Diversity and the Workforce

Another important demographic shift in workforce diversity is the distribution of race. (Note that we are using categories defined by the U.S. Census Bureau. It uses the term "Black (African American)" to categorize U.S. residents. In this chapter, we use the term "Black").

While the White non-Hispanic share of the workforce continues to shrink, the share of racial and ethnic minority groups will continue to grow. Specifically, Hispanics and Asians will grow at a faster rate than other racial minorities, and Hispanics are projected to make up almost one-fifth of the labor force by 2024. The projected changes in labor force composition between 2014 and 2024 are as follows:

White non-Hispanic participation in the labor force will decline by 3%. Other groups' share of the labor force is expected to increase: Black (10.1%), Hispanic/Latino (28%), Asian (23.2%), and Other groups (i.e., multiracial, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islanders) labor force share is expected to increase by 22.2%. With the workforce changing, managers will need to be mindful of issues employees encounter that are uniquely tied to their experiences based on race and ethnicity, including harassment, discrimination, stereotyping, and differential treatment by coworkers and decision makers in organizations.

Discrimination Against Black Employees

Race is one of the most frequent grounds for discrimination. Although Blacks do not make up the largest share of the workforce for racial minorities, research studies show they face discrimination more often than other racial minorities. As a matter of fact, some experts believe that hiring discrimination against Blacks has not declined over the past 25 years while workplace discrimination against other racial minority groups has declined.

Ethics in Practice

Discrimination in the Sharing Economy - #AirbnbWhileBlack

Airbnb, a popular home-sharing website founded in San Francisco in 2008, offers millions of homes for short-term rental in more than 190 countries. This company has revolutionized the sharing economy in the same way that ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have, and according to the company, the site's drive to connect hosts and potential renters has been able to contribute to the quality of life of both homeowners and travelers. According to Airbnb's press releases and information campaigns, their services can reduce housing costs for travelers on a budget and can provide unique experiences for adventurous travelers who wish to have the flexibility to experience a city like a local. The organization also claims that most of its users are homeowners looking to supplement their incomes by renting out rooms in their homes or by occasionally renting out their whole homes. According to a statement, most of the listings on the site are rented out fewer than 50 nights per year.

Despite the carefully crafted messages Airbnb has presented to the public, in 2016 the company came under intense scrutiny when independent analyses by researchers and journalists revealed something startling: While some Airbnb hosts did in fact use the services only occasionally, a significant number of hosts were using the services as though they were hotels. These hosts purchased a large number of properties and continuously rented them, a practice that affected the availability of affordable housing in cities and, because these hosts were not officially registered as hoteliers, made it possible for Airbnb hosts to avoid paying the taxes and abiding by the laws that hotels are subject to.

Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandates that hotels and other public accommodations must not discriminate based on race, national origin, sex, or religion, and Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (also known as the Fair Housing Act [FHA]) prohibits discrimination specifically in housing. However, Airbnb's unique structure allows it to circumvent those laws. The company also claims that while it encourages hosts to comply with local and federal laws, it is absolved from responsibility if any of its hosts break these laws. In 2017, researcher Ben Edelman conducted a field experiment and found that Airbnb users looking to rent homes were 16% less likely to have their requests to book accepted if they had traditionally African American sounding names like Tamika, Darnell, and Rasheed.

These findings, coupled with a viral social media campaign, #AirbnbWhileBlack, in which users claimed they were denied housing requests based on their race, prompted the state of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) to file a complaint against the company. In an effort to resolve the complaint, Airbnb reported banning any hosts who were found to have engaged in discriminatory practices, and they hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and former ACLU official Laura Murphy to investigate any claims of discrimination within the company. In 2016, Airbnb released a statement outlining changes to company practices and policies to combat discrimination, and while they initially resisted demands by the DFEH to conduct an audit of their practices, the company eventually agreed to an audit of roughly 6,000 of the hosts in California who have the highest volume of properties listed on the site.

Discussion Questions

1. What are some efforts companies in the sharing economy can take before problems of discrimination threaten to disrupt operations?
2. Should Airbnb be held responsible for discriminatory actions of its hosts?
   

Currently, White men have higher participation rates in the workforce than do Black men, and Black women have slightly higher participation rates than White women. Despite growth and gains in both Black education and Black employment, a Black person is considerably more likely to be unemployed than a White person, even when the White person has a lower level of education or a criminal record.

Blacks frequently experience discrimination in the workplace in spite of extensive legislation in place to prohibit such discrimination. Research has shown that stereotypes and prejudices about Blacks can cause them to be denied the opportunity for employment when compared to equally qualified Whites. It is estimated that about 25% of businesses have no minority workers and another 25% have less than 10% minority workers. In terms of employed Blacks, research has shown that, regardless of managers' race, managers tended to give significantly higher performance ratings to employees who were racially similar to them. Because Whites are much more likely to be managers than Blacks, this similarity effect tends to advantage White employees over Black employees. Blacks are also significantly more likely to be hired in positions that require low skills, offer little to no room for growth, and pay less. These negative employment experiences affect both the mental and physical health of Black employees.

Hispanic/Latino

Hispanics are the second-fastest-growing minority group in the United States behind Asians, and they make up 17% of the labor force. Despite this and the fact that Hispanics have the highest labor participation rate of all the minority groups, they still face discrimination and harassment in similar ways to other minority groups. (Note that we are again using the categories as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, which predominantly uses the term "Hispanic" to refer to people of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin).

Hispanics can be of any race. As a matter of fact, increasingly more Hispanics are identifying racially as White. In 2004 almost half of Hispanics identified themselves racially as White, while just under half identified themselves as "some other race". More than 10 years later, approximately 66% of Hispanics now identify themselves racially as White while only 26% identify themselves as "some other race". The remaining Hispanic population, totaling approximately 7%, identify as either Black, American Indian, Asian, Alaskan Native, Pacific Islander, or Native Hawaiian.

Why would a minority identity group identify racially as White? A Pew study found that the longer Hispanic families lived in the United States, the more likely they were to claim White as their race even if they had not done so in the past. This suggests that upward mobility in America may be perceived by some Hispanics to be equated with "Whiteness". Consequently, Hispanics who self-identify racially as White experience higher rates of education and salary, and lower rates of unemployment. Additionally, only 29% of Hispanics polled by the Pew Hispanic Center believe they share a common culture. According to the Pew Research Center, this finding may be due to the fact that the Hispanic ethnic group in the United States is made up of at least 14 Hispanic origin groups (such as Puerto Rican, Cuban, Spanish, Mexican, Dominican, and Guatemalan, among many others). Each of these groups has its own culture with different customs, values, and norms.

These cultural differences among the various Hispanic groups, combined with different self-perceptions of race, may also affect attitudes toward their workplace environment. For example, one study found that the absenteeism rate among Blacks was related to the level of diversity policies and activities visible in the organization, while the absenteeism rate among Hispanics was similar to that of Whites and not related to those diversity cues. Results from this study suggest that managers need to be aware of how diversity impacts their workplace, namely addressing the relationship between Hispanic job seekers or workers and organizational outcomes concerning diversity policies as it may differ from that of other racial minorities.

Asian and Asian American

Asians are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, growing 72% between 2000 and 2015. Compared to the rest of the U.S. population overall, households headed by Asian Americans earn more money and are more likely to have household members who hold a bachelor's degree. However, there is a wide range of income levels among the Asian population that differs between the more than 19 groups of Asian origin in the United States.

Similar to other racial and ethnic minority groups, Asians are stereotyped and face discrimination at work. Society through media often stereotypes Asian men as having limited English-speaking skills and as being highly educated, affluent, analytical, and good at math and science. Asian women are often portrayed as weak and docile. For Asian women, and other minority women as well, social stereotypes depicting them as exotic contribute to reports of sexual harassment from women minority groups.

The model minority myth is a reflection of perceptions targeting Asians and Asian Americans that contrast the stereotypes of "conformity" and "success" of Asian men with stereotypes of "rebelliousness" and "laziness" of other minority men. It also contrasts the stereotyped "exotic" and "obedient" nature of Asian women against the stereotypical beliefs that White women are "independent" and "pure". These perceptions are used not only to invalidate injustice that occurs among other racial minorities, but also to create barriers for Asian and Asian Americans seeking leadership opportunities as they are steered toward "behind the scenes" positions that require less engagement with others. These stereotypes also relegate Asian women into submissive roles in organizations, making it challenging for Asian men and women to advance in rank at the same rate as White male employees.

Multiracial

Although the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that approximately 2% of the U.S. population describes themselves as belonging to more than one race, the Pew Research Center estimates that number should be higher, with around 7% of the U.S. population considered multiracial. This is due to the fact that some individuals may claim one race for themselves even though they have parents from different racial backgrounds. To complicate matters even more, when collecting data from multiracial group members, racial identity for individuals in this group may change over time because race is a social construct that is not necessarily based on a shared culture or country of origin in the same way as ethnicity. As a result, multiracial individuals (and Hispanics) have admitted to changing their racial identity over the course of their life and even based on the situation. Approximately 30% of multiracial individuals polled by the Pew Research Center say that they have varied between viewing themselves as belonging to one race or belonging to multiple races. Within the group polled, the order in which they first racially identified as belonging to one racial group versus belonging to more than one group varied.

Despite the fact that multiracial births have risen tenfold between 1970 and 2013, their participation in the labor force is only around 2%. Additionally, multiracial individuals with a White racial background are still considered a racial minority unless they identify themselves solely as White, and approximately 56% of them on average say they have been subjected to racial jokes and slurs. Discrimination also varies when multiracial groups are broken down further, with Black–American Indians having the highest percentage of individuals reporting discrimination and White–Asians having the lowest percentage.

At work, multiracial employees are sometimes mistaken for races other than their own. If their racial minority background is visible to others, they may experience negative differential treatment. Sometimes they are not identified as having a racial or ethnic minority background and are privy to disparaging comments from unsuspecting coworkers about their own race, which can be demoralizing and can lead to lower organizational attachment and emotional strain related to concealing their identity.

Other Groups

Approximately 1% of the labor force identifies as American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or some other race.