What Does Affirmative Action Do?

Abstract

We use data from a survey of employers to investigate how Affirmative Action in recruiting and hiring influences hiring practices, personnel policies, and ultimately employment outcomes. Our results show that Affirmative Action increases the number of recruitment and screening practices used by employers, raises their willingness to hire stigmatized applicants, increases the number of minority and female applicants as well as employees, and increases employers' tendencies to provide training and to formally evaluate employees. When Affirmative Action is used in recruiting, it does not lead to lower credentials or performance of women and minorities hired. When it is also used in hiring, it yields female and minority employees whose credentials are somewhat weaker, though performance generally is not. Overall, then, the more intensive search, evaluation, and training that accompany Affirmative Action appear to offset any tendencies of the policy to lead to hiring of less-qualified or less-productive women and minorities. 1 Adarand v. Pena concerns minority set-asides, but these may have strong influences on minority employment (Bates, 1993). We expect future court decisions to address Affirmative Action in employment directly, as almost occurred in the recent case involving teachers in Piscataway, NJ. 2 Effects on educational as opposed to employment outcomes have been analyzed by Kane (1996) and Attiyeh and Attiyeh (1997). 3 An exception is a paper by Leonard (1985), which analyzes the targeting of compliance reviews across companies by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.

Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work

“…Affirmative action regulations, as established in executive orders 10925 and 11246, encourage employers to take active steps to promote the "full realization of equal opportunity" of historically disadvantaged groups. 4 The adoption of skilltraining programs has been perceived as an effective means for generating pools of women and minority employees qualified for management jobs (U.S. Glass Ceiling Commission 1995, p. 47;Holzer and Neumark 1998). In 1974, for example, Kaiser Aluminum signed a contract with U.S. Steelworkers to provide new training programs, which would open skilled craft jobs to blacks.…”

CEO Leadership Styles and the Implementation of Organizational Diversity Practices: Moderating Effects of Social Values and Age

“…For example, when Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action (EEO/AA) requirements were first introduced, many employers implemented diversity programs to ensure compliance with the law Holzer and Neumark 2000;Kalev et al 2006) and to avoid the potential threat of lawsuits and negative publicity stemming from charges of discrimination (Hirsh and Kornrich 2008;James and Wooten 2006). Firms also manage diversity because of the ''business case'' for diversity-it may assist in forging a competitive advantage and improving a firm's innovative capabilities and overall performance (Cox and Blake 1991;Kelly and Dobbins 1998;Kochan et al 2003;Richard 2000).…”

The influence of residential segregation and its correlates on ethnic enterprise in urban areas

“…The survey was funded by the Ford and Russell Sage foundations, and was constructed by a consortium of over 40 researchers and focused on areas pertinent to the present study: labor markets, racial attitudes, and residential segregation. The MCSUI has spawned a number of studies and even full-length books including: low-skill workers perceptions of employer discrimination (Goldsmith et al, 2004), the influence of affirmative action programs on racial composition of workforces and worker quality (Holzer and Neumark, 2000), the influence of racial composition on minority wages (Kmec, 2003), the influence of customer preferences on racial staffing (Holzer and Ihlandfeldt, 1998), and urban interracial conflict and competition (Oliver and Wong, 2003). A number of MCSUI studies have focused on segregation processes and consequences (Charles, 2003(Charles, , 2001Krysan, 2002;Krysan and Farley, 2002;Wilson and Hammer, 2001).…”