Private Sector Industry Disparities: A Report on Evidence of Systemic Disparities for Women, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans

Author: 

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
Karen Brummond
JooHee Han
Skylar Davidson

Year: 

2012

Description: 

Prepared for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission We grade U.S. private sector industries based on 2012 group employment disparities. The EEOC primarily responds to discrimination complaints from citizens. When evaluating these complaints investigators often refer to EEO-1 data on workplace employment distributions compared to the available labor force to develop an estimate of employment disparity. Using the same logic, we produce industry estimates of employment disparities. The report may be useful in a number of ways. It is possible for the EEOC to issue Commissioner’s charges when systemic bias is suspected. This report identifies industries that might be considered for Commissioner’s charges. The OFCCP currently selects firms for random audits of their employment practices. This report provides additional information useful for more targeted enforcement. Finally, the report could be useful if regulatory authorities wanted to identify industries with particularly good records to single out for public praise. We employ 2012 EEO-1 private sector reports of annual reporting establishment workforce composition to produce industry level employment disparity and segregation estimates. This is a preliminary report and we look for ways to tailor the report more closely to the needs of the regulatory, employee, and business communities. We focus on four types of workplace disparity: overall employment representation, managerial representation , occupational segregation, and wage gaps. We describe industry variation in these employment outcomes for women, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans. We use 2007-2011 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) to compute a set of expected employment baselines and to estimate industry level wage disparities. Wage gap results are computed from the 2007-2011 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). We limited the 2012 EEO-1 data to single establishment employer reports, multiple establishment firms’ individual establishment reports, and multiple establishment firms’ headquarters reports. We examined data only for establishments with at least 50 employees.