the—fast-fading perhaps— exemption of Claiborne Hardware.
13
Although an agreement between an educators and an employer to follow a certain hiring policy is unlikely to be
an antitrust violation as a market allocation agreement unless this agreement guaran- teed employment for the school’s minority students, perhaps, employers who as a
result discriminate against certain candidates will violate antidiscrimination laws.
IV. Phasing Out of Minority-Favoring Biases
If careers were equalized, once proportional participation was achieved, hiring and admissions decisions should revert to neutrality. This section examines the effects that
can be expected when biases in favor of the minority are eliminated. Minorities that cannot attain equal career lengths would need a permanent bias in
their favor to maintain proportional participation in the workforce. A stronger bias may have been used in the short term to accelerate this minority’s participation. When some
target participation rate has been achieved, the aggressive biases must be reduced to the level that will maintain proportional representation in the long term. Although only the
elimination of biases is studied here, the analysis applies to any reduction in the favorable treatment of minorities.
The candidate pool of our model has a significant effect on the transition to gender- or race-blind hiring. Because the employers must hire from the pool of candidates,
blind hiring will tend to match the composition of the pool instead of the composition of the population. This implies that in the short term the minority’s participation in the
workforce will tend to evolve toward its participation in the pool. Only in the long term, when the educator’s blind admissions makes the pool match the population, will the
participation of the minority in the workforce be proportional. Therefore, the obser- vation that minority workforce participation has reached its target level is irrelevant in
the short term. An unrepresentative pool of candidates will lead to an unrepresentative workforce. This feedback effect, which turns out to be quite persistent, is illustrated in
Figure 1, which tracks the evolution of the minority’s participation in both the work- force and the candidate pool under different hypotheses.
Consider an example of a society with an equal number of two types of individuals, one of which say, the females has suffered discrimination in the past so that it did not
participate at all in either the workforce or education i.e., the proportional represen- tation w
F
0 5 c
F
0 5 0. Structural discrimination has been eliminated so that both types of individuals have equal careers of 15 periods i.e., the quit rate q
F
5 q
M
5 115. The workforce is slightly 10 larger than the size of the pool of candidates r 5 1.1.
Under these parameters, an employer that adopts as a policy the hiring of the minority at a 50 rate h
F
5 0.5 will see its participation in the workforce reach 45 at time t 5 34.5.
14
At that point, both the employer and the educator cease their favorable treat- ment of the minority, so that the employer hires blindly from the pool of candidates
i.e., the minority is hired at the rate that it has attained in the candidate pool, and the educator admits applicants with the population rate of 50 a
F
5 0.5. Consider two alternative scenarios. According to the first, the educator has favored
employers have been barred for discrimination, see Lisa Markoff, “Dean Suspends Baker Makenzie from 1989-1990 Campus Interviews,” National Law Journal, Feb. 13, 1988 at 4.
13
NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co, 458 U.S. 886 1982.
14
Quotas will be dropped when workforce participation reaches within x of its long-term target w
F
. The solution for t of w
F
t 5 w
F
2 x is t 5 ln[h 2 w
F
0h 1 x 2 w
F
]q. Using the values of the example and x 5 0.05 gives t 5 34.5.
29 N.L. G
EORGAKOPOULOS AND
C. R
EAD
the minority only slightly 1 more than the employer a
F
5 0.51.
15
The similarity of the employer’s and the educator’s quotas causes the pool to be almost depleted from
minority candidates. When the quotas are dropped, the underrepresentativeness of the pool of candidates causes the employment participation of the minority to decline to
a minimum of 31.5 at time 47.2. The workforce will return to within 5 of its target at time 84.3.
According to the second scenario, the educator has been much more zealous than the employer in the admissions policy for the minority, which it admits at an 80 rate
a
F
5 0.8. The excessive zeal of the educator causes the candidate pool to overrepre- sent the minority.
16
Because blind hiring means disproportionate minority hiring in this case, when quotas are dropped, the minority’s participation in employment jumps to
a maximum of 62.5 at time 50.7. The workforce will only return to within 5 of its target at time 79.6.
This setting also highlights the significance of the educators’ admissions policy regarding minority representation. When employers are forced to hire educators’
graduates, as they are in many licensed professional disciplines such as law and medi- cine, society may be able to overcome structural discrimination faster if educators
15
An admissions rate equal to the employer’s hiring rate would result in no minority candidates ever being left in the pool. Any lesser admissions rate and the employer would be unable to fulfill the hiring ratio.
16
If the quotas persisted, the pool would soon be depleted from majority candidates. The pool will have insufficient candidates when it has less than the employer demands. The employer seeks 1 2 h
F
q
M
W candidates of type M. Because the candidate pool is of size C 5 Wr, the candidate pool must have 1 2 h
F
q
M
WC 51 2 h
F
q
M
m candidates of type M to meet the employer’s demand. In the case of the example that is approximately 3.
F
IG
. 1. A graphical illustration of the evolution of a minority’s participation in the workforce and in the candidate pool according to the example in the text. Two alternative policies of the educator are drawn.
When the educator has not been aggressively admitting minority applicants, the pool is underrepre- sentative at the time quotas are dropped, and this results in a retreat of the minority’s workforce
participation due to the blind hiring of the minority in the proportion with which it is represented in the pool. The opposite outcome occurs if the educator has been overaggressive, in which case the
minority will be overrepresented in the workplace after quotas are dropped. Lack of coordination between the employer and the educator can cause problems in addition to backtracking or overshoot-
ing. An overrepresentative or underrepresentative candidate pool unavoidably causes different classes to face significantly different probabilities of being hired. The policy that accomplishes proportional
representation the fastest may follow an undesirable path.
30 Transitions in affirmative action
provide a representative pool of candidates. By contrast, in those disciplines in which the employer hires from the general population, structural biases are likely to persist.
Let us return to the example of gender discrimination and compare law school and business school admissions. Both types of professional schools have seen increases in the
representation of women in their graduating classes. If we compare the participation of women in the ranks of partners at large law-firms to the participation of women in the
equivalent positions in investment banks, we find that their participation rates differ significantly Table 1. If the quit rates of women are equal in those two types of
careers—something that is far from certain—the greater participation of women in the senior ranks of the legal profession may be due to “forced” hiring of the educators’
graduates and to the educators’ admissions policies. An even slightly discriminatory structure of hiring and promotions may strongly hinder women from reaching senior
managerial ranks directly from the population.
V. Conclusions
