Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey are the co-authors of the RSF book Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private-Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act. The volume offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America and is an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.
Q: Your book draws on data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that report on more than 5 million workplaces between 1966 and 2005. Talk a little about the data – what are in these reports and why were they collected? Secondly, have social scientists been able to use them before to analyze desegregation trends?
A: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided numerous legal gains for previously disadvantaged groups. With regards to employment, the act outlawed racial and gender discrimination and segregation; it also created the EEOC, which was mandated to monitor progress toward an equal opportunity society. This federal regulatory agency was charged with processing discrimination complaints and collecting annual data from private sector organizations. These annual reports, known as EEO-1 reports, contain the race and gender composition of occupations for each workplace in private sector firms with more than 100 employees. The EEO-1 surveys of private sector workplaces we analyze in this book were the primary tool mandated by the Civil Rights Act to monitor progress in private sector firms toward equal employment opportunity.
The EEOC, unfortunately, has never had the resources to use these data for the Act’s intended purpose. Additionally, these data have only been used occasionally in the past by social scientists. More recently, social scientists have had increased access to these EEOC-generated data, but access remains difficult and the EEOC is extremely limited in its ability to use these data to identify systemic employment discrimination.
In the 1960s corporations were terrified of being held publicly accountable for employment discrimination. The political pressures of those times severely limited the EEOC's ability to analyze these data or to share them with either the academic community or society at large. It is our hope that these data will become more available to both the academic community and the public at large.
In short, these extraordinary data are remarkable in scope and have very rarely been analyzed until recently. Documenting Desegregation provides the most systematic analysis of change in racial and gender employment opportunities since the Civil Rights Act.
Q: Even though rapid progress was made in the 1960s and 1970s, your analysis shows race desegregation largely stalled after 1980, and now so has gender desegregation. You offer a sobering conclusion: "Little or no national aggregate progress is being made in terms of either desegregation or access to good jobs." What has changed?
A: Racial progress stalled around 1980, and now so has gender progress. Today there is neither political pressure nor uncertainty in the corporate environment to motivate further change. Racial progress was rapid in the 1960s and 1970s when social movement pressure, legislation, and court rulings favored broadened definitions of racial discrimination. The stalling of the Civil Rights movement and the Republican strategy of racial divisiveness ended that pressure and progress. The women’s movement brought pressure in the 1970s for change in gender relations at work, and the expansion of the definition of gender discrimination to include pregnancy, sexual harassment, and even family friendly related issues kept corporations uncertain and open to continued pressure for equal opportunity for women. One wonders if the contemporary political competition for white women’s votes might lead to some re-ignition of women’s employment progress, but it is hard to imagine much change without a re-ignition of a women’s movement of one sort or the other. Rather, in many firms, industries and cities the equal opportunity gains of the last fifty years are now being rolled back.
Q: Did the Civil Rights Act lead to desegregated workplaces?
A: No. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination and segregation illegal, but it was not simply the passage of law that led to desegregation. Rather, it was the political pressure from the Civil Rights and later women’s movements that were powerful sources of change. These political pressures when coupled with civil rights promoting legislation and employers’ fear of federal enforcement of these new laws created uncertainty as to what were legitimate personnel practices. This uncertainty strengthened human resource managers and employees pressuring their firms to increase the hiring of minority and female employees. Law does not change behavior, but it can provide the context in which political movements and progressive human resource managers can advance equality agendas. Now that the political pressure is largely gone, change has stalled.
Q: In the introduction to the book, you write that several myths surround the effectiveness of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which banned the use of racial and gender status distinctions in employment. Let’s take a look at one – that white men would lose ground in the private sector as “affirmative action” kicked in and awarded more jobs to minorities. What has actually happened?
A: Reverse discrimination is a myth. It is the product of whites’ and males’ misguided fears of a loss of privileged access to good jobs. Even in recent years we have see continued concern over "reverse discrimination" (e.g., Fisher v. University of Texas). Affirmative Action did happen in private sector firms, especially among government contractors (the only private sector firms ever subject to affirmative action mandates), although it was never widespread in the private sector and there is practically no evidence that it came at the expense of white men’s employment opportunities. In the 1960s, federal contractors initially hired more African Americans into lower level jobs. This had the immediate consequence of pushing white men higher up in those organizations. By 1970 white men had greater access to skilled working class, professional, and managerial jobs than they had before the Civil Rights Act. These advantages endure to this day for skilled working class and managerial jobs. In fact, today we show that the cities in which white men are the smallest percent of the labor force are the ones in which they have the greatest access to the best jobs.
Compared to other employers, government contractors, again those firms subject to affirmative action, made more progress hiring black men, black women and white women into good quality jobs in the 1970s, but there is little evidence that contractors, the firms mandated to practice affirmative action, have actually made more equal opportunity progress since 1980. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance is responsible for enforcing affirmative action mandates via compliance reviews of federal contractors. The evidence suggests that in the 1970s such compliance reviews led to increased diversity among managers, but that its influence weakened in the 1980s and after 1990 had no effect at all. Our analyses suggest that being a federal contractor was associated with increased racial and gender segregation after 1990, although white women continued to make some small gains into managerial jobs among contractors after 1990.
Q: Another interesting finding concerns education and income. You find that those industries that rely on education credentials tend to desegregate, while industries that have higher relative wages tend to stay segregated. Any theories for why this is the case?
A: In a previous question, you used the word 'sobering' to describe some of the stalling and in some cases reversal of equal employment opportunity progress. The one arena in which we do find white male monopolies over good jobs eroding is among professional occupations. These are occupations that require specific educational credentials—a college degree in a particular field like accounting or medicine. Universities have been much more successful at integrating their classrooms than employers have been at integrating their workplaces. We also see in our analyses that industries that use educational screening to hire employees are also more likely to desegregate and white women, black women, and black men are all more likely to get access to good jobs. We think that as meritocratic hiring criteria increase, discrimination declines.
Before we are quoted for suggesting that educational credentials are "the great equalizer," there are clear caveats to this basic finding that must be pointed out. Educational credentials are important, but are not the panacea for racial and gender segregation. In the book we demonstrate that when jobs are more desirable, either because they are high skilled, high paid, or have authority over others, the pressures to reserve these jobs for white men increases as well. It is always easier to integrate bad jobs than good jobs. One of our most striking findings is that in high paying industries, white men’s advantaged access to skilled blue collar, professional, and managerial jobs rises and racial minorities and women are more likely to be excluded.
We see these two processes – meritocracy around formal credentials and social closure around desirable jobs – as in fundamental tension. The increased income inequality that U.S. workplaces have enacted over the last thirty years have probably increased the pressure for social closure and helped stall the equal opportunity advances witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Q: Looking to the future, what can be done to pressure sectors and firms to change course? Do you think increased regulatory enforcement is an issue?
A: Political pressure, uncertainty, and accountability are the recipe for future equal opportunity advances. Right now, the Republican strategy of racial division has pretty much run its course. As the U.S. becomes a majority-minority country, we should expect pressure for equal opportunity in workplaces and schools to reassert itself. The political competition for the white female vote already is strengthening the ability of women to demand more political attention.
In the absence of mass movements, uncertainty may need to be generated from government regulators. We think that the EEOC data we used in this book, as well as similar data on government employment, could be used by the government to make clear what cities, industries, and even firms are systemic discriminators. Publishing these data could lead to a politics of shaming the worst offenders and praising firms with the best outcomes. If tied to more aggressive legal or regulatory action, companies might renew their commitment to equal opportunity in efforts to avoid negative publicity and successfully recruit increasingly productive and diverse labor forces. Only in the arena of equal opportunity are corporations protected from public scrutiny. Campaign contributions, pollution discharges, stock market activity, and even balance sheets of publicly traded companies are all public records, so why not firms employment records? It is time to fulfill the original 1964 Civil Rights Act mandate and make visible where there is progress toward equal employment opportunity and where past gains are slipping away. Only by acknowledging that progress is not inevitable and that equal opportunity progress has stalled can we move toward creating equal opportunity for all.
Recent Books
