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Race Matters
Does the race or ethnicity of hiring managers affect the diversity of a company's workforce? Absolutely, according to a recent study. Whether there is intentional discrimination, however, is another question.
A study of two years' worth of personnel data involving more than 700 stores and 100,000 employees at a large United States retail chain appears to confirm that the race or ethnicity of those making the hiring decisions has a clear impact on the racial makeup of a company's workforce. The study found that, when a black manager in a typical store was replaced by a white, Asian or Hispanic manager, the share of newly hired blacks fell from 21 percent to 17 percent, and the share of whites being hired rose from 60 percent to 64 percent. The study, published in the October issue of the Journal of Labor Economics, found that the effect was even more pronounced in the South, where the replacement of a black manager caused the share of newly hired blacks to decrease from 29 percent to 21 percent. On a more granular level, the study found, replacing a black manager with a non-black manager at a Southern store staffed by 40 employees would result in the replacement of three to four black workers with white workers over the course of one year. The study also found that black managers were more likely to hire black employees than employees of other races. Laura Guiliano, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Miami, authored the study along with David Levine and Jonathan Leonard from the University of California at Berkeley. The study's results don't surprise Steve Miller, an employment attorney at Fisher & Phillips in Chicago. "I've heard these types of arguments before -- that managers prefer to hire members of their own race or national origin," he says. "But it's hard to prove whether there's intentional discrimination occurring here without looking at the applicant pools. "For example, it could be that -- at retail stores, especially -- a lot of the hiring is done via word of mouth, and if a store is located in an area that's predominantly white or Hispanic, then it follows that the store's workforce will reflect that." Although Guiliano acknowledges that data on applicants was not available for the study's purposes, she says that, by focusing strictly on stores that experienced a change in managers rather than on demographic data, she was able to isolate the role that race plays in hiring. The discrimination does not appear to be deliberate, she adds. "The study's results do not indicate that this is something the managers themselves realize is happening, even at the district-manager level," she says, adding that black and non-black managers tended to hire people who lived close to them. "It's only when you aggregate the data that the patterns emerge," she says. The study reinforces the importance of ensuring that standard hiring practices are being followed, says Guiliano. "Even though standard company policy is that you're not supposed to just hire your friends, information inevitably travels through social networks -- and social networks can be socially segregated," she says. "If that's part of what's going on, it's up to employers to make sure jobs are being advertised as widely as possible." Jeremi Duru, an employment law professor at Temple University's law school in Philadelphia, says the results of the study indicate the need for "diverse-candidate slates" to offset other factors in the hiring process that may lead to discriminatory hiring. A diverse-candidate slate mandates that at least one or more of the people interviewed for a given position must be a person of color or, for gender balance, a woman, says Duru. Although diversity-slate mandates are often built into class-action settlements between companies and plaintiffs who alleged discrimination, some organizations, such as the National Football League, have taken on such requirements voluntarily, he says. "Ever since 2002, the NFL has mandated the use of diverse-candidate slates for the hiring of head coaches," he says. "The idea is not to require managers to hire women or minorities, but to ensure that they're at least being exposed to a more diverse set of candidates than they might ordinarily be exposed to. They may end up spotting talent where they otherwise wouldn't have looked." So-called "squishy" factors such as chemistry and personality can lead to unintentional discrimination during the hiring process, says Jeffrey Braff, an employment attorney at Cozen O'Connor in Philadelphia. In many cases, says Braff, applicants may feel more comfortable interviewing with a manager of their own race and will therefore let more of their personality come through during the interview. "Because of that comfort level, the applicant may come across differently in each situation," he says. "A black applicant may be open and relaxed with a black hiring manager and more quiet and reserved with a white manager. This can get complicated when it comes to evaluating applicants on traits such as personality, which is important in a retail environment." Braff says if he counseled the retail firm, he would ask HR to ensure that all managers be schooled in proper hiring protocols, that all applicants be asked a uniform set of questions and that the responses to the questions be measured consistently. He would also advise HR to work closely with managers on measuring more subjective criteria, he says. "You could require managers to, instead of saying an applicant has a 'good personality,' give examples of how they came to that conclusion: 'The person was very talkative,' for example," says Braff. "However, that's probably getting more detailed than most firms are willing to get." Guiliano's study uncovered another interesting phenomenon: When a black manager replaced a white manager at a store, the rate at which white workers quit their jobs increased by 15 percent. "Clearly, some white employees are choosing not to work for black managers, which suggests that minority managers may face additional challenges when it comes to employee retention," she says.
October 29, 2009 Copyright 2009© LRP Publications |
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