Discrimination

More stories

  • 113 Shares129 Views

    in Economy

    Who Discriminates in Hiring? A New Study Can Tell.

    by

    Applications seemingly from Black candidates got fewer replies than those evidently from white candidates. The method could point to specific companies.Twenty years ago, Kalisha White performed an experiment. A Marquette University graduate who is Black, she suspected that her application for a job as executive team leader at a Target in Wisconsin was being ignored because of her race. So she sent in another one, with a name (Sarah Brucker) more likely to make the candidate appear white.Though the fake résumé was not quite as accomplished as Ms. White’s, the alter ego scored an interview. Target ultimately paid over half a million dollars to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Ms. White and a handful of other Black job applicants.Now a variation on her strategy could help expose racial discrimination in employment across the corporate landscape.Economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago this week unveiled a vast discrimination audit of some of the largest U.S. companies. Starting in late 2019, they sent 83,000 fake job applications for entry-level positions at 108 companies — most of them in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list, and some of their subsidiaries.Their insights can provide valuable evidence about violations of Black workers’ civil rights.The researchers — Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters of Berkeley and Evan K. Rose of Chicago — are not ready to reveal the names of companies on their list. But they plan to, once they expose the data to more statistical tests. Labor lawyers, the E.E.O.C. and maybe the companies themselves could do a lot with this information. (Dr. Kline said they had briefed the U.S. Labor Department on the general findings.)In the study, applicants’ characteristics — like age, sexual orientation, or work and school experience — varied at random. Names, however, were chosen purposefully to ensure applications came in pairs: one with a more distinctive white name — Jake or Molly, say — and the other with a similar background but a more distinctive Black name, like DeShawn or Imani.What the researchers found would probably not surprise Ms. White: On average, applications from candidates with a “Black name” get fewer callbacks than similar applications bearing a “white name.”This aligns with a paper published by two economists from the University of Chicago a couple of years after Ms. White’s tussle with Target: Respondents to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago had much better luck if their name was Emily or Greg than if it was Lakisha or Jamal. (Marianne Bertrand, one of the authors, testified as an expert witness in the trial over Ms. White’s discrimination claim.)This experimental approach with paired applications, some economists argue, offers a closer representation of racial discrimination in the work force than studies that seek to relate employment and wage gaps to other characteristics — such as educational attainment and skill — and treat discrimination as a residual, or what’s left after other differences are accounted for.The Berkeley and Chicago researchers found that discrimination isn’t uniform across the corporate landscape. Some companies discriminate little, responding similarly to applications by Molly and Latifa. Others show a measurable bias.All told, for every 1,000 applications received, the researchers found, white candidates got about 250 responses, compared with about 230 for Black candidates. But among one-fifth of companies, the average gap grew to 50 callbacks. Even allowing that some patterns of discrimination could be random, rather than the result of racism, they concluded that 23 companies from their selection were “very likely to be engaged in systemic discrimination against Black applicants.”There are 13 companies in automotive retailing and services in the Fortune 500 list. Five are among the 10 most discriminatory companies on the researchers’ list. Of the companies very likely to discriminate based on race, according to the findings, eight are federal contractors, which are bound by particularly stringent anti-discrimination rules and could lose their government contracts as a consequence.“Discriminatory behavior is clustered in particular firms,” the researchers wrote. “The identity of many of these firms can be deduced with high confidence.”The researchers also identified some overall patterns. For starters, discriminating companies tend to be less profitable, a finding consistent with the proposition by Gary Becker, who first studied discrimination in the workplace in the 1950s, that it is costly for firms to discriminate against productive workers.The study found no strong link between discrimination and geography: Applications for jobs in the South fared no worse than anywhere else. Retailers and restaurants and bars discriminate more than average. And employers with more centralized personnel operations handling job applications tend to discriminate less, suggesting that uniform rules and procedures across a company can help reduce racial biases.An early precedent for the paper published this week is a 1978 study that sent pairs of fake applications with similar qualifications but different photos, showing a white or a Black applicant. Interestingly, that study found some evidence of “reverse” discrimination against white applicants.More fake-résumé studies have followed in recent years. One found that recent Black college graduates get fewer callbacks from potential employers than white candidates with identical resumes. Another found that prospective employers treat Black graduates from elite universities about the same as white graduates of less selective institutions.One study reported that when employers in New York and New Jersey were barred from asking about job candidates’ criminal records, callbacks to Black candidates dropped significantly, relative to white job seekers, suggesting employers assumed Black candidates were more likely to have a record.What makes the new research valuable is that it shows regulators, courts and labor lawyers how large-scale auditing of hiring practices offers a method to monitor and police bias. “Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to identify individual firms responsible for a substantial share of racial discrimination while maintaining a tight limit on the expected number of false positives encountered,” the researchers wrote.Individual companies might even use the findings to reform their hiring practices.Dr. Kline of Berkeley said Jenny R. Yang, a former chief commissioner of the E.E.O.C. and the current director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which has jurisdiction over federal contractors, had been apprised of the findings and had expressed interest in the researchers’ technique. (A representative of the agency declined to comment or to make Ms. Yang available.)Similar tests have been performed since the 1980s to detect discrimination in housing by real estate agents and rental property owners. Tests in which white and nonwhite people inquire about the availability of housing suggest discrimination remains rampant.Deploying this approach in the labor market has proved a bit tougher. Last year, the New York City Commission on Human Rights performed tests to detect employment discrimination — whether by race, gender, age or any other protected class — at 2,356 shops. Still, “employment is always harder than housing,” said Sapna Raj, deputy commissioner of the law enforcement bureau at the agency, which enforces anti-discrimination regulations.“This could give us a deeper understanding,” Ms. Raj said of the study by the Berkeley and Chicago researchers. “What we would do is evaluate the information and look proactively at ways to address it.”The commission, she noted, could not take action based on the kind of statistics in the new study on their own. “There are so many things you have to look at before you can determine that it is discrimination,” she argued. Still, she suggested, statistical analysis could alert her to which employers it makes sense to look at.And that could ultimately convince corporations that discrimination is costly. “This is actionable evidence of illegal behavior by huge firms,” Dr. Walters of Berkeley said on Twitter in connection with the study’s release. “Modern statistical methods have the potential to help detect and redress civil rights violations.” More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    Black Workers Stopped Making Progress on Pay. Is It Racism?

    by

    William Spriggs, a professor at Howard University, wrote an open letter last year to his fellow economists. Reacting to the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he began the letter with a question: “Is now a teachable moment for economists?”Slamming what he saw as attempts to deny racial discrimination, Dr. Spriggs argued that economists should stop looking for a reason other than racism — some “omitted variable” — to account for why African Americans are falling further behind in the economy.“Hopefully, this moment will cause economists to reflect and rethink how we study racial disparities,” wrote Dr. Spriggs, who is Black. “Trapped in the dominant conversation, far too often African American economists find themselves having to prove that African Americans are equal.”After a year in which demands for racial justice acquired new resonance, Dr. Spriggs and others are pushing back against a strongly held tenet of economics: that differences in wages largely reflect differences in skill.While African Americans lag behind whites in educational attainment, that disparity has narrowed substantially over the last 40 years. Still, the wage gap hasn’t budged.In 2020, the typical full-time Black worker earned about 20 percent less than a typical full-time white worker. And Black men and women are far less likely than whites to have a job. So the median earnings for Black men in 2019 amounted to only 56 cents for every dollar earned by white men. The gap was wider than it was in 1970.Lost ProgressEarnings of Black men, as a percentage of the earnings of white men, are at the same place they were in the 1960s and 1970s. More

  • 125 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    Banks Fight $4 Billion Debt Relief Plan for Black Farmers

    by

    Lenders are pressuring the Agriculture Department to give them more money, saying quick repayments will cut into profits.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Biden’s Proposals Aim to Give Sturdier Support to the Middle Class

    by

    Perhaps the most striking difference between the middle class of 50 years ago and the middle class today is a loss of confidence — the confidence that you were doing better than your parents and that your children would do better than you.President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar suite of economic proposals is aiming to both reinforce and rebuild an American middle class that feels it has been standing on shifting ground. And it comes with an explicit message that the private sector alone cannot deliver on that dream and that the government has a central part to play.“When you look at periods of shared growth,” said Brian Deese, director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, “what you see is that public investment has played an absolutely critical role, not to the exclusion of private investment and innovation, but in laying the foundation.”If the Biden administration gets its way, the reconstructed middle class would be built on a sturdier and much broader plank of government support rather than the vagaries of the market.Some proposals are meant to support parents who work: federal paid family and medical leave, more affordable child care, free prekindergarten classes. Others would use public investment to create jobs, in areas like clean energy, transportation and high-speed broadband. And a higher minimum wage would aim to buoy those in low-paid work, while free community college would improve skills.That presidents pitch their agendas to the middle class is not surprising given that nearly nine out of 10 Americans consider themselves members. The definition, of course, has always been a nebulous stew of cash, credentials and culture, relying on lifestyles and aspirations as much as on assets.But what cuts across an avalanche of studies, surveys and statistics over the last half century is that life in the middle class, once considered a guarantee of security and comfort, now often comes with a nagging sense of vulnerability.Salaries for teachers, hospital workers and child care providers are determined largely by the government, and do not necessarily reflect their value in an open market.Philip Keith for The New York TimesBefore the pandemic, unemployment was low and stocks soared. But for decades, workers have increasingly had to contend with low pay and sluggish wage growth, more erratic schedules, as well as a lack of sick days, parental leave and any kind of long-term security. At the same time, the cost of essentials like housing, health care and education have been gulping up a much larger portion of their incomes.The trend can be found in rich countries all over the world. “Every generation since the baby boom, has seen the middle-income group shrink and its economic influence weaken,” a 2019 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded.In the United States, the proportion of adults in the middle bands of the income spectrum — which the Pew Research Center defines as roughly between $50,000 and $150,000 — declined to 51 percent in 2019 from 61 percent 50 years ago. Their share of the nation’s income shrank even more over the same period, to 42 percent from 62 percent.Their outlook dimmed, too. During the 1990s, Pew found rising optimism that the next generation would be better off financially than the current one, reaching a high of 55 percent in 1999. That figure dropped to 42 percent in 2019.The economy has produced enormous wealth over the last few decades, but much of it was channeled to a tiny cadre at the top. Two wage earners were needed to generate the kind of income that used to come in a single paycheck.“Upper-income households pulled away,” said Richard Fry, a senior economist at Pew.Corrosive inequality was just the beginning of what appeared to be a litany of glaring market failures like the inability to head off ruinous climate change or meet the enormous demand for affordable housing and health care. Companies often channeled profits to buy back stock instead of using them to invest or raise wages.The evidence was growing, liberal economists argued, that the reigning hands-off economic approach — low taxes on the wealthy, minimal government — was not producing the broad-based economic gains that sustained and grew the middle class.“The unregulated economy is not working for most Americans,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics. “The government has an important role,” he emphasized, in regulating the private sector’s excesses, redistributing income and making substantial public investments.Skeptics have warned of government overreach and the risk that deficit spending could ignite inflation, but Mr. Biden and his team of economic advisers have, nonetheless, embraced the approach.“It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out,” Mr. Biden said in his speech to a joint session of Congress last week, a reference to the idea that prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the wealthy, but flows out of a well-educated and well-paid middle class.He underscored the point by singling out workers as the dynamo powering the middle class.“Wall Street didn’t build this country,” he said. “The middle class built the country. And unions built the middle class.”Of course, the economy that lifted millions of postwar families into the middle class differed sharply from the current one. Manufacturing, construction and mining jobs, previously viewed as the backbone of the labor force, dwindled — as did the labor unions that aggressively fought for better wages and benefits. Now, only one out of every 10 workers is a union member, while roughly 80 percent of jobs in the United States are in the service sector.And it is these types of jobs, in health care, education, child care, disabled and senior care, that are expected to continue expanding at the quickest pace.Most of them, though, fall short of paying middle-income wages. That does not necessarily reflect their value in an open market. Salaries for teachers, hospital workers, lab technicians, child care providers and nursing home attendants are determined largely by the government, which collects tax dollars to pay their salaries and sets reimbursements rates for Medicare and other programs.They are also jobs that are filled by significant numbers of women, African-Americans, Latinos and Asians.“When we think about what is the right wage,” Mr. Stiglitz asked, “should we take advantage of discrimination against women and people of color, which is what we’ve done, or can we use this as the basis of building a middle class?”Mr. Biden’s spending plans — a $2.3 trillion infrastructure package called the American Jobs Plan, and a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan that concentrates on social spending — aim to take account of just how much the work force and the economy have transformed over the past half-century and where they may be headed in the next.The president’s economic team took inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the public programs that followed it.After World War II, for instance, the government helped millions of veterans get college educations and buy homes by offering tuition assistance and subsidized mortgages. It created a mammoth highway system to undergird commercial activity and funneled billions of dollars into research and development that was used later to develop smartphone technology, search engines, the human genome project, magnetic resonance imaging, hybrid corn and supercomputers.Mr. Biden, too, wants to fix roads and bridges, upgrade electric grids and invest in research. But his administration has also concluded that a 21st-century economy requires much more, from expanded access to high-speed broadband, which more than a third of rural inhabitants lack, to parental leave and higher wages for child care workers.The basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force, like child care and parental leave, are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, an economics professor.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times“We’ve now had 50 years of the revolution of women entering the labor force,” and the most basic necessities that make it possible for parents to fully participate in the work force are still missing, said Betsey Stevenson, a professor at the University of Michigan and a former member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. She paused a few moments to take it in: “It’s absolutely stunning.”Right before the pandemic, more women than men could be found in paying jobs.Ensuring equal opportunity, Ms. Stevenson noted, includes “the opportunity to get high-quality early-childhood education, the opportunity to have a parent stay home with you when you’re sick, the opportunity for a parent to bond with you when born.”When it comes to offering this type of support, she added, “the United States is an outlier compared to almost every industrialized country.”The administration also has an eye on how federal education, housing and business programs of earlier eras largely excluded women, African-Americans, Asians and others.In the Biden plan are aid for colleges that primarily serve nonwhite students, free community college for all, universal prekindergarten and monthly child payments.“This is not a 1930s model any more,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a political science professor at Princeton University.And it’s all to be paid for by higher taxes on corporations and the top 1 percent.Passage in a sharply polarized Congress is anything but assured. The multitrillion-dollar price tag and the prospect of an activist government have ensured the opposition of Republicans in a Senate where Democrats have the slimmest possible majority.But public polling from last year showed widening support for the government to take a larger role.“What is so remarkable about this moment is this notion that public investment can transform America, that these are things government can do,” said Felicia Wong, president of the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute. “This is fundamentally restructuring how the economy works.”The middle class today differs in significant ways from the middle class of 50 years ago and perhaps the most striking is a loss of confidence.Evan Jenkins for The New York Times More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    Beyond Pandemic’s Upheaval, a Racial Wealth Gap Endures

    by

    Billions in aid has been dispensed, and the social safety net has been reinforced. Will there be more ambitious steps to address longtime inequities?Not since Lyndon Baines Johnson’s momentous civil rights and anti-poverty legislation has an American president so pointedly put racial and economic equity at the center of his agenda.President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar initiatives to rebuild infrastructure in neglected and segregated neighborhoods, increase wages for health care workers, expand the safety net and make pre-K and college more accessible are all shot through with attention to the particular economic disadvantages that face racial minorities. So were his sweeping pandemic relief bill and Inauguration Day executive orders.Yet as ambitious as such efforts are, academic experts and some policymakers say still more will be needed to repair one of the most stubborn and invidious inequalities: the gap in wealth between Black and white Americans.Wealth — one’s total assets — is the most meaningful measure of financial strength. Yet for every dollar a typical white household has, a Black one has 12 cents, a divide that has grown over the last half-century. Latinos have 21 cents for every dollar in white wealth.Such disparities drag down the American economy as a whole. A study by McKinsey & Company found that consumption and investment lost because of that gap cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, or 4 to 6 percent of the projected gross domestic product in 2028.Mr. Biden started talking about the wealth divide on the campaign trail, calling on the Federal Reserve to take on a new role and “aggressively target persistent racial gaps in jobs, wages and wealth.”Vice President Kamala Harris and several Democratic senators have supported proposals targeted specifically at the gap — from increasing Black homeownership to establishing trust accounts for newborns (“baby bonds”). And senior economic advisers who have joined the Biden team, including Cecilia Rouse and Jared Bernstein, have talked about the need for programs that attack structural inequities, noting that disparities in income over time create more entrenched gaps in wealth.Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the president’s proposals were intended to work together to make sure that unexpected or temporary economic jolts — like the loss of a job — didn’t snowball into a disastrous tumble.“No one thing alone is going to check the box to close the wealth gap, but the combination of all these things together will make real progress,” said Ms. Boushey, who has written frequently about the issue.Government support is crucial, economists say, because there is so little that individuals can do on their own to close the wealth gap. The most surprising finding that researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis established after a decade-long study of inequality and financial vulnerability was that no matter what financial decisions you make or schools you attend, roughly 80 percent of those yawning disparities are determined by your skin color, the year you were born and your gender.Median wealth of Black, Hispanic and white households

    Note: Figures adjusted for inflationSource: Federal Reserve Bank of St. LouisThe New York Times“There’s a lot you don’t control,” said Ray Boshara, who headed the research effort. “These larger forces really have an impact on your ability to accumulate wealth.”Imagine playing a game of Monopoly with a set of rigged rules. Your opponent gets $2,000 in cash, rolls with two dice at every turn, and earns $200 every time he circles the board and passes “Go.” You, by contrast, begin with only $1,000, roll with a single die and earn $100 at “Go.”At the game’s end, you can hand off whatever cash and property you’ve accumulated to a friend or family member, and the next round just continues.The rigged game helps explain the origins of the wealth gap. The heavy hand of a history studded by intimidation and terrifying violence, segregation and unfair housing, zoning and lending policies has prevented generations of Black families from gathering assets.In the 19th century, when the government distributed the country’s most realizable asset — land — during the Homestead Act, African-Americans were left out. In the 20th century, when the focus shifted to building a berth in the middle class through homeownership, African-Americans were again largely excluded from federal mortgage loan support programs and the G.I. Bill of Rights. Tax policies, in turn, favored the wealth-building strategies that were offered to whites.Even New Deal assistance programs like unemployment insurance that were created to help people survive the Depression excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were overwhelmingly Black.Again and again, African-Americans were shut off from the capital that makes capitalism work.“That’s how we built the racial wealth gap,” said William A. Darity Jr., an economics professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “Unless you have a comparable program focused on building Black wealth, you’re not going to do much about it.”Unequal outcomes in one generation turn into unequal opportunities in the next. Without assets, Black parents cannot offer as much financial support to help pay for their children’s education, first home or efforts to start a small business.Black graduates, for example, have to take out bigger loans to cover college costs, compelling them to start out in more debt — on average $25,000 more — than their white counterparts.Recognizing an uneven playing field is not as obvious as it might seem. The lopsided Monopoly rules were developed by social scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, nearly a decade ago as part of an experiment on money’s effect on human behavior.They found that winners consistently credited their hard-earned skills and smarts for their success rather than a skewed playing field.Research shows that outside forces prevent Black workers who are just as talented and hardworking from achieving the same success as their white peers.Harold M. Lambert/Getty ImagesThat all-too-human response clouds thinking about inequality, said Paul Piff, who led the research team and is now a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine.Americans, much more than people from other countries, interpret “their advantages in terms of things they themselves have earned or deserved as opposed to thinking it’s the result of an unfair world,” Professor Piff said. “Then the inequalities you’re seeing aren’t unfair, they’re just necessary outcomes of things that people did or didn’t do,” he said, so you are less willing to do anything about them.Mr. Boshara at the St. Louis Fed said the implications were particularly pertinent in thinking about the racial wealth gap.“People feel they’ve earned everything they have, but the evidence just doesn’t support that,” said Mr. Boshara, who is helping to lead a follow-up research initiative at the bank, the Institute for Economic Equity. “It counters the American narrative that everybody who has something made it on their own.”Challenging shibboleths about hard work and personal responsibility can meet resistance. People often take immediate offense, interpreting the argument as detracting from their own demonstrable hard work, skills and talent. What the research highlights, though, are the outside forces that prevent other individuals who are just as talented and hardworking from achieving the same success.The same house in a Black neighborhood will fetch less money than it would in a white one. A Black worker with the same credentials as a white colleague will earn less. Even among college graduates, the Black jobless rate tends to be twice as high as the rate for whites. Such inequities operate like an invisible tax on African-Americans, a tax on being Black.The pandemic has underscored how crushing unpredictable and uncontrollable twists in circumstances can be. When Congress approved the $1.9 trillion relief plan, Mr. Biden pointed out that millions of Americans were jobless and lining up at food banks “through no fault of their own.”“I want to emphasize that,” he added. “Through no fault of their own.”The pandemic has hit African-Americans and Latinos hardest on all fronts, with higher infection and death rates, more job losses, and more business closures.Proposals that confront the wealth gap head on, though, are both expensive and politically charged.Professor Darity of Duke, a co-author of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” has argued that compensating the descendants of Black slaves — who helped build the nation’s wealth but were barred from sharing it — would be the most direct and effective way to reduce the racial wealth gap.Vice President Harris and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey have tended to push for asset-building policies that have more popular support. They have offered programs to increase Black homeownership, reduce student debt, supplement retirement accounts and establish “baby bonds” with government contributions tied to family income.With these accounts, recipients could build up money over time that could be used to cover college tuition, start a business or help in retirement.Several states have experimented with small-scale programs meant to encourage children to go to college. Though those programs were not created to close the racial wealth gap, researchers have seen positive side effects. In Oklahoma, child development accounts seeded with $1,000 were created in 2007 for a group of newborns.“We have very clear evidence that if we create an account of birth for everyone and provide a little more resources to people at the bottom, then all these babies accumulate assets,” said Michael Sherraden, founding director of the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, which is running the Oklahoma experiment. “Kids of color accumulate assets as fast as white kids.”Without dedicated funds — the kind of programs that enabled white families to build assets — it won’t be possible for African-Americans to bridge the wealth gap, said Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”She paraphrased a 1968 presidential campaign slogan of Hubert Humphrey’s: “You can’t have Black capitalism without capital.” More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    The Obstacles to Reporting on Black Representation in Fashion

    by

    Times journalists asked leading companies about the racial makeup of their work forces. The responses, or the lack of them, were revealing. Here, the reporters discuss what they found.Leaders in the fashion world have pledged to address racism in their business. But to determine whether anything is improving, reporters for The New York Times felt they needed a concrete set of data about the current state of Black representation in the industry.Reporters asked prominent brands, stores and publications to provide information about the number of Black employees and executives in their ranks — including those who design, make and sell products; walk runways; appear in ad campaigns and on magazine covers; and sit on corporate boards. But of the 64 companies contacted, only four responded fully to a short set of questions.In a recent article, a team of reporters published the responses from the companies, along with personal comments from Black stylists, editors and publicists. Below is an edited conversation with those journalists: Vanessa Friedman, Salamishah Tillet, Elizabeth Paton, Jessica Testa and Evan Nicole Brown.What was the biggest challenge in telling this story?VANESSA FRIEDMAN The absolute lack of consistency. You’re dealing with global organizations that speak to a variety of markets, tapping into a whole bunch of different kinds of cultural areas. They’re headquartered in different countries with different demographics, different histories, different issues with racism and different laws. We had one set of very simple questions, less than 10, that felt like the most basic, obvious things everyone could answer. But only four companies out of 64 answered completely.When did you realize the inability to answer the questions was the story?FRIEDMAN You write what you find, and we felt that it was important to get across that if you have that level of chaos in the basic information, until you can make that into a clearer picture, you can’t actually know when progress is happening.Why weren’t the companies able to answer these questions?ELIZABETH PATON Every company had its own reservations and issues and reasons. I think, to a degree, it had to do with culture. For example, how the Italian brands perceived what we were trying to do was different than the Americans. I mean, legal reasons were part of it, but the American companies notably provided more information than the European companies did. I actually think that America is in a slightly different place in its conversation about race at the moment.JESSICA TESTA It was almost surprising how reluctant some of the magazines were about participating because their numbers were the ones that were actually going to reflect well on them. I do feel like we were getting resistance from all sides, but one thing we did hear was, “I’ll be interested in participating next time.”What has the response been like to the story?PATON The majority of brands do understand the work that we’re doing, even if they found the questions really uncomfortable. A couple of brands were disappointed that their efforts were not more recognized, even if they hadn’t given us full answers. I haven’t heard any brand telling us that we made a mistake in trying to undertake this project. They recognize they need this scrutiny to change.You also interviewed people about their experience working in the industry. What did you take away from that?EVAN NICOLE BROWN It was important to me to find the intersections, but also the differences, in what Black professionals in this space felt. Sometimes people in the past have been asked to comment on things, and there has been a fear that might work against them, or their concerns would be misunderstood, but I feel like this project did a really good job at making people feel comfortable to speak. I think that this platform was appreciated, and it felt like there was no fear in terms of just sharing those really honest experiences, which definitely helped the piece and helped confirm the data or lack thereof.What questions remain really interesting to you?SALAMISHAH TILLET For me, how do you continue to diversify the leadership at the top? And then what are the structures and what are the assumptions that happen in those spaces that prevent that leadership from becoming more and more diverse? Because we would like to continue to change all aspects of the industry and all levers of the industry, but if the top remains monolithic, then really they’re the ones who are determining how the other aspects of the industry are also changing alongside it.BROWN I was really interested in the tension of where classism comes up in this conversation as it relates to representation. Even if representation in the fashion industry improves on the race front, there’s still work to be done on the socioeconomic front. Through this reporting, that was illuminated more for me — which communities are being reached and what the ideal consumer is for so many of these places we’re discussing.What do you want readers to take away?FRIEDMAN I think we learned a lot about where the sticking points are and the need for a clear picture of what is going on. You cannot move forward until you know where you are. And it is just time for us all to know where we are with this industry. More

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Economy

    Women in Economics Face Hostility When Presenting Research

    by

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWomen in Economics Face Hostility When Presenting ResearchStudies have found that the field is plagued by a singular problem of gender bias. The latest evidence comes from the types of questions posed at seminars.The American Economic Association conference in San Diego early last year. New research details how men and women are treated differently when they make economic presentations.Credit…Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesFeb. 23, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETA few years ago, the economists Alicia Sasser Modestino and Justin Wolfers sat at the back of a professional conference and watched Rebecca Diamond, a rising star in their field, present her latest research on inequality. Or at least she was meant to present it — moments after she began her talk, the audience began peppering her with questions.“She must have gotten 15 questions in the first five minutes, including, ‘Are you going to show us the data?’” Dr. Modestino recalled. It was an odd, even demeaning question — the session was in the data-heavy field of applied microeconomics. Of course she was going to show her data.Later that morning, Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers watched as another prominent economist, Arindrajit Dube, presented a paper on the minimum wage. But while that was one of the most hotly debated topics in the field, the audience allowed Dr. Dube to lay out his findings for several minutes with few interruptions.Over a drink later, Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers wondered: Had the audiences treated the two presenters differently because of their genders?They couldn’t be sure. Maybe the audience treated Dr. Dube differently because he was more senior. Maybe they had simply found his paper more convincing, or less interesting. Maybe the observations of Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers were a result of their own biases — Dr. Dube, in an email, recalled getting lots of questions, some of them quite skeptical. (He added that he didn’t know how his reception compared with Dr. Diamond’s, and he said didn’t challenge Dr. Modestino’s recollection over all.)So Dr. Modestino and Dr. Wolfers, who has written on economics in The New York Times, did what economists often do: They gathered data. Along with two other economists, they recruited dozens of graduate students across the country to attend hundreds of economics presentations to record what happened. Their findings, according to a working paper that is expected to be published next week by the National Bureau of Economic Research: Women received 12 percent more questions than men, and they were more likely to get questions that were patronizing or hostile.“It measures something that we thought couldn’t be measured,” Dr. Modestino said. “It links it to a potential reason that women are underrepresented in the profession.”The paper is the latest addition to a mounting body of evidence of gender discrimination in economics. Other researchers in recent years have found that women are less likely than men to be hired and promoted, and face greater barriers to getting their work published in economic journals. Those problems aren’t unique to economics, but there is evidence that the field has a particular problem: Gender and racial gaps in economics are wider, and have narrowed less over time, than in many other fields.In response to those concerns, the American Economic Association commissioned a survey of more than 9,000 current and former members that asked about their experiences in the field. The results, released in 2019, revealed a disturbing number of cases of harassment and outright sexual assault. And it found that subtler forms of bias were rampant: Only one woman in five reported being “satisfied with the overall climate” in the field. Nearly one in three said they believed they had been discriminated against. And nearly half of women said they had avoided speaking at a conference or seminar because they feared harassment or disrespectful treatment.“Half of women are saying they don’t even want to present in a seminar,” Dr. Modestino said. “We’re losing a lot of ideas that way.”The harsh reception faced by women is particularly striking because they are also less likely to be invited to present their research in the first place. Women accounted for fewer than a quarter of the economic talks given over recent years, according to another paper. Racial minorities were even more underrepresented: Barely 1 percent of the speakers were Black or Hispanic.“It’s just embarrassingly bad,” said Jennifer Doleac, an economist at Texas A&M University who is one of the study’s authors. Only about 30 talks have been delivered by Black or Latina women since the authors began tracking the data, she noted. “These scholars are just not being invited, ever.”The lack of representation is so significant that Dr. Modestino and her colleagues could not study whether Black and Latino economists were treated differently in seminars than their white counterparts — there were too few examples in their data to analyze.The lack of opportunities has potentially significant career consequences. Research presentations, known as seminars, are an important way that academics, particularly those early in their careers, disseminate their research, build their reputations and get feedback on their work.Seminars play a particular role in economics. In other fields, they tend to be collegial affairs, with mostly respectful questions and few interruptions. In economics, however, they often resemble gladiatorial battles, with audience members vying to poke holes in the presenter’s argument. Seemingly every economist, regardless of gender, has at least one horror story of losing control of a presentation. Many say they have been brought to tears.Most economists acknowledge that there are bad actors who are more interested in scoring debating points than raising legitimate questions. But many defend the field’s culture of aggressiveness, saying it is helpful to get feedback — even critical feedback — from colleagues.“I expect a room full of economists to speak up and have their own opinions and ideas,” said Ioana Marinescu, a University of Pennsylvania economist. “To me, if they’re not asking questions, they might be a little bit zoned out.”Dr. Marinescu recalled a talk she gave at a prestigious conference several years ago, where she, too, faced frequent interruptions. It was terrifying, she said — but also stimulating.“The questions were incessant, but they were awesome questions from the top people in the profession,” she said. “From my perspective, it was one of the best experiences I ever had.”Still, Dr. Marinescu said, reforms are needed. And in recent years, some economists have begun to question the field’s culture of aggressiveness, arguing that it discourages people from entering the field. Several universities have instituted rules meant to cut down on bad behavior, such as banning questions for the first 10 or 15 minutes of a talk so that speakers can get through at least the beginning of their presentations uninterrupted.But Judith Chevalier, a Yale economist who chairs the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, said rules intended to improve seminars wouldn’t address the underlying problems that Dr. Modestino’s research revealed.“Seminars are a public setting — seminars are when they are on their good behavior,” Dr. Chevalier said. “We can’t declare victory even if we fix seminars. We need to re-examine everything. Are we biased when we hire? Are we biased when we mentor? Are we biased in seminars? Are we biased when we promote?”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Walter E. Williams, 84, Dies; Conservative Economist on Black Issues

    by

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWalter E. Williams, 84, Dies; Conservative Economist on Black IssuesSkeptical of antipoverty programs, he was a scholar who reached a wide public through a newspaper column and books, and as a fill-in for Rush Limbaugh.Walter E. Williams speaking in 1982 at a conference at the United Nations Plaza Hotel in New York. A scholar and author, he reached a wide audience through lectures, a newspaper column and broadcast appearances.Credit…Craig Terry, via Manhattan InstituteBy More