Seeing the light
Devin Pope, Joseph Price & Justin Wolfers
NBER Working Paper, December 2013
Abstract:
Can raising awareness of racial bias subsequently reduce that bias? We address this question by exploiting the widespread media attention highlighting racial bias among professional basketball referees that occurred in May 2007 following the release of an academic study. Using new data, we confirm that racial bias persisted in the years after the study's original sample, but prior to the media coverage. Subsequent to the media coverage though, the bias completely disappeared. We examine potential mechanisms that may have produced this result and find that the most likely explanation is that upon becoming aware of their biases, individual referees changed their decision-making process. These results suggest that raising awareness of even subtle forms of bias can bring about meaningful change.
----------------------
The Connection Between Race and Called Strikes and Balls
Jeff Hamrick & John Rasp
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate potential racial bias by Major League Baseball umpires. We do so in the context of the subjective decision as to whether a pitch is called a strike or a ball, using data from the 1989-2010 seasons. We find limited, and sometimes contradictory, evidence that umpires unduly favor or unjustly discriminate against players based on their race. Potential mitigating variables such as attendance, terminal pitch, the absolute score differential, and the presence of monitoring systems do not consistently interact with umpire/pitcher and umpire/hitter racial combinations. Most evidence that would first appear to support racially connected behaviors by umpires appears to vanish in three-way interaction models. Overall, our findings fall well short of convincing evidence for racial bias.
----------------------
David Broockman
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Communications from constituents strongly shape the representation politicians provide. However, if politicians hear less from some constituents than others, this unequal communication may lead to unequal representation. In this article, I present a field experiment demonstrating that constituents are less likely to communicate to representatives not of their race. The experiment exploited electoral rules in Maryland, where several multimember districts have both black and white representatives. I provided 8,829 residents of such districts an opportunity to communicate to one of their actual representatives, whose race I randomized. Both blacks and whites were markedly less likely to communicate to their representatives not of their race. These results imply that politicians receive racially distorted communication, hearing disproportionately infrequently from constituents unlike them. The fact that most racial minorities have white representatives may thus help explain both minorities’ less frequent communication to their representatives and the diminished substantive representation minorities typically receive.
----------------------
Gender Profiling: A Gendered Race Perspective on Person-Position Fit
Erika Hall, Adam Galinsky & Katherine Phillips
Northwestern University Working Paper, November 2013
Abstract:
The current research integrates perspectives on gendered race and person-position fit by introducing the concept of a gender profile. First, we propose that both the ‘gender’ of a person’s biological sex and the ‘gender’ of a person’s race (e.g., Asians are perceived to be more feminine, and Blacks are perceived to be more masculine than Whites) cumulatively define an individual’s gender profile – the overall femininity, masculinity, or androgyny associated with their demographic characteristics. Second, we propose that occupational positions also have a gender profile. Third, we argue that the overall gender profile of one’s demographic group (e.g., Black female, Asian male), rather than just one’s biological sex, is what determines one’s fit for different positions. Finally, we propose that a demographic group’s gender profile helps determine perceptions of hireability for androgynous, feminine, or masculine occupational roles. Study 1 establishes the gender profile of Asian, White, and Black women and men and the gender profile of three occupational prototypes – manager (androgynous), librarian (feminine), and security guard (masculine). Study 2 finds that individuals from demographic groups with an androgynous gender profile are selected over individuals from highly sex-typed demographic groups for a managerial position. In Study 3, individuals with feminine-typed and masculine-typed gender profiles were selected for a feminine or masculine position, respectively. By integrating gendered race perspectives with the literature on person-position fit, we provide new insights for predicting who advances in different types of environments.
----------------------
Social Media for Selection? Validity and Adverse Impact Potential of a Facebook-Based Assessment
Chad Van Iddekinge et al.
Journal of Management, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent reports suggest that an increasing number of organizations are using information from social media platforms such as Facebook.com to screen job applicants. Unfortunately, empirical research concerning the potential implications of this practice is extremely limited. We address the use of social media for selection by examining how recruiter ratings of Facebook profiles fare with respect to two important criteria on which selection procedures are evaluated: criterion-related validity and subgroup differences (which can lead to adverse impact). We captured Facebook profiles of college students who were applying for full-time jobs, and recruiters from various organizations reviewed the profiles and provided evaluations. We then followed up with applicants in their new jobs. Recruiter ratings of applicants’ Facebook information were unrelated to supervisor ratings of job performance (rs = −.13 to –.04), turnover intentions (rs = −.05 to .00), and actual turnover (rs = −.01 to .01). In addition, Facebook ratings did not contribute to the prediction of these criteria beyond more traditional predictors, including cognitive ability, self-efficacy, and personality. Furthermore, there was evidence of subgroup difference in Facebook ratings that tended to favor female and White applicants. The overall results suggest that organizations should be very cautious about using social media information such as Facebook to assess job applicants.
----------------------
School Accountability and the Black-White Test Score Gap
Michael Gaddis & Douglas Lee Lauen
Social Science Research, March 2014, Pages 15–31
Abstract:
Since at least the 1960s, researchers have closely examined the respective roles of families, neighborhoods, and schools in producing the black-white achievement gap. Although many researchers minimize the ability of schools to eliminate achievement gaps, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased pressure on schools to do so by 2014. In this study, we examine the effects of NCLB’s subgroup-specific accountability pressure on changes in black-white math and reading test score gaps using a school-level panel dataset on all North Carolina public elementary and middle schools between 2001 and 2009. Using difference-in-difference models with school fixed effects, we find that accountability pressure reduces black-white achievement gaps by raising mean black achievement without harming mean white achievement. We find no differential effects of accountability pressure based on the racial composition of schools, but schools with more affluent populations are the most successful at reducing the black-white math achievement gap. Thus, our findings suggest that school-based interventions have the potential to close test score gaps, but differences in school composition and resources play a significant role in the ability of schools to reduce racial inequality.
----------------------
Rick Harbaugh & Ted To
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are minorities more vulnerable to opportunism? We find that individuals from a minority group face greater danger of being cheated because trade with them is less frequent and the value of a reputation for fairness toward them is correspondingly smaller. When the majority is sufficiently large it has no reason to fear opportunism, so a firm that cheats the minority can continue to do business as usual with the majority. If there is a small chance that a firm might have an implicit or preference bias against either group, then the interaction with reputational incentives gives unbiased firms an incentive to cheat the minority but not the majority. The prediction that smaller groups are more susceptible to discrimination distinguishes the model from most other discrimination models.
----------------------
Spatial and Racial Patterning of Real Estate Broker Listings in New York City
Naa Oyo Kwate et al.
Review of Black Political Economy, December 2013, Pages 401-424
Abstract:
It has been well documented that Black homeseekers face discrimination in the housing market in the form of racial steering and other institutional policies and practices that are critical in limiting housing access. Less is known about the mechanisms that operate on the other side of real estate transactions to perpetuate racially segregated neighborhoods. We investigated whether White and Black brokers face segregation in the housing market. That is, to what extent do White and Black brokers differentially market property listings in neighborhoods of varying racial composition? Using real estate listings extracted from the websites of two of the largest New York City real estate brokerages, we examined whether Black and White brokers market properties primarily in Black and White neighborhoods, respectively; and whether, controlling for gender and experience level, Black brokers had a lower average price per square foot than White brokers. Results showed that Black brokers overwhelmingly marketed properties in Black neighborhoods, with fewer listings in White areas. Black brokers also marketed properties with an average price per square foot that was $197 lower than White brokers. Black brokers who worked in offices in Black neighborhoods had the lowest asking price of all brokers. Taken together, Black and White real estate brokers control a bifurcated market in NYC, perpetuating residential segregation and Black–White income and wealth disparities.
----------------------
White Coats, Black Specialists? Racial Divides in the Medical Profession
Georgiann Davis & Rachel Allison
Sociological Spectrum, November/December 2013, Pages 510-533
Abstract:
This study assesses whether racialized patterns of medical specialization persist among a recent cohort of U.S. medical students. Data from the Association of American Medical College's 2004 Graduation Questionnaire (GQ), an annual survey of all graduating U.S. medical students, are employed to explore how factors internal and external to medical education influence specialization patterns among black and white medical school graduates. The data suggest that a degree of racial division in medical specialization endures, but that division does not neatly map onto specialty prestige and is deeply gendered. Black graduates are more likely to enter high-prestige surgical residency programs than their white colleagues, but this finding holds only for male medical school graduates. That the surgery effect emerges only with the inclusion of social factors inside and outside medicine suggests these have distinct impact across race. We conclude by suggesting directions for future studies of stratification in medicine.
----------------------
Valija Rose
Urban Review, November 2013, Pages 472-489
Abstract:
Access to high-quality educational opportunities is central to growing postsecondary degree attainment. This study employs secondary data analysis of the public-use National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88/00) to examine how school context and precollege educational opportunities influence college degree attainment among high-achieving Black males. Findings show that approximately 40 % of high-achieving Black males attained a bachelor’s degree or higher 8 years after high school. Binary logistic regression analysis indicates that attending an urban school decreases the likelihood of bachelor’s degree attainment. Attending a private school, on the other hand, has the opposite effect — it increases the likelihood of bachelor’s degree attainment. Results also indicate that although participating in a gifted and talented program increases the likelihood of bachelor’s degree attainment among high-achieving Black males, participating in Advanced Placement has no effect. Implications for educators in K-16 educational settings are discussed.
----------------------
Labor Diversity and Firm Productivity
Pierpaolo Parrotta, Dario Pozzoli & Mariola Pytlikova
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Using a matched employer-employee data-set, we analyze how workforce diversity associates with the productivity of firms in Denmark, following two main econometric routes. In the first one, we estimate a standard Cobb-Douglas function, calculate the implied total factor productivity and relate the latter to diversity statistics in a second stage. This reduced-form approach allows us to identify which types of labor heterogeneity appear to descriptively matter. In the second approach, we move toward a richer production function specification, which takes different types of labor as inputs and that allows for flexible substitution patterns, and possible quality differences between types. Both methods show that workforce diversity in ethnicity is negatively associated with firm productivity. The evidence regarding diversity in education is mixed.
----------------------
Unfairness begets unfairness: Victim derogation bias in employee ratings
Daniel Skarlicki & Anthony Turner
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
This research investigated criterion contamination in human resource evaluations, specifically victim derogation in which third parties (e.g., managers, co-workers) systematically undervalue the performance and potential of individuals who have previously suffered organizational injustices. A policy capturing design (Study 1) found that managers rated job applicants who had been treated unfairly by their previous employers as less suitable than fairly treated applicants, after objective performance information was controlled. In Study 2, the effect of unfair treatment on job applicant ratings was found to be moderated by managers’ just world beliefs, with applicant ratings reflecting more derogation among managers with higher (vs. lower) Belief in a Just World. In Study 3, the pattern of results from Study 2 was replicated in a performance evaluation context using peers as raters. Moreover, in Study 3 an intervention that activated raters’ moral identity was found to attenuate victim derogation bias.
----------------------
Yona Rubinstein & Dror Brenner
Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do labour markets discriminate against workers with particular ethnic-sounding names? We use non-random sorting into inter-ethnic marriage and salient differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazi surnames to evaluate the causal impact of Sephardic affiliation on wages. Using the 1995 Israeli Census, we estimate the effect of a Sephardic sounding surname on wages. We first compare the wages of Israeli Jewish males born to Sephardic fathers and Ashkenazi mothers (SA), who are more likely to carry a Sephardic surname, with the wages of Israeli Jewish males born to Ashkenazi fathers and Sephardic mothers (AS). We find that Israeli labour markets discriminate based on perceived ethnicity: SA workers earn significantly less than their AS counterparts. We then exploit the custom of women to adopt their husbands' surnames to disentangle actual ethnicity from the ethnicity perceived by the market. Consistent with ethnic discrimination based on surnames, we find that it is father-in-law's ethnicity — rather than father's ethnicity — that shapes female wage rates. Finally, we find that labour markets discriminate based on surname only when those names provide additional information about ethnicity. When ethnicity can be discerned from skin tone, surnames do not provide additional explanatory power with respect to wages.
----------------------
When Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Preventing Discrimination of Nonstandard Speakers
Karolina Hansen, Tamara Rakić & Melanie Steffens
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, January 2014, Pages 68-77
Abstract:
Prejudice against a social group may lead to discrimination of members of this group. One very strong cue of group membership is a (non)standard accent in speech. Surprisingly, hardly any interventions against accent-based discrimination have been tested. In the current article, we introduce an intervention in which what participants experience themselves unobtrusively changes their evaluations of others. In the present experiment, participants in the experimental condition talked to a confederate in a foreign language before the experiment, whereas those in the control condition received no treatment. Replicating previous research, participants in the control condition discriminated against Turkish-accented job candidates. In contrast, those in the experimental condition evaluated Turkish- and standard-accented candidates as similarly competent. We discuss potential mediating and moderating factors of this effect.
----------------------
Lieselotte Blommaert, Marcel Coenders & Frank van Tubergen
Social Forces, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examines discrimination of Arabic-named applicants in online recruitment procedures in the Netherlands. We develop and implement a new field experiment approach, posting fictitious résumés (n = 636) on two online résumé databases. Two phases of recruitment procedures are examined: employers' decisions to (1) view applicants' complete résumés after seeing short profiles and (2) contact applicants. The experiment covers both male and female applicants, three occupational levels, five sectors, and ten geographical regions, and consists of two waves. Results provide strong evidence of discrimination in the first phase (views). Résumés of Arabic-named applicants were requested less often, regardless of their education, gender, age, region, or sector, and for both websites and waves. Controlling for the number of times candidates' full résumés were viewed, there is less evidence of discrimination in the second phase (reactions). Yet, after two phases, the cumulative ethnic difference is considerable: Dutch-named applicants are 60 percent more likely to receive a positive reaction than Arabic-named applicants. We conclude that ethnic disparities in outcomes of recruitment procedures are substantial and arise already in the very first phase of the selection process. Hence, employers often do not even get to see Arabic-named applicants' résumés. Finally, discrimination is stronger in wave two, when the total number of views of résumés was lower, indicating lower labor demand.
----------------------
Serena Wee, Daniel Newman & Dana Joseph
Journal of Applied Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
When using cognitive tests, personnel selection practitioners typically face a trade-off between the expected job performance and diversity of new hires. We review the increasingly mainstream evidence that cognitive ability is a multidimensional and hierarchically ordered set of concepts, and examine the implications for both composite test validity and subgroup differences. Ultimately, we recommend a strategy for differentially weighting cognitive subtests (i.e., second-stratum abilities) in a way that minimizes overall subgroup differences without compromising composite test validity. Using data from 2 large validation studies that included a total of 15 job families, we demonstrate that this strategy could lead to substantial improvement in diversity hiring (e.g., doubling the number of job offers extended to minority applicants) and to at least 8% improvement in job offers made to minority applicants, without decrements in expected selection quality compared to a unit-weighted cognitive test composite. Finally, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to examine whether the technique continues to perform well when applied to applicant pools of smaller size. We discuss prerequisites for the application of this strategy, potential limitations, and extensions.
----------------------
Jonathan Lanning
Labour Economics, January 2014, Pages 55–71
Abstract:
This paper extends the search with discrimination framework by introducing jobs that are constrained by equal wage policies, and endogenous job destruction that creates Becker-like competitive pressure on prejudiced firms. The model predicts a number of stylized facts observed in the U.S. labor market, including persistent aggregate wage inequality, prevalent within-firm wage equality, overlapping wage distributions for different worker types, and some, but imperfect, job sorting/segregation. Numeric simulations are offered to illustrate some of the model’s predictions. These include a counterintuitive relationship between wage inequality and equal wage policies that can arise in special cases: under specific assumptions equal wage policies can actually increase the steady-state level of market discrimination. I discuss this result’s implication that different policies may be optimal to combat race- and gender-based discrimination, but note that this result may be of limited practical importance.
----------------------
Unintended Consequences of EEO Enforcement Policies: Being Big is Worse than Being Bad
Rick Jacobs, Kevin Murphy & Jay Silva
Journal of Business and Psychology, December 2013, Pages 467-471
Abstract:
In enforcing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, it is often critical to determine whether a challenged procedure has systematic adverse impact. The use of statistical significance tests to make this determination has the perverse consequence that the size of an organization or an applicant pool has more impact on determining adverse impact than the extent to which procedures actually discriminate. That is, it is worse to be big than to be bad. We use Monte Carlo studies to illustrate this unforeseen consequence of current enforcement policies and note that a broader definition of adverse impact is clearly warranted.