The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 20-Affirmative Action in the Workplace

Since affirmative action began in the 1960s, and especially since a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 1971, employers have been tightly constrained in the way they can use tests to select employees. Basically, the court ruled that tests that measured cognitive ability could not be used to select employees. Rather, if a perspective employees were to be given a test it could only measure a specific job skill and not the persons intellectual capacity. Furthermore, it was up to the employer to prove that any test given complied to these rules.

Affirmative action in the work place began at the same time that it did in the universities but with several important differences. First, in the workplace the government and the courts, not the university administrators, have been the main activists. A second important difference is that almost everyone has a personal stake and can see what is going on, unlike the college campus where a relative few are involved. In college an applicant that is not accepted because he was displaced by an affirmative action admission never exactly knows why he was rejected. In the workplace everyone knows what is going on. If a rejected applicant or an unprompted employee brings a complaint, an employer must be able to prove that the hiring and promotion practices meet the legal definitions of fairness. How do the employers comply with the requirements for fairness in the workplace? First, they can decline to use tests. Second they can attempt to design a test that only measures the skills necessary to perform the job, making sure that the test does not test for general ability or IQ. Most often, the employer will attempt to meet the 80 percent rule which says in effect that people in protected groups have to be hired or promoted at 80 percent or more of the rate realized by the group with the highest rate of success in being hired or promoted. For practical matters this means that if 225 white males apply for a job and 90 are hired, this 40 percent hiring rate is the benchmark against which the hiring of other groups is measured. Thus, if 100 blacks apply, 32 must be hired ( 100 X 40% = 40. 40 X 80% = 32). As time went on, proponents of affirmative action became more forthright about what they were really promoting- not just equal opportunity but equal employment outcomes despite unequal job performance. The question is, has affirmative action worked? As one would expect, affirmative action policies have had the biggest positive effect in public bureaucracies, the most obvious example being the increases in the number of black police and firefighters. At the federal level, the strongest effects are at the clerical level and below. In cities with large minority populations, the effects are spread across a broader range of government positions, with defacto quotas up to the highest levels. Among private companies, affirmative action has had some significant effects, particularly in the south and among companies doing business with the federal government. The behavior of employers has certainly been effected by the various job discrimination laws. Every large company must maintain a bureaucracy to monitor compliance with federal regulations and to defend against (or more commonly settle out of court) lawsuits alleging discrimination. The amounts of time, money and resources devoted to compliance are substantial and increases the cost of almost everything we purchase. The authors now address a question that has not been asked in the literature. How would the observed occupational and wage differences between blacks and whites change if cognitive ability were taken into account? As of 1990, in all job categories, from highest to lowest is skill, employers hire blacks with IQs one standard deviation lower than whites. The black-white differences in IQ are more pronounced in the professions (1.3 standard deviations) than it is for low-skill labors (1.1 standard deviations) showing that affirmative action has been more successful in colleges and professional schools than it has been in the work place. There is only one plausible explanation for statistical anomalies in the workplace. Employers are using dual hiring standards in because someone or something (the government or aversion to harmful publicity) is making them do so. In practical terms, this data shows that a black is 1.5 times as likely to be hired for a professional or technical job than a white. For clerical jobs, a black is 1.9 times (almost twice as likely) more likely to get employed than a white of equal IQ. Thus, one could argue, that affirmative action, if anything, has worked to well. As recently as 1959, the employment of blacks in all job categories was only half the proportion that would have been if based on IQ alone. The under-representation of blacks in the workplace was even more severe in the 1940s and 1950s. But the under-representation of blacks was largely gone by 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. This statistic argues that something besides anti-discrimination legislation was already afoot in America resulting in the job market being less stacked against blacks even before the first piece of anti-discrimination legislation was passed by congress. In the decades after the 1960s, blacks became over-represented, with respect to IQ, and this shift in the job market was a direct result of anti-discrimination legislation. The cost of affirmative action, of course, was job performance. In so much as cognitive ability is related to job performance and as minority workers are entering professions with lower ability than whites, is there evidence of lower average performance for minority workers than for whites? Well, yes there is. Teacher competency testing was common in the 1980s. The competency tests were seldom job performance tests as such; rather, they were designed to test basic knowledge of reading, writing and mathematics. Nonetheless, if we assume that more knowledgeable people make better teachers, we can conclude that people with a better grasp of reading, writing and arithmetic are better at their teaching jobs than people who are less qualified. In California between 1983 and 1991 the pass rates for white and black teachers was 80 percent and 35 percent respectively, the implied difference in IQ was 1.2 standard deviations. Similar disparities in the abilities of black and white teachers was found in every state which performed such testing. It is important to note that these tests were not used to select people for further teacher training; rather, they were tests of people who either were already in or headed to the classroom. The justification for hiring less qualified blacks over better qualified whites in the teaching profession is called the compensating skills fallacy, it goes something like this. There are many skills and qualities that go into making a good teacher other than test scores. This statement, of course, is correct. The fallacy in its application to the teaching profession is that prospective teachers are not evaluated in any way to determine if they might have the ability to inspire students or create an eagerness for them to learn. Rather, it seems that if they have low test scores it is simply assumed that they have compensating skill that will make them more effective teachers than those with higher cognitive ability. When, in reality, there is no reason to believe that prospective teachers with low test scores have untested qualities that are any higher than average. Sense affirmative action has been practiced most aggressively in public employment- police, firemen, social agencies, departments of motor vehicles and the like- they are logical places to determine if job performance has been compromised by affirmative action. Journalist Tucker Carlson did such a study of the Washington, D.C. police department. In the 1970s Washington D.Cs white population was concentrated among white-collar and professional groups and there were no significant white collar working-class neighborhoods. As a result of residency requirements the pool of potential white applicants was severely limited. By 1982, 40 percent of the candidates who took the police academy admissions test failed it. A new test, designed to favor minorities was introduced in 1983. Standards for the police academy were lowered to the point that not one student flunked out of the training course in 1985. In 1988 the academy abolished its final examination because 40 percent of the graduating recruits could not pass it. The incompetence of the academies' graduates was soon felt in the workplace. By 1990 one third of the murder cases brought in the district were dismissed because the prosecutors were unable to make sense of the unintelligible arrest reports. It was common knowledge at the time that some people at the academy graduates could not read or write, others were completely illiterate and a significant number were borderline retarded. The same was true in Miami where almost 90 percent of the officers who were dismissed or suspended a few years after the initiation of aggressive affirmative action policies were officers with marginal qualifications, hired because of these policies. No one can reasonably argue that black affirmative action hires are less productive than the average white worker. The authors now address two questions related to affirmative action. What is the nation trying to accomplish with affirmative action and how much degradation in job performance is acceptable in pursuit of the goals of affirmative action? The argument for affirmative action goes like this. A properly constructed affirmative action policy may be temporarily less efficient but more efficient in the long run. If it achieves long-run efficiency by breaking the cycle of past discrimination, it is arguably fair. And even if the long run is far off, we should be willing to pay the price in lost productivity for a large enough gain in group equity. But, affirmative action does not just mean wanting good things to happen. It means specific and often substantial restraints on the employer's ability to make use of the most qualified and productive people available. Advocates of affirmative action policies argue that it makes no difference if a disadvantage group performs at a lower level since it is self-evidently societies fault that they under-perform and the government must take whatever steps are necessary to bring the disadvantaged group up to the level of other groups, ensuring equal employment and income while doing so. Sometimes this argument is couched specifically in terms of the black experience and sometimes as part of a broader egalitarian agenda. The authors reject equality of outcome as an appropriate goal and argue that equality of opportunity is the test most consistent with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Referring to the bill, Hubert Humphrey declared that it " does not limit the employer's freedom to hire, fire, or demote for any reason-- or for no reason-- so long as his action is not based on race," and volunteered to eat the bill if he were wrong about what the bill would do. The appropriate goal of affirmative action should be to achieve a job market in which people are not favored or held back because of their race. Nothing in the human experience says that all groups should be equally successful in all walks of life. This may be "unfair" in the sense that life is unfair, but it does not mean that human beings are treating one another unfairly. By the standard of proportional equality there are " too many" black players in the National Basketball Association. Interestingly, no one thinks this unjust or in any way unfair. Similarly, when professional tennis equalized the purses for male and female champions, it did not require men and women to play against each other because everyone realized that all top men would beat all of the top women every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Obviously, in the two examples given, making things proportional would produce unfairness along with equal representation. When a police department hires people who become less effective police officers than those it passed up because of affirmative action, the department loses some of its capability to provide law enforcement. Just as would be the case if the NBA restricted the numbers of black on their basketball teams. The question remains, how do we achieve fairness in the workplace without affirmative action? The authors discuss the pros and cons of four alternatives. In theory, employers could construct job-specific tests that meet the Supreme Courts definition of fairness. It would be expensive and the tests would seldom, if ever, be more predictive than a general test of cognitive ability. The problem is that the predictiveness of such tests comes from their measure g (general intelligence) and they would be thrown out because of their disparate impact. Remember also that, for the past 50 years, ethnic bias in a job test need not be proved, it need only to be alleged. A second alternative would be to use educational achievements to screen prospective candidates for a job. However, affirmative action at the university level prevents this solution because, as discussed above, the same degree does not have the same meaning for minorities who have been on the affirmative action track for their entire lives, as it does for whites and Orientals. Remember that the black-white differences for every educational level, from high school diploma to Ph.D, are huge, with the smallest being a difference of 1.2 standard deviations. The reality facing employers today is that, given the aggressive affirmative action that universities have employed over the past 60 years, educational credentials can no longer be used to compare the intellectual qualifications of black, Latino and white job applicants. By the 1980s race norming had become a common solution to the employers dilemma. Most used the popular Wonderlic Personnel Test, a highly g-loaded paper and pencil test that takes only twelve minutes. The Wonderlic company gave precise instructions for what it called "percentile selection" its term for race norming along with an "Ethnic Conversion Table." Here's how it worked. Suppose that five candidates (white, black, Latino, Asian and American Indian) all got a mean score of 22 prior to any adjustment for group distributions. The personnel office would then assign those five candidates, all of whom got the same scores, to the 45 percentile for the white candidate, 80th percentile for the black candidate, 75 percentile for the Latino candidate, 55th percentile for the Asian candidate and 60th percentile for the American Indian candidate, and these scores thereafter would be treated as the candidate's "real scores." An employer could then hire from the top down using these adjusted scores and expect to end up with ratios of employees that would avoid triggering the Uniform Hiring Guidelines. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 banded the practice even though race norming was efficient from a productive standpoint and the most "fair" insofar as the highest scorers in each group were hired. Obviously, all of the attempts to eliminate the unfairness in affirmative action hiring practices have failed to improve the situation. The authors conclude that, if tomorrow, all job discrimination regulations based on group proportions were rescinded, the United States would have a job market that is ethically fair, more conductive to racial harmony and economically more productive, than the one we have now. There are two reasons for thinking that the elimination of affirmative action hiring practices would be a good thing. First, there has never been widespread public support for affirmative action hiring policies. In fact, one could argue that such policies have made race relations worse, not better, in the United States than they were in 1964 when the Congress passed and Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill. The authors believe that illuminating unfair hiring practices would improve race relations in our country. Certainly, a return to policies based on evenhandedness for individuals rather than groups would attract broad public support outside of minority communities. The second reason to abandon affirmative action hiring practices is the potential for building "good faith." We should be casting a wider net and leaning over backwards to make sure that all minority applicants have a fair shot at the apple and a fair chance for promotion. To the extent that the government has a role to play, it is to assure equality of opportunity, not equal outcome. The main abjection to the elimination of our unseemly affirmative action policies is that to do so will take us back to "the bad old days." The authors believe we have come a long ways sense the 1960s and today's Americans are better than that. So do I! Comment: This chapter may be summarized in one short sentence. Since the 1960s whites, and especially white males, have been screwed royally by a political system that refuses to recognize the disparity in cognitive ability between blacks, whites and the other ethnic groups.