Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act

Chapter 2. Hyper-Segregation in the Pre–Civil Rights Period

50 Prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employment segregation was deeply institutionalized in U.S. workplaces. During this historical moment, people in the United States understood that white men would occupy the most desirable jobs and hold authority over other groups. It was also assumed that women of all races and nonwhites of all genders would tend to occupy marginally rewarded jobs with little or no authority over others. These ongoing, society-wide patterns of social relations were both legally codified and normatively sanctioned, ensuring the maintenance of rigid race and gender hierarchies. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the high levels and relative homogeneity of employment segregation in 1966—the first year the EEOC began collecting data on private-sector employment patterns. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated this data collection effort in order to monitor progress toward an equal employment opportunity society. The fact that the data were collected only two years after the passage of the act is remarkable testimony to the speed with which the EEOC was created and set into motion. This data collection effort was the first serious intrusion of the federal government into private-sector employers’ personnel policies, at least with respect to race and gender. Although wage and hour laws and laws relating to unionization had existed since the 1930s, neither required systematic reporting by employers of the demographic attributes of their employees. Most corporate personnel managers were oriented more toward unions than the federal government prior to the initiation of EEOC data collection (see Dulebohn, Ferris, and Stodd 1995; Kaufman 2008). Requiring private-sector employers to submit annual reports to the EEOC was arguably one of the federal government’s most controversial actions from the point of view of employers. Certainly, employer organizations had long resisted equal opportunity and fair employment practice Chapter 2 Hyper-Segregation in the Pre–Civil Rights Period Hyper-Segregation in the Pre–Civil Rights Period    51 laws and regulations (Chen 2009). It was not, however, the first time the U.S. government sought to influence the employment practices of privatesector firms. Indeed, each president since Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued an executive order to federal contractors to practice affirmative action in hiring black Americans. Regulatory enforcement, however, was limited at best. Frank Dobbin (2009) concludes that President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 executive order was different from previous presidential mandates, because the Kennedy administration was ostensibly more serious about racial equality than previous administrations and because the civil rights movement made the need for change in behavior more salient to employers. Thus, there are reasons to expect that by 1966 employer behavior toward African Americans may have already begun to change as a result of the civil rights movement as well as federal and local politics. There is no reason to expect similar shifts around gender segregation. In what follows, we document race and gender segregation in private-sector employment in 1966 and discuss the historical narrative shaping the patterns we observe. What Did Employment Segregation Look Like in 1966? Workplace-level estimates of race and gender employment distributions prior to the first 1966 EEO-1 surveys do not exist. Therefore, we will primarily gauge progress toward equal employment opportunity from the available 1966 baseline. There is reason to believe, given the current literature , that some EEO progress might already have been made in states that had already implemented pre-1964 fair employment practice (FEP) laws, as well as among federal contractors and perhaps among the largest U.S. employers. We begin with the simplest of statistics. What percentages of privatesector EEOC-reporting workplaces were racially or gender homogeneous? Table 2.1 provides two approaches to this question: How common was complete exclusion from private-sector workplaces? And how common were race-gender homogeneous workplaces? In other words, to what extent did employers maintain separate workplaces for different race-gender groups? The EEO-1 reports show that very few workplaces employed no white men (7.8 percent) or no white women (11.3 percent). However, complete exclusion was a much more common experience for black men and black women. In 1966 half of EEOC-reporting workplaces employed no black men, and almost two-thirds (63 percent) employed no black women. Table 52    Documenting Desegregation 2.1 also reveals that while more than one-third of workplaces were allwhite , they tended to be gender-integrated: only 7...