Study find no change in racial discrimination in hiring for past 25 years!

Sad but True. Hiring Discrimination has not Changed Since 1989

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that discrimination in hiring has not changed for Blacks since 1989. There was a slight decrease for Latinos during the same time period.

The four researchers looked at every hiring discrimination study since 1972. They chose to focus on the period 1989 to 2015 when better studies became available. They gathered up all the data from each of the individual studies to build a larger, "meta" data set.  The data contained about 56,000 applications for 26,000 positions in total. The studies took into account education, gender, and local labor market conditions.

Based on the studies, Whites receive about 36% more call backs than Blacks and 24% more callbacks than Latinos. The results have not changed in 25 years.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Here is a link tothe  PNAS study on hiring discrimination. And the abstract. The paper looks at an assembled data set from multiple hiring discrimination studies.

It's sad to say: We have made NO progress on hiring discrimination in 25 years.

It is also interesting to note that during approximately the same period, 1980 to 2017, wages for the majority of workers have been flat. So, with more workers fighting over fewer good jobs there is no  incentive to reduce hiring discrimination.

EBE Note #2: You have to hand it to the National Academy of Sciences for solid, large scale, impactful research.  They tackled immigration and pretty much settled the debate about the true cost of immigration to US soceity.  Now the produce a great and sad study about hiring discrimination.