Today’s Economist: Nancy Folbre: The Uneven Progress of Equal Opportunity

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently edited and contributed to “For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.“

The central theme of President Obama’s inauguration speech was equal opportunity and its refrain, “Our journey is not complete.”

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He never referred directly to equal opportunity in employment, perhaps because his very election testifies to certain progress since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

But looking at the United States labor force as a whole, how broad has that progress actually been? Lack of systematic data on workplace segregation over time has long made that question difficult to answer. Recently, however, the  Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made available to researchers a rich legacy of private-sector employer reports known as the EEO-1 survey.

These data star in “Documenting Desegregation,” a new book by the sociologists Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, which analyzes the trajectory of change in workplaces from 1964 to 2005 in careful detail. Their narrative reveals a jagged and uneven process of change driven by political mobilization, electoral outcomes and personnel-department practices, as well as specific legislative actions.

While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 destabilized a system of institutionalized obstacles to equal opportunity for both women and African-Americans, it failed to establish practical mechanisms that could guarantee steady progress toward equal opportunity.

From 1960 to 1972, many African-Americans, particularly men, moved out of segregated jobs. From 1972 to 1980, white women also began to gain access to new opportunities.

After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, however, the federal government backed off from activist equal-opportunity enforcement, and racial desegregation stalled. White women continued to make inroads based on increased access to professional and managerial occupations, including human resource departments of major corporations, where they became an internal force for change.

The authors contend that increased education alone does not explain white women’s relative success, because African-Americans steadily improved their educational attainment relative to whites throughout the 1980s and 1990s, even as employment progress stalled. Further, for reasons that may be related to political and cultural backlash, white women’s movement out of gender-segregated work slowed in the 1990s and stalled after 2000.

Five years into the 21st century, the data reveal a surprisingly high level of job segregation in which African-American men, white women and especially African-American women only rarely worked in the same occupation in the same workplace as white men. In order to create a completely integrated private-sector workplace, more than half of all private sector workers would need to change jobs.

In most workplaces, the face of authority looks predictable. As the authors put it, “White men are often in positions in management over everyone; white women tend to supervise other women, black men to supervise black men and black women tend to supervise black women.”

While overt discrimination based on race and sex is no longer culturally condoned, both covert bias and institutional inertia perpetuate inequality. Drawing on a wide range of social-science research, Professors Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey contend we have shifted from a regime of “condoned exploitation” to one of “contested prejudice,” from a hegemonic regime of bright social boundaries to a fractured social world of blurry, criss-crossed lines.

In this world, remarkable successes like the election of an African-American president coexist with continuing failures, especially in domains where disadvantages based on race, gender and class coincide and collide.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 might have led to steadier desegregation had we monitored its impact from the very outset, developing an analysis of institutional practices that could be renegotiated rather than relying largely on costly and contentious lawsuits based on particularly striking instances of discrimination.

Indeed, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recognized the need to move toward a strategy of strategic enforcement, to examine industry-specific, regional and local patterns of occupational segregation and pay inequality.

The commission is currently barred from releasing data on the worst or best corporate citizens. By contrast the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission regularly make public company-specific data on the release of toxic chemicals, workplace injuries and financial standing.

Professors Stainback and Tomaskovic-Devey suggest that a similar level of public accountability for equal opportunity in employment could positively influence future corporate behavior.

It could also speed the journey the president urged us to complete.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the-uneven-progress-of-equal-opportunity/?partner=rss&emc=rss