CANCELED | Using Civil Rights Data to Understand Race and Gender Discrimination

CANCELED | While audit studies and correspondence analyses shed significant light on discrimination in the pre-hiring stage of employment, other research has revealed that these experiences are just the tip of the iceberg. Scholars using civil rights case data, for example, help to advance this line of work by exposing the varied forms of discrimination (whether via promotion, harassment, termination etc.) that employees face while on the job. Dr. Byron's talk will focus on 950 civil rights cases adjudicated by seven state level fair employment practice agencies over 20 years (1999- 2018; over 17,700 pages of data) that he content coded with seven undergraduate students. His analyses reveal that despite societal progress and the predominance of more subtle forms of bias, a substantial proportion of plaintiffs still claim that they face explicit racism and sexism at work. Furthermore, being pushed out of work (i.e., terminated) appears to be more of a problem than access to it. Such descriptive trends are enriched by vivid qualitative excerpts that uncover the specific processes of contemporary employment discrimination. Dr. Byron will conclude by presenting a variety of ideas that he believes will move organizations closer to equal employment opportunity.

Dr. Byron is an Associate Professor of Sociology, co-director of a large “Inclusive Pedagogies” grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and a principal investigator on triennial Campus Climate Data collection and mixed-methods assessments. His work has been published in a variety of outlets including the Journal of Higher Education, Gender & Society, Research in Race and Ethnic Relations, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and the Journal of Homosexuality.