, particularly firings.
Supervisors’ conscious or unconscious biases against racial minorities
can result in unfair discharge decisions. Perhaps some supervisors wait for
any excuse to terminate these individuals. They can apply the harshest of
penalties to address the employees’ productivity problems, absences and in-
terpersonal conflicts. In contrast to minorities, majority members might re-
ceive the benefit of the doubt in dealing with similar issues and more
reasonable treatment from their supervisors. When such injustices occur, the
costs to both the employees and their employers can be significant.
The Process and Cost of Perceived Discrimination
Whether valid or frivolous, upheld or denied, all claims of employment dis-
crimination are costly to employers. No research to date has estimated how
many claimants fraudulently file employment discrimination claims when
they do not truly believe that they have been victims of discrimination, but
there is no reason to believe that such instances represent a substantial per-
centage of claims. Based on their analyses of the 8,051 claims of employ-
ment discrimination, and after talking with attorneys and investigators for
civil rights agencies, the authors believe that only six to eight percent of for-
mal charges have no basis or are fraudulent. The authors firmly believe that
the majority of employment discrimination claims filed with civil rights
commission clearly indicate a perception of unjust treatment.
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 3
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and state agencies re-
ceive, investigate, and resolve employment discrimination claims. An em-
ployee or applicant need only state the essential facts surrounding the claim,
under oath and with agency assistance. The agency then conducts an investi-
gation that may be as simple as requesting documents, or as thorough as on-
site interviews. The agency attempts to help the parties resolve the claim. If
it is not resolved, the claimant is entitled to a “right to sue” letter, which is
necessary if they wish to file a lawsuit in the courts. The letter will be issued
regardless of whether or not the agency found “probable cause” that dis-
crimination occurred. Cooperating with an investigation of a claim of em-
ployment discrimination or presenting a defense in court consumes
managers’ time and money.
The deterioration of employees’ morale and public goodwill that can re-
sult from perceived discrimination can also be very costly. When employees
believe that their managers have committed acts of racial discrimination,
their morale and motivation are likely to suffer. Employees who empathize
with the victim will resent management. Employees who are racial minori-
ties themselves may be particularly affected because, as social cognitive
theory research has demonstrated (Wood & Bandura, 1989), people tend to
compare themselves to and learn from the experiences of similar referents.
Racial discrimination is also behavior that external stakeholders (e.g., cus-
tomers and investors) will often penalize. In many instances, employment
discrimination publicity has led to customer boycotts of businesses. Simi-
larly, socially responsible investors are disinclined to invest in companies
with a poor record of racial justice.
For these practical reasons, and because many managers are personally
committed to eliminating employment discrimination, studying employ-
ment discrimination claims is important. We conducted this study to iden-
tify discrimination patterns that managers will want to address.
Sample and Methodology
To better understand the current characteristics of employment discrimina-
tion, the authors have been conducting a longitudinal study, The Ohio Em-
ployment Discrimination Studies. To date, they have examined 8,051 claims
of employment discrimination closed by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission
(OCRC) from 1985 through 2001. The claims were randomly drawn as a
stratified random sample (8.7%) from the 92,494 cases closed during that
time. The authors used a content analysis research method to analyze the
variables (discussed in this article) within each claim. The claims were filed
under federal (85%) and state (15%) laws, against all types of employers,
whose sizes ranged from micro-businesses to Fortune 500 firms.
Based on a comparison of sample claimants to the workforces of both
Ohio and the U.S., the findings of this research are generalizable to those
workforce populations. Women compose 44% of the Ohio and the U.S.
workforces. Ohio is seventh in the country for gross state product (Ohio Bu-
4 Equal Opportunities International
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
reau of Employment Services, 1998, p. 1-2) (U.S. Department of Labor,
2000, Table A-1). Ohio’s goods producing industries are slightly higher (at
25%), and service producing industries slightly lower (at 75%) than those of
the U.S. (20% goods and 80% service). For Ohio, local and state government
employment is about 12.5%, while nationally it averages about 13.5% of to-
tal employment (Ohio Bureau of Employment Services, 1998, Table 2; U.S.
Department of Labor, 2000, Table B-1).
Outcomes: Front Door versus Back Door
As regards the “front door” of employment (not hired) 543 claimants (7%) in
the database alleged that they were not hired. Of these, men filed 328 claims
(60%), with 232 claims (43%) filed by non-Black males and 96 claims (18%)
filed by Black males. Regarding the “back door” of employment (being dis-
charged) 4,619 claimants (57%) alleged that they were fired. Of these, men
filed 2,132 claims (49%), with 1,344 claims (29%) filed by non-Black males
and 788 claims (17%) filed by Black males. The significance of these per-
centages becomes clear when workforce participation rates are considered.
African–American males represent only 4% of the Ohio workforce, and only
5% of the U.S. workforce (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Thus, front door dis-
crimination claims are 3.6 times the rate of what should be expected, and
back door claims are nearly 3.4 times the expected rate.
As noted above, only 7% of all 8,051 claimants in the authors’ database
alleged that they were not hired as a result of discrimination. This low rate,
while somewhat surprising, is understandable since job applicants who are
rejected and never get in the front door, never gain access to the reasons for
their rejection, or to the employer’s pattern of hiring/rejecting applicants, all
of which may include discriminatory motives. Without some information
and insights concerning the potential employer’s hiring/rejection practices,
proving a claim of illegal discrimination in connection with hiring becomes
almost impossible. And yet, so much of the discussion since passage of Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has focused on the front door, i.e., hiring
minorities, particularly African Americans.
However, the back door (discharges) is another matter. First, as noted
above, 57% (4,619) of all claims (8,051) in the authors’ database alleged dis-
criminatory firing. Second, 1,411 (31%) of the discharge claims were filed
by African Americans, including 788 (17%) being filed by African Ameri-
can males. Thus, while African American males only filed 96 front door
claims, they filed more than eight times that number (788) of back door
claims. Employers need to focus on the back door.
General Characteristics of Back Door Claims by African American
Males
Table 1 summarizes the jobs held by the discharged African American male
claimants.
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 5
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
By way of comparison, note the percentages of African American male
claimants in executive/managerial-level jobs (10%) and in transporta-
tion/labor jobs (27%) as compared to claims filed by other discharged males
in those jobs, i.e., 18% and 18% respectively. Corporate America still has
very few African American executives and managers, only 41,900 (Bureau
of Labor Statistics). White Americans appear to have less favorable atti-
tudes toward African Americans in management positions than African
Americans possess (Tomkiewicz, Adeyemi-Bello, & Johnson, 1999),
which could contribute to the glass ceiling.
Table 1 also shows a high concentration of discharges for African
American males in transportation/labor jobs (27% versus 18% for non Afri-
can American males). This suggests that African American males face other
social economic and education barriers to entering the workforce that need
to be addressed through public education and other workforce preparatory
programs.
One of the most significant findings by these authors is the length of em-
ployment of African American males shown the back door by the employers
identified in their claims (Table 2).
6 Equal Opportunities International
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
Fifty-three percent of African American males who filed claims alleging
discriminatory discharge held their jobs for one year or less. Compare this to
the 32% of non-Black discharged male claimants who were employed for
one year or less. Clearly, African American males are significantly more vul-
nerable to discharge during their first year of employment.
In the mid-1990s, the authors spent considerable time interviewing Hu-
man Resource professionals in the Southwestern Ohio region concerning
workforce diversity and workforce problems in their organizations. When
asked whether employment discrimination was a problem in their organiza-
tions, the overwhelming response was, “No, because we are not in a hiring
mode.” This consistent response suggests that even HR professionals look at
race discrimination as a front door issue. They were not aware of what hap-
pened to racial minorities after they entered their front doors.
If African American males can survive the first year of employment,
then their chances of retaining their jobs increases to that of non Black males
(Table 2). Thus, if employers and HR professionals want to reap the benefits
of their equal hiring opportunity efforts, they must closely monitor what hap-
pens to African American males during their first year of employment.
Table 3 reports the source of the discharge, or who fired them. Dis-
charged African American males identified their immediate supervisor as
the source of the discriminatory discharge 53% of the time. This compares to
45% of non African American males who identified their immediate supervi-
sor as the source of their discharge.
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 7
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
Thus, employers and HR professionals should monitor discharge deci-
sions made by front-line, immediate supervisors.
The involvement of higher-level supervisors (25%) in allegedly dis-
criminatory discharges of African American males was essentially the same
(26%) as reported by non Black discharged males. However, note the in-
volvement of HR professionals: 10% identified by African American males
versus 15% for other males. This suggests that perhaps HR professionals are
deferring to immediate supervisors more frequently when African Ameri-
can males are discharged than when other males are discharged. At the very
least, the authors suggest that HR professionals need to have increased in-
volvement when the discharge of an African American male is being consid-
ered.
Although, the authors have not identified the race of immediate or
higher-level supervisors for all 8,051 claims in their database, they have
identified race for several sub-sets. Consistently, 99% of the persons identi-
fied as the source of the discharge are white. This is consistent with the lim-
ited number of African American executives/managers shown in Table 1.
The authors tracked the reasons given by employers for their discharge
decisions. Table 4 reports these findings. Interestingly, the first reason, “in-
adequate performance,” was reported at the same rate (21%) for non Black
discharged males. Performance is not a greater issue for African American
males. Similarly, “violation of company policy” was essentially the same
for both groups (14% African American males; 13% other males). There
were few differences for “reorganization/layoff” (7% African American
8 Equal Opportunities International
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
males; 10% other males) and for “attendance” (13% African American
males; 9% other males).
However, for one of the employers’ reasons, “disruptive behavior,”
there was a substantial difference. Employers used this reason in 21% of the
discharges of African American males, while using it only 12% of the time
when discharging a non-Black male. The authors find it hard to believe that
African American males are nearly twice as disruptive in the workplace as
are other males. After having analyzed the 788 claims of discriminatory dis-
charge filed by African American males, the authors have formed two opin-
ions. First, the authors believe that negative stereotypes influence how
supervisors and co-workers perceive African American males. Second, the
authors believe that immediate supervisors, and co-workers acting with the
tacit consent of supervisors, instigate incidents that have racial overtones.
Recommendations
If organizations are going to successfully recruit, promote, and retain Afri-
can American males, white managers must be trained to accept and work
with racial minorities. Three of the top five reasons that employees consider
“very important” in deciding to accept a job with their current employer are
open communication, management quality, and their supervisor (Galinsky,
Bond & Friedman, 1993). These factors have a tremendous impact on
African-American males who believe they are the targets of discriminatory
discharge.
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 9
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
To defray the perception of discriminatory actions, organizations must
establish clearly defined procedures for handling all involuntary termina-
tions. These procedures must be followed prior to each discharge decision,
including:
* No on the spot discharges without consultation with a Human
Resource representative;
* Review of the personnel record by at least two individuals,
including a Human Resources representative;
* Conduct a full investigation to ascertain the facts of the issue;
* Consider mitigating circumstances, (e.g. involvement of oth-
ers, discipline assessed to other employees, previous handling
of similar situations, etc.);
* Give the employee an opportunity to tell his side of the story;
* Consider how employees in similar circumstances have been
previously treated;
* Periodically engage the employee in conversation to confirm
that he is not experiencing discrimination;
* Understanding and valuing diversity should be part of the or-
ganizational strategic plan and the tenant of the way the or-
ganization does business; and
* Consider alternatives that could be invoked to remedy the
situation.
Conclusion
This study demonstrates three important patterns in the employment experi-
ences of African American males. First, the number of African American
males in the executive/managerial ranks is very low when compared to their
labor force participation rate, and accordingly they only reported a small
percentage of the discrimination claims in the study. Second, there is a sig-
nificantly higher vulnerability of African American males to discriminatory
discharge during their first year of employment. Third, this study indicates
that employers perceive that African American males engage in more dis-
ruptive behavior necessitating discharge in the workplace than do non-
Black males. Clearly, organizations need to aggressively confront stereo-
types that can bias discharge decisions. Many people would like to believe
10 Equal Opportunities International
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Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
that race discrimination is an artifact of the past. This research suggests that,
where African American males are concerned, far more needs to be done.
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the cooperation and encouragement that
they have received from the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, Pastor Aaron
Wheeler, Sr., Chairman, G. Michael Payton, Executive Director, and Alan J.
Clark, Director of IT and Workforce Design. The authors also thank Jennifer
Davis for her assistance with this manuscript. This article is part of The Ohio
Employment Discrimination Studies that have been supported by grants from
Wright State University and the Raj Soin College of Business, and created in
partnership with the Ohio Civil Rights Commission. The opinions expressed
in this article are solely those of the authors. This paper is the product of the
authors’ dedicated collaboration, and the sequence of their names is without
significance.
Biographical Sketch
Scott D. Williams, Ph.D., William M. Slonaker, JD, MBA, and Ann C.
Wendt, Ph.D. are professors in the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright
State University. Professor Williams is an assistant professor of manage-
ment and management consultant. Professor Slonaker is an associate profes-
sor of law and serves as a mediator for EEOC. Professor Wendt is an
associate professor of management. Professors Slonaker and Wendt serve as
labor arbitrators for FMCS, are neutrals for Ohio’s SERB, are principals in
Workforce Consultants providing workplace mediation and discrimina-
tion fact-finding investigations, and are the principal investigators for The
Ohio Employment Discrimination Studies.
Volume 22 Number 1 2003 11
African American
Males in the Front
Door but out the
Back Door
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Door but out the
Back Door
