Affirmative Action at Work: Corporate Compliance Activites and Workforce Composition

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In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, but did not outline specific means of compliance. Employers experimented with dozens of different compliance measures. Many were largely symbolic, such as anti-discrimination policies, while others offered procedural guarantees of equal treatment, such as in dealing with sexual harassment and formal promotion. Still others were more substantive in that they involved positive steps to increase diversity, such as special management training for women and minority mentoring programs. Which of these measures have worked? How did the law matter, and through what kinds of changes in employment practices did it have influence? This project builds on institutional theories of organizational action to address these questions. It distinguishes between symbolic, procedural, and substantive anti-discrimination activities, and specifies hypotheses about the relative effectiveness of each strategy.The project tests the hypotheses using employment data from the annual reports that 412 large employers submitted to the government from 1978 through 1993. These publicly available reports detail employment by race, ethnicity, and gender in nine occupational categories. It also surveys these companies to chart the history of their personnel practices, and merges the survey data with the annual reports. It then analyzes how particular employment practices of the companies (obtained from the survey data) affect the gender, racial, and ethnic composition of their workforce (obtained from the annual reports). The project represents the first sustained effort to sort out the effects of employment practices on workforce composition, and to measure the effectiveness of activities designed to satisfy anti-discrimination laws in making the workforce more diverse.