Description:

Department of Statistics 2020-2021 Seminar Series (joint with Biostatistics) - Fall 2020

"Trends in Hiring Discrimination against Racial and Ethnic Minorities in Western Countries"

Speaker: Lincoln Quillian, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University

Abstract: In this presentation, I examine trends in hiring discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities over the last 20 to 30 years in countries in North America and Europe.  The analysis uses estimates of discrimination from about 120 field experiments of hiring discrimination.  In these experiments falsified applications from members of different racial and ethnic groups are made for actual job listings.  The racial disparity in positive responses is used as a measure of discrimination.  I find few changes over time in hiring discrimination in both pooled samples of countries and in results for several individual countries and target groups.  There are a few exceptions, most notably that discrimination in France may have declined (but remains high).  I analyze factors predicted by theory to affect trends in hiring discrimination.  Employment discrimination appears to be driven by relatively stable biases against non-white applicants that are only weakly linked to political attitudes expressed on surveys.  The presentation will also discuss the strengths and weaknesses of using a time series of field experiments to understand trends.