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Population Processes and Establishment-Level Racial Employment Segregation
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Economic theory has long maintained that employers pay a price for engaging in racial discrimination. According to Gary Becker’s seminal work on this topic and the rich literature that followed, racial preferences unrelated to productivity are costly and, in a competitive market, should drive discriminatory employers out of business. Though a dominant theoretical proposition in the field of economics, this argument has never before been subjected to direct empirical scrutiny. This research pairs an experimental audit study of racial discrimination in employment with an employer database capturing information on establishment survival, examining the relationship between observed discrimination and firm longevity. Results suggest that employers who engage in hiring discrimination are less likely to remain in business six years later.
Focusing on the United States, we examine the connection between organizational demography and rising income inequality at the state level. Drawing upon research on social comparisons and firm boundaries, we argue that large firms are particularly susceptible to invidious social comparisons and undertake strategies, such as wage compression, to help ameliorate their damaging effects. We argue that wage compression affects the distribution of wages throughout the broader labor market and that, consequently, state levels of income inequality will increase as fewer individuals in a state are employed by large firms. We also argue that the negative relationship between large-firm employment and income inequality will weaken when large employers are more racially diverse and when their workers are dispersed across a greater number of establishments. Using pooled, cross-sectional data at the state level, our results show that, net of other factors, as the number of workers in a state employed by large firms declines, income inequality in that state increases. However, when these firms are more racially diverse, the negative relationship between large-firm employment and income inequality weakens. These results point to the importance of considering how corporate demography influences the dispersion of wages in a labor market.
We argue that existing studies underestimate the degree that racial change leads to residential segregation in post-Civil Rights American neighborhoods. This is because previous studies only measure the presence of racial groups in neighborhoods, not the degree of integration among those groups. As a result, those studies do not detect gradual racial succession that ends in racially segregated neighborhoods. We demonstrate how a new approach based on growth mixture models can be used to identify patterns of racial change that distinguish between durable integration and gradual racial succession. We use this approach to identify common trajectories of neighborhood racial change among Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians from 1970 to 2010 in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston metropolitan areas. We show that many nominally integrated neighborhoods have experienced gradual succession. For Blacks this succession has caused the gradual concentric diusion of the ghetto while Latino and Asian growth has dispersed throughout both cities and suburbs in the metropolitan areas. Durable integration, meanwhile, has come about largely in the suburbs.
Standard measures of residential segregation tend to equate spatial with social proximity. This assumption has been increasingly subject to critique among demographers and ethnographers and becomes especially problematic in historical settings. In the late nineteenth-century United States, standard measures suggest a counterintuitive pattern: southern cities, with their long history of racial inequality, had less residential segregation than urban areas considered to be more racially tolerant. By using census enumeration procedures, we develop a sequence measure that captures a more subtle “backyard” pattern of segregation, where white families dominated front streets and blacks were relegated to alleys. Our analysis of complete household data from the 1880 Census documents how segregation took various forms across the postbellum United States. Whereas northern cities developed segregation via racialized neighborhoods, substituting residential inequality for the status inequality of slavery, southern cities embraced street-front segregation that reproduced the racial inequality that existed under slavery.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex illegal in the United States. Previous research based on analyses of aggregate national trends in occupational segregation suggests that sex and race/ethnic employment segregation has declined in the United States since the 1960s. We add to the existing knowledge base by documenting for the first time male-female, black-white, and Hispanic-white segregation trends using private sector workplace data. The general pattern is that segregation declined for all three categorical comparisons between 1966 and 1980, but after 1980 only sex segregation continued to decline markedly. We estimate regression-based decompositions in the time trends for workplace desegregation to determine whether the observed changes represent change in segregation behavior at the level of workplaces or merely changes in the sectoral and regional distribution of workplaces with stable industrial or local labor market practices. These decompositions suggest that, in addition to desegregation caused by changes in the composition of the population of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission monitored private sector firms, there has been real workplace-level desegregation since 1964.
Gender disparities in wages and attainment caused by employer discrimination can come about by three very different processes: allocative discrimination, within-job wage discrimination, and valuative discrimination. For the United States, it has been established that within-job wage discrimination no longer is a major source of wage differences, while valuative discrimination potentially is. Less known is the role of allocative discrimination, especially in the hiring process, which we identify as the point where discrimination is most feasible. Our analysis uses personnel data on all entrants into a large U.S. service organization in the period 1978-86, focusing on managerial, administrative, and professional employees. We study the placement at initial hire and then follow job levels, wages, promotions, as well as departures, in years subsequent to hire.
Did strikes affect the extent of ethnic and racial conflicts in late 19th- and early 20th-century America? Data on the occurrence of conflicts and of violence against various ethnic or racial groups in the 81 largest cities, 1880-1914, show that the growth of the union movement and the rising supply of low-wage labor increased levels of ethnic competition in urban labor markets, thus raising rates of ethnic conflict. The findings support the argument that ethnic conflict and labor unrest are parallel forms of collective action and that each depends on the number and foundings of national labor unions. The effect of labor union organization is strongest for all attacks on blacks. -from Author
The circumstances that helped create formal arrangements for managing employees in large firms, often referred to as internal
labor markets, are changing. Internalized employment arrangements that buffer jobs from market pressures are giving way to
arrangements that rely much more heavily on outside market forces to manage employees. This argument goes beyond previous
assertions that jobs are being transformed away from permanent employees in the United States (Pfeffer and Baron 1988; Abraham 1990) in that it suggests a breakdown across many aspects of internal labor markets, even for permanent employees. Nor do these
more market-mediated arrangements correspond to the “core-periphery” model, which is thought to enhance protection from the
market for at least some employees. What they might entail for employees, employers, and society is considered here along
with evidence of the change.
Occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries, but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well-documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. We address this deficiency by assessing occupation-level effects on wage inequality using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008. We model the mean and variance of wages for each occupation, controlling for education and demographic factors at the individual level to test three competing explanations for the increase in wage inequality: (1) the growth of between-occupation polarization, (2) changes in education and labor force composition, and (3) residual inequality unaccounted for by occupations and demographic characteristics. After correcting for a problem with imputed data that biased Kim and Sakamoto’s (2008) results, we find that between-occupation changes explain 66 percent of the increase in wage inequality from 1992 to 2008, although 23 percent of this is due to the switch to the 2000 occupation codes in 2003. Sensitivity analysis reveals that 18 percent of the increase in inequality from 1983 to 2002 is due to changes in just three occupations: managers ‘‘not elsewhere classified,’’ secretaries, and computer systems analysts.
Trends toward gender equality largely stalled in the 1990s, but the progress of women in management was mixed. Given the importance of managers as actors in the reproduction of inequality, and managerial positions as rewards in their own right, this study investigates the relative status of women in management over the past two decades, using U.S. Decennial Census data from 1980 to 2000. The authors find that women's entry into management occupations slowed markedly in the 1990s. Furthermore, after decreasing in the 1980s, gender segregation among managers rebounded sharply upward in the 1990s. However, greater segregation coincided with a decreasing gender earnings gap, which largely resulted from narrowing gaps within integrated or male-dominated managerial occupations. Finally, there remains a substantial earnings penalty for managers who work in female-dominated occupations.
Considers structural inertia in organizational populations as an outcome of an ecological-evolutionary process. Structural inertia is considered to be a consequence of selection as opposed to a precondition. The focus of this analysis is on the timing of organizational change. Structural inertia is defined to be a correspondence between a class of organizations and their environments. Reliably producing collective action and accounting rationally for their activities are identified as important organizational competencies. This reliability and accountability are achieved when the organization has the capacity to reproduce structure with high fidelity. Organizations are composed of various hierarchical layers that vary in their ability to respond and change. Organizational goals, forms of authority, core technology, and marketing strategy are the four organizational properties used to classify organizations in the proposed theory. Older organizations are found to have more inertia than younger ones. The effect of size on inertia is more difficult to determine. The variance in inertia with respect to the complexity of organizational arrangements is also explored. (SRD)
This article summarizes the results and conclusions reached in studies of the relationships between race and gender diversity and business performance carried out in four large firms by a research consortium known as the Diversity Research Network. These researchers were asked by the BOLD Initiative to conduct this research to test arguments regarding the “business case” for diversity. Few positive or negative direct effects of diversity on performance were observed. Instead a number of different aspects of the organizational context and some group processes moderated diversity-performance relationships. This suggests a more nuanced view of the “business case” for diversity may be appropriate. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Scholars of employment segregation now recognize that gender, race, and class processes are
mutually constitutive. Coupled with new data-collection strategies, understanding of the organization
of work and distribution of inequality will improve. The authors explore the strengths and
weaknesses of longitudinal establishment data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC), comparing these to other data used to study workplace status processes.
Findings both confirm and dispute well-known occupation-based analyses of workplace segregation
and lead to similar substantive conclusions. EEOC data are useful for discovering trends
in segregation, for locating segregation in spatial, temporal, and industrial contexts, and for
combining with organizational data to uncover mechanisms.
Wages for black and white workers are substantially lower in occupations with a high density of black employees, following standard controls. Such correlations can exist absent discrimination or as a result of discrimination. In wage level equations, partial correlations fall sharply after controlling for occupational skills. Longitudinal estimates accounting for worker heterogeneity indicate little wage change associated with changes in racial composition. Results support a "quality sorting" rather than discrimination explanation, with racial density serving as an index of unmeasured skills. Discrimination reflected in racial wage gaps occurs within occupations or across occupations in a manner uncorrelated with racial composition.
We study the sources of women’s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search. Using data that include proprietary information on 10,970 individuals considered by a search firm, we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles. Contrary to received wisdom, we find limited evidence that demand-side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting. What gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply-side and demand-side actors. Once considered for a position, women are no less likely than men to be hired—though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm. Our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates’ “self-steering” behavior from the “pipeline bending” of hiring agents. We discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market.
This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.
Does limiting managers’ discretion limit organizations’ scope for discrimination? Social-psychological research argues that it limits opportunities to exercise cognitive biases. Organizational research has found that formal personnel practices that establish accountability for workplace diversity have increased women and minority representation in management. However, drawing causal inferences from such studies is complicated because adopting such policies may be endogenous to the firm’s wish to hire and promote women and minorities. This study uses unionization elections to conduct a regression-discontinuity test fromwhich stronger causal inferences can bemade. It finds that while unionization is associated with more representative workplaces and more women and minorities in management, these effects disappear close to the discontinuity threshold. Most of the effects of unionization on workforce diversity may be attributable to the unobserved drivers of selection into unionization. This has similar implications for the causal effects of diversity policies adopted by managers.
This article advances strategic management by developing a data-driven simulation method to analyze how the characteristics of a group influence the characteristics of the group's components. We apply our method to the underrepresentation of women in the top management of S&P 1,500 firms. Although extant research suggests that the presence of women in top management could be self-reinforcing, we theorize and provide strong evidence that women face an implicit quota, whereby a firm's leadership makes an effort to have a small number of women in top management, but makes less effort to have, or even resists having, larger numbers of women. In consequence, the presence of a woman on a top management team reduces the likelihood that another woman occupies a position on that team.
This article documents a new macro-segregation, where the locus of racial differentiation resides increasingly in socio-spatial processes at the community or place level. The goal is to broaden the spatial lens for studying segregation, using decennial Census data on 222 metropolitan areas. Unlike previous neighborhood studies of racial change, we decompose metropolitan segregation into its within- and between-place components from 1990 to 2010. This is accomplished with the Theil index (H). Our decomposition of H reveals large post-1990 declines in metropolitan segregation. But, significantly, macro-segregation—the between-place component—has increased since 1990, offsetting declines in the within-place component. The macro component of segregation is also most pronounced and increasing most rapidly among blacks, accounting for roughly one-half of all metro segregation in the most segregated metropolitan areas of the United States. Macro-segregation is least evident among Asians, which suggests other members of these communities (i.e., middle-class or affluent ethnoburbs) have less resistance to Asians relocating there. These results on emerging patterns of macro-segregation are confirmed in fixed-effects models that control for unobserved heterogeneity across metropolitan areas. Unlike most previous studies focused on the uneven distribution of racial and ethnic groups across metropolitan neighborhoods, we show that racial residential segregation is increasingly shaped by the cities and suburban communities in which neighborhoods are embedded.
Does racial diversity make forming a union harder? Case studies offer conflicting answers, and little large-scale research on the question exists. Most quantitative research on race and unionization has studied trends in membership rather than the outcome of specific organizing drives and has assumed that the main problem is mistrust between workers and unions, paying less attention, for example, to the role of employers. The author explores the role of racial and ethnic diversity in the outcomes of nearly 7,000 organizing drives launched between 1999 and 2008. By matching the National Labor Relations Board’s information on union activity with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s surveys of large establishments, the author reconstructs the demographic composition of the work groups involved in each mobilization. The study finds that more diverse establishments are less likely to see successful organizing attempts. Little evidence is found, however, that this is because workers are less interested in voting for unions. Instead, the organizers of more diverse units are more likely to give up before such elections are held. Furthermore, this higher quit rate can be explained best by considering the other organizations involved in the organizing drive. In particular, employers are more likely to be charged with unfair labor practices when the unit in question is more racially diverse. This effect persists when the study controls for heterogeneity among industries, unions, and regions.
This article examines how workers respond to changes in the racial composition of their workplaces, An analysis of the job histories of new hires into multiple work groups within a single firm reveals path dependence in the effects of group composition on turnover. Exit rates are inversely related to the level of same-race representation at the time of organizational entry and increase when workers experience declines in same-race representation. However, turnover rates do not decline in response to increases in representation. The results suggest that initial token status can have a lasting impact on attachment and that increases in attachment in integrated groups occur through a cohort-replacement process. The turnover dynamics also imply that any gains in the representation of minority groups are very fragile. The challenge of workplace racial integration therefore lies not simply in eliminating discrimination in hiring, but also in managing the post-hire consequences of changes in group composition. Implications of the asymmetric effects of compositional change for the literature on organizational demography are also discussed.
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features
of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income
at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average,
a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational
mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the
top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9%
in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential
segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family
stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly
available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms. JEL Codes: H0, J0, R0.
This essay examines the shift toward "structural" explanations in recent studies of inequality. After reviewing this body of research and some of its shortcomings, we examine its theoretical underpinnings, comparing "structuralist" perspectives on work organization derived from institutional economics and neo-Marxism to more orthodox accounts based on neoclassical and "industrialism" theories. This discussion suggests areas where the different perspectives overlap and diverge. We conclude that work arrangements within the firm and their trend are the focus of most "structural" perspectives on positional stratification; thus, empirical studies grounded at the organizational level are more likely to inform current debates about the "structure of work" than is the growing body of research about structural effects on individual attainment or covariation among industrial/occupational characteristics. Toward that end, an agenda for future research is outlined, focusing on three aspects of work organization: (a) the units which comprise the structure of work and the dimensions underlying economic segmentation; (b) the effects of sectoral differentiation on technical and administrative arrangements within firms; and (c) temporal changes in how enterprises organize production. We provide some illustrations of the kinds of empirical data and research hypotheses required to link research on segmentation and stratification more closely to studies of organizations.
This paper proposes a model for the process of attaining occupational status and income, where change in attainment is generated by the creation of vacant positions in social structure. The distribution of attainments, or the structure of inequality, is assumed fixed and is described by a simple exponential or geometric distribution function (depending on whether attainment levels are assumed discrete or continuous). Persons leaving the labor force create chains of vacancies in this structure that present mobility opportunities for persons entering the labor force. The implications of the model for the attainment process derived from these considerations for status attainment research and stochastic models for job mobility are discussed.
This paper conceives of residential segregation as a multidimensional phenomenon varying along five distinct axes of measurement:
evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering. Twenty indices of segregation are surveyed and related
conceptually to one of the five dimensions. Using data from a large set of U.S. metropolitan areas, the indices are intercorrelated
and factor analyzed. Orthogonal and oblique rotations produce pattern matrices consistent with the postulated dimensional
structure. Based on the factor analyses and other information, one index was chosen to represent each of the five dimensions,
and these selections were confirmed with a principal components analysis. The paper recommends adopting these indices as standard
indicators in future studies of segregation.
Functional diversity in teams has been conceptualized in a variety of ways without careful attention to how different conceptualizations might lead to different results. We examined the process and performance effects of dominant function diversity (the diversity of functional experts on a team) and intrapersonal functional diversity (the aggregate functional breadth of team members). In a sample of business unit management teams, dominant function diversity had a negative, and intrapersonal functional diversity, a positive effect on information sharing and unit performance. These findings suggest that different forms of functional diversity can have very different implications for team process and performance and that intrapersonal functional diversity matters for team effectiveness.
The value-in-diversity perspective argues that a diverse workforce, relative to a homogeneous one, is generally beneficial for business, including but not limited to corporate profits and earnings. This is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either nonconsequential to business success or actually detrimental by creating conflict, undermining cohesion, and thus decreasing productivity. Using data from the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey, a national sample of for-profit business organizations, this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value-in-diversity thesis. The results support seven of these hypotheses: racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits. Gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits. I discuss the implications of these findings relative to alternative views of diversity in the workplace.
By studying data on the Baltimore city and Baltimore county (suburban) school systems, we try to specify conditions under which an organization is able to control the social composition of the net flow of the population across its boundaries. The Baltimore city system has had a demographic goal of desegregated schools for some ten years. This paper tries to specify some of the reasons that this goal has not been achievable. We will argue that the capacity of an organization to control its demographic composition or, to put it another way, to pursue demographic goals decreases to the degree that (a) its jurisdiction is defined territorially, (b) the jurisdictions of its subunits are defined territorially, (c) the size of the aggregate net flow for the system as a whole is large and in a direction opposite to that implied by the demographic policy goals, and (d) the size of its demographic problem is large. We will show that all of these conditions apply to the Baltimore city system in pursuing a goal of desegregation and that consequenctly its administrative policie have been unsuccessful.
Using unique data from a large retail bank, we investigate the theoretical mechanisms by which preexisting social ties affect the hiring process. By focusing on a single, large employer, we are able to identify the recruitment practices and hiring criteria used during screening for entry-level positions. This method allows us to assemble data for the pool of candidates at multiple phases of the hiring process and to conduct empirical tests of the various roles that personal contacts might play at each stage. Because we are able to treat hiring as a process, rather than as an event, we can also consider the possible selection biases introduced by the multistage screening process. More specifically, we study how employee referral (i.e., being recommended by a current bank employee) affects an applicant's success at multiple stages of the recruitment process, and we examine the cumulative effects of referral status on the chance of being offered a job. Results of probit models indicate that, controlling for other factors, referrals have advantages at both the interview and job-offer stages compared to external nonreferral applicants. Consistent with theoretical arguments that referrals are prescreened by current employees, our results show that referral applicants present more appropriate résumés than do nonreferral applicants. Referral applicants also are more likely than nonreferrals to apply when market conditions are more favorable. Nevertheless, résumé quality and application timing cannot explain referrals' advantage at the interview and hire phases. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.
This article develops and tests hypotheses about the determinants of sex segregation in occupations employing both men and women, analyzing data on a diverse sample of California establishments. In the few instances in which men and women perform similar work roles, the jobs are typically done in distinct organizational settings, and when an enterprise employs both sexes in the same occupation, men and women are usually assigned different job titles. The findings are consistent with the theory of statistical discrimination, wich posits that employers reserve some jobs for men and others for women. However, little evidence is found that employers' practices reflect efficient and rational responses to sex differences in skills and turnover costs. Alternative explanations for gender segregation within and among organizations are suggested and the research necessary to develop a more accurate account of the sexual division of labor in the workplace is outlined.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
It is common for scholars interested in race and poverty to invoke a lack of access to job networks as one of the reasons that African Americans and Hispanics face difficulties in the labor market. Much research has found, however, that minorities do worse when they use personal networks in job finding. Research in this area has been hampered by the complicated and multi-step nature of the job-finding process and by the lack of appropriate comparison data for demonstrating the various ways in which minorities can be isolated from good job opportunities. We seek to specify what it means to say that minorities are cut off from job networks. Building on the literature on social networks in the labor market, we delineate the various mechanisms by which minorities can be isolated from good job opportunities. We examine how these mechanisms operate, using unique data on the chain of network contacts that funnel to an employer offering desirable jobs. We find that network factors operate at several stages of the recruitment process. We find scant evidence, however, that these network factors serve to cut off minorities from employment in this setting. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological implications of the case for the study of networks, race, and hiring.
This paper studies occupational segregation by ethnicity/race and gender by following a new approach that facilitates multigroup comparisons and econometric analyses to take into account group characteristics. The analysis shows that segregation is particularly intense in the Hispanic and Asian populations (the situation being more severe for the former given its higher concentration in low‐paid jobs). A distinctive characteristic of Hispanics is that segregation is higher for men than for women although females are more concentrated in low‐paid jobs. Segregation neither for women nor for African and Native Americans is reduced by taking human capital variables into account.
Bell System Technical Journal, also pp. 623-656 (October)
▪ Abstract This chapter reviews research on the determinants and consequences of race and sex composition of organizations. Determinants include the composition of the qualified labor supply; employers' preferences, including the qualifications they require; the response of majority groups; and an establishment's attractiveness, size, and recruiting methods. The race and sex composition of an establishment affects workers' cross-group contact; stress, satisfaction, and turnover; cohesion; stereotyping; and evaluation. Composition also affects organizations themselves, including their performance, hiring and promotion practices, levels of job segregation, and wages and benefits. Theory-driven research is needed (a) on the causal mechanisms that underlie the relationships between organizational composition and its determinants and consequences and (b) on the form of the relationships between organizational composition and workers outcomes (e.g., cross-group contact, cohesion, turnover, etc). Research is nee...
In this paper we derive and evaluate measures of multigroup segregation. After describing four ways to conceptualize the measurement of multigroup segregation—as the disproportionality in group (e.g., race) proportions across organizational units (e.g., schools or census tracts), as the strength of association between nominal variables indexing group and organizational unit membership, as the ratio of between–unit diversity to total diversity, and as the weighted average of two–group segregation indices—we derive six multigroup segregation indices: a dissimilarity index (D), a Gini index (G), an information theory index (H), a squared coefficient of variation index (C), a relative diversity index (R), and a normalized exposure index (P). We evaluate these six indices against a set of seven desirable properties of segregation indices. We conclude that the information theory index H is the most conceptually and mathematically satisfactory index, since it alone obeys the principle of transfers in the multigroup case. Moreover, H is the only multigroup index that can be decomposed into a sum of between– and within–group components.
Many American managers are under increasing pressure to base hiring and other employment decisions on consumers' preferences. This study attempts, in exploratory fashion, to identify traits of in-person service workers (IPSWs) that are preferred by consumers and could serve as the basis for employment discrimination. Preliminary results indicate that consumers do have strongly held preferences when a transaction involves significant customer-worker interaction. Females appear to be a more likely source of consumer-based discrimination than males for high involvement purchases. Briefly discussed is the question of whether consumers have stereotypical beliefs about IPSWs as well as the implications of these beliefs.
We review the logic underlying margin-free analyses of sex segregation arrays. In the course of our review, we show that the Karmel-MacLachlan decomposition does not live up to its margin-free billing, as the index upon which it rests, I
p
, is itself margin-sensitive. Moreover, because the implicit individualism of D is necessarily inconsistent with margin-free analysis, the field would do well to abandon not merely the Karmel-MacLachlan decomposition but all related efforts to purge marginal dependencies from D-inspired measures. The criticisms that Watts (1998) levels against our log-multiplicative approach are likewise unconvincing. We demonstrate that our preferred models pass the test of organizational equivalence, that the “problem⤎ of zero cells can be solved by applying well-developed methods for ransacking incomplete or sparse tables, and that simple log-multiplicative models can be readily devised to analyze disaggregate arrays. We illustrate these conclusions by analyzing a new cross-national archive of detailed segregation data.
To investigate whether unions have helped or hindered the employment prospects of minorities and women, the author analyzes data on 1,273 California manufacturing plants for the period 1974-80. The main finding is that, with the exception of Hispanic females, unions have not been a significant impediment to minority or female blue-collar employment. In the case of black males, the employment share has increased significantly faster in union than in nonunion plants. Despite seniority provisions that might be expected to reduce minority and female employment during recessions such as those in 1974 and 1979, minorities and women as a bloc increased their share of union employment from 1974 to 1980. The author concludes that unions have not generally hindered the employment growth of minorities and women. (Abstract courtesy JSTOR.)
Publisher Summary The chapter presents a survey on the economics of labor market discrimination, motivated by two fundamental problems associated with income and wage differences among groups classified by sex, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics. The first is the inequity of long-lasting differences in economic well-being among the groups; in particular, differences in household or family income. The second is the inequity of long-lasting differences in the average wage rates among groups of workers classified by these demographic traits, when the groups may be presumed to be either equally productive or to have equal productive capacity. The second problem also raises the question of whether a labor market that pays unequal wages to equally productive workers is inefficient. Economic discrimination is defined in terms of income differences among families and wage differences among workers. The chapter discusses these definitions and presents data from the United States on the income and earnings differences of blacks, Hispanics, whites, women, and men. The chapter surveys theories of economic discrimination in the labor market. The theories are classified into competitive and monopolistic neoclassical models with (essentially) complete information, competitive neoclassical models with imperfect information-leading to “statistical discrimination,” and institutional theories. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the economic research on discrimination.
This paper studies interfirm racial segregation in two newly developed firm-level databases. Within the representative MSA, we find that the interfirm distribution of black and white workers is close to what would be implied by the random assignment of workers to firms. However, we also find that black workers are systematically clustered in "black" employers where managers, owners, and customers are also black. These facts may be reconciled by the facts that a) there are not enough black employers to generate much segregation and that b) perhaps other difficult-to-identify forces serve to systematically integrate black and white workers. Finally, we find that the black/white wage gap is entirely a within-firm phenomenon, as blacks do not work in firms that pay low wages on average.