David and GDOers,
Several weeks ago, David alerted us to an excellent article by Kalev, Dobbin
and Kelly which matched EEO-1 data with the authors own survey data of
several hundred U.S. organizations to examine longitudinally effects of AAPs
and other diversity programs. David made a reasonable assumption that EEO-1
data are now available for public use. I am writing to correct that
assumption. EEO-1 data are not available for public use. It is my
understanding that Kalev got a hold of the data by becoming unpaid federal
employees and by promising not to disclose individuating information about
employers. It is federal crime to disclose such information, therefore,
unfortunately such data remain out of the reach of most of us.
I thank Linda Hamilton Krieger for bringing this to my attention. She is
the author of a forthcoming chapter entitled "The Watched Variable Improves:
On Eliminating Sex Discrimination in Employment," where she calls for
greater disclosure of EEO progress on the part of all employers, much like
publicly traded organizations need to disclose their financial status to the
SEC. I've copied Linda on this note, and you may want to contact her for a
copy of her chapter. I've also copied Alex Kalev who may want to correct me
on anything I've written here, and I've copied Faye Crosby who is the lead
editor for the book in which Linda's chapter appears.
Thank you and hope everyone is enjoying or about to enjoy a holiday break.
Peggy Stockdale, Ph.D.
Professor, Psychology
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Carbondale, IL 62901-6502
pstock@siu.edu
618-453-8331 (O)
618-453-3563 (F)
-----Original Message-----
From: Gender & Diversity in Organizations Division Listserv
[mailto:
GDO-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of David Kravitz
Sent: Saturday, October 28, 2006 6:43 PM
To:
GDO-L@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Excellent article on impact of diversity practices
Greetings colleagues,
The GDO listserve is a potentially valuable resource that we are not
exploiting as much as we might. For example, we might use it to alert
others to particularly good work of which they might not otherwise
remain unaware. With that in mind, I draw your attention to the following.
Kalev, A., Dobbin, F., & Kelly, E. (2006). Best practices or best
guesses? Assessing the efficacy of corporate affirmative action and
diversity policies. /American Sociological Review, 71/(4), 589-617.
The authors point out that the proliferation of "best practices" in
diversity management has not been based on hard data about the
effectiveness of diversity practices. They begin to fill that hole. I
will skip the details, but the data set they analyze includes
information on 708 establishments from 1971 through 2002. From EEO-1
reports, they obtain information about the proportion of manages who are
white and black males and females. These are their criteria. The
predictors include seven diversity practices (more below), some
organizational characteristics that are closely linked to diversity
(e.g., targeted recruitment), and various other controls (e.g., number
of top executives who are women or minorities).
For each year, they report (graph) the frequencies of managers in each
of the four demographic groups and the use of all seven diversity
practices. Some snazzy regression analyses indicate the effect of each
practice on representation of each of the demographic groups. Their
analytic approach eliminates some problems with drawing causal
conclusions. For example, effects of the practices cannot be due to
pre-existing pro-diversity tendencies within the organization.
For increasing representation of white and black women and of black men,
the most consistent effects were seen for having been subject to a Title
VII lawsuit, the use of targeted recruitment, and the existence of a
diversity staff and a diversity committee. Presence of an AAP increased
representation of white women and black men (and black women, but only
in service industries; it had a negative effect in manufacturing).
Existence of networking programs increased representation of white women
but decreased representation of black men. Mentoring programs increased
representation of black women. Diversity training had a negative effect
on representation of black women and diversity evaluations had a
negative effect on representation of black men (but a positive effect on
white women). In addition to these main effects, the authors explored
various interactions among the predictors and many were significant. For
example, diversity training increased the representation of white and
black women among establishments that were federal contractors, but it
decreased their representation among those that were not. In addition,
the existence of "responsibility structures" (i.e., having an AAP, a
diversity staff, and a diversity committee) increased the impact of some
other practices. In addition, work-family accommodations had positive
effects on the representation of women. The existence of formal
personnel policies had negative effects on the representation of black
men and women. The proportion of minorities in top management had a
positive effect on the representation of black women and black men. The
proportion of women in top management had positive effects on the
representation of women and negative effects on the representation of
men. Finally, many of these practices had significant negative effects
on the representation of white men.
It is important to remember that these results refer only to
representation of the groups in management positions and that, due to
limitations of EEO-1 categories; they could not distinguish among levels
of management.
Finally, note that this implies that it is now possible to obtain EEO-1
data from the EEOC.
The above is just a brief summary of the article and I do not accept any
responsibility for inaccuracies. I recommend it to you. I assume you can
get a pdf or paper version from your library.
Cheers,
David
--
David A. Kravitz
Associate Professor
School of Management
Enterprise Hall, MSN 5F5
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
Telephone: 703-993-1781
Fax: 703-993-1870
E-mail:
dkravitz@gmu.edu
Web: http://www.som2.gmu.edu/dkravitz/index.htm