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xxi Introduction It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation , terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion , sex, or national origin (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964). In 1964 the U.S. Congress enacted, and President Lyndon Johnson signed, the Civil Rights Act. Although it was not the first or the last legislative moment of the civil rights movement, it was a pivotal one. The act outlawed segregation and discrimination by race, ethnicity, and religion in public education, public accommodations, voting, and federal assistance. Title VII of the act extended the equal opportunity principle to employment and for the first time explicitly mentioned “sex” as a protected category. It is this extension of rights to equal opportunity in employment, freedom from discrimination in employment, and the erosion of race and gender employment segregation as a legitimate and expected practice that is at the heart of this book. The passage of the Civil Rights Act is without question one of the most monumental achievements in the history of the United States, perhaps even the world. The act made clear for the first time at a national level that the use of racial and gender status distinctions in employment was illegitimate and illegal. The passage of a law, however, does not automatically produce societal change. How did employers respond to this legal challenge ? How much progress has the United States made as a nation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Which groups benefited, and who lagged behind? These are the questions we grapple with throughout the book. We xxii      Introduction answer them primarily with data on private-sector employment that were authorized by the Civil RightsAct to be collected by the then newly formed U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The data were to be used to monitor progress at both the workplace and societal levels. The EEOC has used these data as part of its enforcement activities, but no one has yet used them to systematically evaluate societal change. In this book, we utilize this remarkable historical record, analyzing the Employer Information Reports (EEO-1) that describe over 5 million workplaces from 1966 to 2005. We use our reading of the historical record and apply social science methods and theory to make sense of and organize our analyses of these remarkable workplace employment records. Prior to this book, there have been almost no direct examinations of societal workplace desegregation since the Civil Rights Act. There is no shortage, however, of erroneous beliefs about what happened after the Civil Rights Act. One of the most common is that discrimination was eliminated or severely weakened by firms as they responded to the threat of discrimination lawsuits. We find this view naive in the extreme. Much research demonstrates that symbolic rather than real compliance was widespread and that contemporary discrimination lawsuits have very weak effects on firm behavior. The extreme version of this belief is that equal opportunity policies somehow unfairly disadvantage white men, producing widespread reverse discrimination. In this somewhat amusing account, white men become the victims. Anecdotal evidence for this often comes in the form of stories about why a white man did not get a particular job but a racial minority or woman did. African American women have often been held up as particular beneficiaries of this reverse discrimination because they fulfill two “quotas” simultaneously. More objective evidence might be found in the decreased proportion of white men in the best jobs in the economy. In this book, we document that while white male advantages have been eroded, they remain the norm in nearly all workplaces. In stark contrast to the popular assumptions about black women’s two-“quota” advantage in the labor market, our findings show that black women have benefited the least from equal opportunity policies. One remarkably stable finding in this book is that as firms hire a lower proportion of white men, white men are pushed up in organizational hierarchies. In other words, when racial minorities and women compete with...

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