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Reviewed by:
  • The Face of Discrimination: How Race and Gender Impact Work and Home Lives
  • Janice Fanning Madden
The Face of Discrimination: How Race and Gender Impact Work and Home Lives. By Vincent J. Roscigno. Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. 242 pages. $25.95 paper.

Professor Roscigno and his colleagues creatively analyze data from the Ohio Civil Rights Commission on allegations of gender, race and ethnicity discrimination in employment and housing, for which an OCRC investigation concluded with a finding of “probable cause,” from 1988 through 2003. The idea is good and the book is worth a read for many reasons, the least of which is to encourage more research with these data.

The book combines the stories of the alleged discrimination as told by the complainants with statistical analysis of the complainant database to show how discrimination complaints differ across a variety of characteristics, including race, gender, employment sector and the particular forms of the discriminatory acts. Interesting findings and insights abound. The data provide new and numerous insights into how housing and labor market discrimination is perceived by white women and blacks of both genders. Here are a few of them:

Employers often provide reasonable explanations for the outcomes (firing, not promoting, etc.) of African-American [End Page 2218] or women workers. Follow-up investigations by OROC found, however, that the “reasonable” explanations/policies do not appear to be applied equally by race or gender. Whites or men who are absent or who make the same mistake are not fired; whites or men who lack a particular credential that is credibly linked to a better job are given the job while similarly-credentialed African-American and female employees are passed over.

Alleged sexual harassers are not typically supervisors, but co-workers or owners. The patterns of response by management to the initial complaints show the mistakes that can be made in responding. (Obviously if managements’ responses were effective, the harassment complaint would not have been filed with OCRC and would not be in the data set.) The ineffective responses primarily include internal investigations that notify the alleged harasser and other co-workers of the complaints and make the complainants sources of scrutiny. The complainant’s frustration with the downward spiral that the investigation starts leads to a formal complaint with OCRC.

The bases for women’s complaints concerning both housing and employment discrimination differ by race. African-American women’s complaints of discrimination in the labor or the housing market identify race as affecting their outcomes, while white women’s complaints see discriminatory treatment as the result of their pregnancies or their child care responsibilities. While race is obviously expected to be a factor for African American, and not white, women, we would expect pregnancy and child care responsibility to be as much a factor for African-American as for white women. The authors do not find that in either the stories told by complainants or in the analysis of the OCRC data. I hope they return to this finding in the future to explore why this is the case.

Allegations of racial discrimination in employment are more likely (controlling for the employment distributions of minority workers) to arise in the high wage service and public sectors. Racial and gender employment discrimination complaints are most likely to allege discriminatory termination or firing. While [End Page 2219] complaints of discrimination in hiring, upward mobility (promotion) and harassment are fewer, they arise disproportionately from the public sector. For African Americans, Chapter 1 ascribes these differences as arising from a more educated African-American workforce in the public sector who is more aware of their rights and, therefore, more likely to complain. There is no evidence presented, however, for this explanation. For gender discrimination, both chapters 3 and 5 attribute the differences between the public and private sectors to be the greater transparency of decisions in the public sector, which makes discrimination more evident to the complainant. This explanation seems far more plausible and should apply, in any case, to both race and gender discrimination.

Because this is a first attempt to analyze data on discrimination complaints, many concerns inevitably remain. The authors recognize that selection affects the data they analyze: selection both...

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