Why Must Black Employees Be Twice As Competent?
African American employees tend to get more scrutiny from their supervisors than their white counterparts, meaning that slight errors are more likely to be discovered, resulting in poorer performance reports and lower pay over time.
Black parents have instructed their children for decades that to thrive despite racial discrimination, they must be "twice as good": twice as intelligent, twice as trustworthy, and twice as talented. This counsel can be found everywhere, from literature and television to everyday discourse. But, now, a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that this adage may be more than a cliche when it comes to obtaining and retaining employment.
Data illustrates the terrible reality that black employees are subjected to greater scrutiny from their supervisors, resulting in poorer performance evaluations, lower compensation, and even termination. The NBER paper, produced by Costas Cavounidis and Kevin Lang of Boston University, aims to explain how prejudice enters into firm decisions and forms a feedback loop, resulting in racial disparities in the labor force.
The researchers developed an economic model based on the labor market results of unemployed employees. They then model how organizations assess whether or not new workers are a good fit based on current data regarding job tenure, unemployment duration, and lifetime wages.
They note that the pool of jobless black workers is likely to be perceived as less skilled due to their more consistent or continuous unemployment. This can make organizations less willing to hire them and, once they do, more skeptical of their abilities. Employers invest more in monitoring black staff as a result. This could involve asking managers to closely observe new hires to more direct monitoring of job performance, such as counting the number of boxes accurately packed by a worker at a distribution center. In addition, significant or minor errors are more likely to be identified if black employees are checked more closely.
According to the study, a black worker is more likely than a white worker to be terminated for similar errors. Therefore, according to Lang, another way to interpret the findings is that blacks do not receive a second opportunity.
Once terminated, black employees rejoin the ranks of the unemployed, where it will be difficult for them to find work again, causing their next employer to be apprehensive as well. In the interim, white workers are less inspected, and as a result, they enjoy a more extended stay on the job, which results in more crucial work history, more extraordinary skills, and higher compensation.
Black workers must fulfill a higher standard to maintain employment. The study discovered that black workers only have a substantial probability of retaining their jobs if they are closely watched and have much greater skill levels than their white counterparts. Nevertheless, there was evidence that discrimination remained, which might contribute to lower earnings or slower promotions, even when black workers' productivity vastly outpaced that of their white colleagues.
All these may help explain why black and white Americans continue to have disparate labor market outcomes. Historically, the unemployment rate of African-Americans has been approximately two percentage points greater than that of white Americans. Currently, the disparity is more significant.
Unsurprisingly, all of these job changes indicate that black workers may expect to earn less during their lifetimes than their white counterparts, increasing the income and wealth discrepancies between the races. Moreover, the economists argue, "with a surveillance regime to anticipate any future employment, a black worker revealed to be a good fit could be paid less than a white worker who has not been exposed."
The existing system, in which black workers are disproportionately scrutinized and terminated while white workers are permitted longer tenures, is detrimental to the labor market, not just black people. Moreover, such a system is inefficient because a massive pool of unemployed individuals drives down overall production and labor health and because such discrimination does not ensure that the most productive individual obtains and maintains employment.
About the author
Leslie Weinberg is a core member of Woods Kovalova Group's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices. She has extensive knowledge and experience at the nexus of people, operations, and technology. Her work has concentrated on the development and implementation of strategic operational models in asset management, banking, and social services.