Not at My Expense: Group Interests, Inequality Beliefs and Americans' Views on Workplace EEO Interventions

• In Event: 389 - Regular Session. Workplace Diversity

Abstract

Based on a survey experiment administered to representative national samples of whites, African Americans, and Latinos, we assess support for and opposition to specific policies that are commonly implemented to address diversity and nondiscrimination in the workplace. Subjects were randomly assigned to report their opinions about policies designed to address either racial inequality or gender inequality in the workplace, and they were randomly assigned to exposure to justifications for interventions that framed interventions as efforts to minimize unlawful discrimination, efforts to enhance workplace diversity, or no justification at all. Contrary to our expectations, we find that diversity versus legal compliance justifications have no effect on Americans' opinions on EEO interventions. However, opinions diverge substantially depending on whether they are described as addressing racial or gender inequality. Whites, on average, are much more opposed to EEO interventions when they are about race than when they are about gender, especially for interventions that are perceived as "zero sum," benefitting one racial group at the expense of another, such as recruitment outreach, diversity goals, and mandatory training. In contrast, on average there was substantial agreement among whites, African Americans, and Latinos on the appropriateness of structural interventions such as formalization of human resource practices and accountability structures designed to identify and eliminate barriers to equal employment opportunity. This was true regardless of whether these types of interventions were described as being targeted towards reducing racial inequality or gender inequality. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Authors

• William T. Bielby, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Maria Krysan, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Cedric Herring, University of Illinois-Chicago