Discriminating
Going Back in Time? Gender Differences in Trends and Sources of the Racial Pay Gap, 1970 to 2010
Hadas Mandel & Moshe Semyonov
American Sociological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using IPUMS data for five decennial years between 1970 and 2010, we delineate and compare the trends and sources of the racial pay gap among men and women in the U.S. labor force. Decomposition of the pay gap into components underscores the significance of the intersection between gender and race; we find meaningful gender differences in the composition of the gap and in the gross and the net earnings gaps - both are much larger among men than among women. Despite these differences, the over-time trend is strikingly similar for both genders. Racial gaps sharply declined between 1970 and 1980 and continued to decline, but at a slower rate, until 2000. However, at the turn of the millennium, the trend reversed for both gender groups. The growth of the racial pay gap at the turn of the millennium is attributable to the increase in overall income inequality, stagnation in occupational segregation, and an increase in the unexplained portion of the gap, a portion we attribute to economic discrimination.
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Jon Valant & Daniel Newark
Educational Researcher, August/September 2016, Pages 331-346
Abstract:
For decades, researchers have documented large differences in average test scores between minority and White students and between poor and wealthy students. These gaps are a focal point of reformers' and policymakers' efforts to address educational inequities. However, the U.S. public's views on achievement gaps have received little attention from researchers, despite playing an important role in shaping policymakers' behaviors. Drawing on randomized experiments with a nationally representative sample of adults, we explore the public's beliefs about test score gaps and its support for gap-closing initiatives. We find that Americans are more concerned about - and more supportive of proposals to close - wealth-based achievement gaps than Black-White or Hispanic-White gaps. Americans also explain the causes of wealth-based gaps more readily.
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Glenn Ellison & Parag Pathak
NBER Working Paper, September 2016
Abstract:
Several public K-12 and university systems have recently shifted from race-based affirmative action plans to race-neutral alternatives. This paper explores the degree to which race-neutral alternatives are effective substitutes for racial quotas using data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where a race-neutral, place-based affirmative action system is used for admissions at highly competitive exam high schools. We develop a theoretical framework that motivates quantifying the efficiency cost of race-neutral policies by the extent admissions decisions are distorted more than needed to achieve a given level of diversity. According to our metric, CPS's race-neutral system is 24% and 20% efficient as a tool for increasing minority representation at the top two exam schools, i.e. about three-fourths of the reduction in composite scores could have been avoided by explicitly considering race. Even though CPS's system is based on socioeconomic disadvantage, it is actually less effective than racial quotas at increasing the number of low-income students. We examine several alternative race-neutral policies and find some to be more efficient than the CPS policy. What is feasible varies with the school's surrounding neighborhood characteristics and the targeted level of minority representation. However, no race-neutral policy restores minority representation to prior levels without substantial inefficiency, implying significant efficiency costs from prohibitions on affirmative action policies that explicitly consider race.
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Racial and Ethnic Disparities in ADHD Diagnosis and Treatment
Tumaini Coker et al.
Pediatrics, September 2016
Methods: We used a population-based, multisite sample of 4297 children and parents surveyed over 3 waves (fifth, seventh, and 10th grades). Multivariate logistic regression examined disparities in parent-reported ADHD diagnosis and medication use in the following analyses: (1) using the total sample; (2) limited to children with an ADHD diagnosis or symptoms; and (3) limited to children without a diagnosis or symptoms.
Results: Across all waves, African-American and Latino children, compared with white children, had lower odds of having an ADHD diagnosis and of taking ADHD medication, controlling for sociodemographics, ADHD symptoms, and other potential comorbid mental health symptoms. Among children with an ADHD diagnosis or symptoms, African-American children had lower odds of medication use at fifth, seventh, and 10th grades, and Latino children had lower odds at fifth and 10th grades. Among children who had neither ADHD symptoms nor ADHD diagnosis by fifth grade (and thus would not likely meet ADHD diagnostic criteria at any age), medication use did not vary by race/ethnicity in adjusted analysis.
Conclusions: Racial/ethnic disparities in parent-reported medication use for ADHD are robust, persisting from fifth grade to 10th grade. These findings suggest that disparities may be more likely related to underdiagnosis and undertreatment of African-American and Latino children as opposed to overdiagnosis or overtreatment of white children.
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Effects of dyadic communication on race-based impressions and memory
Monica Biernat et al.
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
In an experimental study, we examined the effects of dyadic communication and implicit racial attitudes on impressions formed of Black versus White individuals. Participants viewed a graduate application of a student depicted as a Black or White male and then had a conversation about the applicant with another student (or not) before individually rendering judgments of him. Subjective impressions were more favorable for the Black than White applicant among participants in the communication condition, conversations about Whites included more negations, and participants wrote longer narratives in which they were less likely to mention race when they had previously communicated than when they had not. Communication also disrupted the association between implicit racial attitudes and memory for the applicant's Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores: Those with negative racial attitudes remembered the Black applicant as having lower GRE scores than the White applicant, but this effect was eliminated following communication. Findings are discussed with reference to audience tuning, shifting standards, and attitude-behavior consistency models.
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Weeds in the Ivy: College admissions under preference constraints
Dennis Weisman & Dong Li
Applied Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a series of cases spanning more than three decades, the courts have attempted to establish boundaries on the permissible use of racial preferences in college admissions. Proponents of these policies believe that race-based preferences are needed to create a diverse student body that facilitates effective learning and social inclusion. Opponents of such policies contend that racial preferences are inherently discriminatory and eliminating them would yield a more able student body. Whereas race-based preferences have garnered the most attention, elite colleges regularly employ other types of preferences, including those for alumni and talented athletes. To inform this important policy debate, we develop a simple model comprised of a rational college administrator that maximizes a linear combination of student body ability and the college endowment through the choice of race, legacy and merit admission shares. We find that relaxing the racial-preferences constraint can produce a 'less-able' student body even when the college administrator places greater weight on student body ability than she does on the college endowment. The change in admissions policy may serve only to increase the number of admissions that can be 'sold' to wealthy alumni through legacy preferences and thereby foster the growth of weeds in the Ivy.
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Context matters: Diversity's short and long term effects in Fortune's 'Best Companies to Work For'
Scott Julian & Joseph Ofori-Dankwa
Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has examined the racial diversity-productivity relationship in corporations with an evident high commitment to minority programs, Fortune's Best Companies for Minorities. To assess generalizability, we replicate this research using a different context of high organizational-employee value congruence, Fortune's Best Companies to Work For. We are not able to find evidence for the curvilinear relationships previously found, but do uncover a linear negative relationship between racial diversity and short-run performance.
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Executive Mobility and Minority Status
Paul Guest
Industrial Relations, October 2016, Pages 604-631
Abstract:
We examine the mobility of minority executives, defined as ethnic minority and female executives, in publicly listed U.S. firms. Minority executives as a whole experience lower promotion, higher demotion, and higher exit than Caucasian males. Female and African American executives account for the majority of these differences. Specifically, female executives experience lower promotion and exit, while African Americans experience lower promotion, higher demotion, and higher exit. In contrast, Asian and Hispanic executives do not experience different mobility outcomes from Caucasian executives.
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Michelle Rheinschmidt-Same, Neha John-Henderson & Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined participation in an ethnically based residential program or "theme house" during the first year of college as a predictor of downstream immune system inflammation among undergraduates. Using a 4-year prospective design, we compared markers of inflammation among Latino/Latina students in a residential theme program with a matched sample of nonresidents. Students provided oral mucosal transudate samples for the assessment of circulating Interleukin 6 (IL-6), an inflammatory cytokine linked to health vulnerabilities. Findings suggest a protective benefit of theme house residency especially among students with anxious expectations of discrimination. Such expectations predicted higher levels of IL-6 after the first year of college among nonresidents only. In years 2-3, following exit from the theme house, the relationship between expected discrimination and IL-6 levels remained positive among nonresidents and was attenuated among residents, controlling for past IL-6 levels. Culturally based spaces may therefore offset the physiological burden of expected discrimination among undergraduates.
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Rachel Fish
Social Science Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Scholars, policy-makers, and practitioners have long argued that students of color are over-represented in special education and under-represented in gifted education, arguing that educators make racially/ethnically biased decisions to refer and qualify students with disabilities and giftedness. Recent research has called this into question, focusing on the role of confounders of race/ethnicity. However, the role of educator decisions in the disproportionality is still unclear. In this study, I examine the role of student race/ethnicity in teachers' categorization of student needs as "exceptional" and in need of special or gifted education services. I use an original survey experiment in which teachers read case studies of fictional male students in which the race/ethnicity, English Language Learner status, and exceptionality characteristics were experimentally manipulated. The teachers are then asked whether they would refer the student for exceptionality testing. My findings suggest a complex intersection of race/ethnicity and exceptionality, in which white boys are more likely to be suspected of having exceptionalities when they exhibit academic challenges, while boys of color are more likely to be suspected when they exhibit behavioral challenges. This suggests that the racialized construction of exceptionalities reflects differential academic expectations and interpretations of behavior by race/ethnicity, with implications for the subjectivity of exceptionality identification and for the exacerbation of racial/ethnic inequalities in education.
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Paul Hanselman et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it is therefore impossible to isolate whether different effects are the result of theorized heterogeneity, unidentified moderators, or idiosyncratic features of the different studies. We addressed this limitation by conducting a well-powered replication of self-affirmation in a setting where a previous large-scale field experiment demonstrated significant positive impacts, using the same procedures. We found no evidence of effects in this replication study and estimates were precise enough to reject benefits larger than an effect size of 0.10. These null effects were significantly different from persistent benefits in the prior study in the same setting, and extensive testing revealed that currently theorized moderators of self-affirmation effects could not explain the difference. These results highlight the potential fragility of self-affirmation in educational settings when implemented widely and the need for new theory, measures, and evidence about the necessary conditions for self-affirmation success.