Testimony at the Meeting of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

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I would like to make some general comments this morning about racial discrimination and its continuing presence in the U.S. labor market.

1 Racial discrimination clearly persists in the labor market, though it is more powerful against some groups of minorities than others.

The evidence that discrimination in hiring persists is clearest in the many "audit" or "tester" studies of the past 10-15 years, in which matched pairs of white and minority job applicants with identical credentials on paper are sent to apply for jobs. Virtually all of these studies show statistically significant differences in the rates at which white and minority candidates receive "call backs" or are offered jobs (Fix and Struyk 1994).¹

Studies of self-reported employer data on job applicants and hiring show differences as well, with black applicants gaining fewer jobs than whites or Hispanics, and black men gaining fewer than black women (Holzer 1996). The data show that smaller establishments, those with white customers, and those with white managers/owners make fewer offers to black applicants, all else equal (Holzer 1998; Holzer and Ihlanfeldt 1998; Holzer et al. 2000). Ethnographic evidence confirms that employers have negative stereotypes about blacks relative to other employees and are more fearful of black men than women (Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Moss and Tilly 2001).

Employer discrimination also seems to occur more frequently at the hiring stage than at the job assignment or promotion stages, perhaps partly because employment discrimination lawsuits are more likely to focus on allegations of wrongful promotion or discharges rather than hiring (Donohue and Siegelman 1991). Also, employers often prefer immigrants to native-born (minority) workers for low-wage, low-skill jobs; this reflects their perceptions of stronger work ethic and greater appreciation for the work among the former (Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991).²

Notes from this section

1 See reviews and critiques of these studies in Darity and Mason (1998) and Heckman (1998). For evidence on Hispanics, see Kenney and Wissoker (1994). Also, Bertrand and Mullinathan (2004) show that employers are less likely to call back individuals with African-American names than those with more conventional names.

2 This is true even when employers consider legal immigrants, who are generally paid the same wages for those jobs as are paid to other employees. For those who are illegal (or undocumented), wages paid might well be lower.

Note: This testimony is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

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