DEI and Racial Discrimination in Hiring

So much nonsense is coming from the White House these days that I may be sending posts more often that once per month.

According to a Presidential Executive Order issued on January 20, 2025, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) are “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” that have infiltrated the government, and that “Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect.” This Executive Order would have us think that DEI creates discrimination, and that getting rid of it eliminates discrimination.

So, we can ask: Does unfair discrimination in the workplace occur? Is there a problem that DEI has attempted to address? Discrimination in the workplace can range from hiring decisions, to promotion of workers, payment of workers, retention of workers, and so forth. Here, I will take one slice of this larger picture: racial discrimination in the screening of job applicants. What does the research say? Keep in mind that racial discrimination in hiring has been illegal in the U.S. since 1964.

In audit studies of discrimination in hiring, researchers submit matched job applications that are similar except for one trait, such as race (the trait can also be gender, source of income, disability, LGBTQ status, immigration status, etc.). Race of applicant is not written anywhere on the application, but it is suggested by the name of the applicant. The researchers then find out which applicants were called back for an interview.

Audit studies of racial discrimination in hiring are not new. Let’s look at the most recent ones.

In 2021, Patrick Kline, Evan Rose, and Christopher Walters of the National Bureau of Economic Research replicated a study of bias in hiring that was conducted 20 years earlier. They sent out about 80,000 fake resumes applying for about 10,000 positions in 97 companies in the U.S., with resumes being matched by everything except race. Companies’ responses varied widely, but all except a few favored White over Black applicants – companies called the White applicants in for an interview an average of 9.5% more often than the Black applicants. While 14 of the companies engaged in very little racial discrimination, some engaged in a great deal. AutoNation contacted the fake White applicants 43% more often than the Black applicants, and Genuine Parts Company (an auto parts company) contacted them 33% more often.

In 2019, Asia Eaton, Jessica Saunders, Ryan Jacobson and Keon West reported a smaller but similarly designed study to investigate hiring in biology and physics university departments. Two-hundred fifty-one biology and physics professors from eight universities read CV’s of hypothetical post-doc applicants. The CVs were constructed such that everything was comparable except the name of the applicant (differentiating among Asian, Black, Latinx, and White-sounding names). Physics faculty members rated the Asian and White candidates as more competent and hirable than the Black and Latinx candidates. Biology faculty members rated the Asian candidates as more competent and hirable than the Black candidates, and as more hirable than the Latinx candidates. Here impact of stereotyping Black folks as less competent is clearly visible.

A Pew survey reported in 2023 found most adults in the U.S. to recognize that bias in hiring is a problem, but how strongly people see the problem varies by their experience with it. About two-thirds of the Black adults described bias and unfair treatment based on a job applicant’s race or ethnicity as a major problem, compared with 49% of Asian, 41% of Latinx, and only 30% of White adults.

Racial bias in hiring is not confined to the United States. In 2023, Lincoln Quillian and John J. Lee published a study in which they analyzed 90 experimental studies of hiring discrimination, based on a total of more than 170,000 job applications, in six countries. They examined trends in discrimination against four racial-ethnic origin groups: African/Black, Asian, Latin American/Hispanic, and Middle Eastern or North African. They found that levels of racial discrimination in callbacks remained either unchanged or slightly increased over 3-4 decades in 5 of the 6 countries; racial discrimination decreased in France. In the United States, where thirty of the studies were conducted, there was a slight increase in racial discrimination.

I need to emphasize that the great majority of the racial discrimination that occurs favors White applicants, who are least likely to recognize the problem. To repeat what the 2021 Kline, Rose, and Walters study found, companies called the White applicants in for an interview an average of 9.5% more often than the Black applicants. Discrimination against White applicants sometimes happens, but not nearly to the degree of discrimination against Black applicants.

Now let’s consider what this means for DEI. The purpose of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is to eliminate racial discrimination in workplaces, which includes hiring. One might conclude that DEI doesn’t work if racial discrimination in callbacks has increased slightly over the past 30 years. But we can also find out what the companies that demonstrate negligible racial discrimination are doing.

This is exactly what Kline, Rose, and Walters did. Essentially, they found that racial bias tends to kick in when resumes are being screened by people who are close to the job itself, but not when the screening is done by people distant from the job. Companies that used a centralized human resources approach with well-defined applicant vetting and resume selection processes produced less bias. They also found that companies with a racially diverse hiring team produced less bias.

Here we have some useful guidance for DEI work. Whether companies had a chief diversity officer was not associated with fairness in screening resumes. But how the companies structured the hiring process mattered. One would hope that having a diversity officer would lead to practices that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it’s the practices that count.

The problem with simply eliminating anything called DEI is that one leaves in place the racial discrimination that is already occurring. Either champions of eliminating DEI assume that racial discrimination favoring White people is negligible and that the real problem is discrimination against White people, or that racial discrimination will go away on its own. The research does not uphold either assumption. If anything, the research suggests that White people are least likely to recognize the problem but most likely to benefit from it, and that DEI should be strengthened in ways that align with research findings, such as those in the Kline, Rose, and Walters study.