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3 Chapter 1 Documenting Desegregation Title vii of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to reduce U.S. status-based employment discrimination. Its passage has been praised as one of the central moments in the extension of social, economic, and political rights to all adult citizens in the United States. Ironically, it also stands, historically, as one of the U.S. government’s most controversial actions, because it was arguably the most extensive attempt to regulate the behavior of private-sector organizations. Nearly fifty years later, remarkably little is known about how that law and associated political, legal, and administrative shifts affected racial and gender inequality in U.S. workplaces . Although the law targeted the behavior of employers, its efficacy has been gauged almost entirely through the study of either individual wages and promotions or aggregate national trends in occupational segregation and access to desirable occupations. Although some contemporary scholarship has explored the effects of workplace context and variation in equal opportunity practices on racial and gender inequality, most of our knowledge of equal employment opportunity (EEO) change simply does not address the organizational responses to the fundamental legal, political , and social changes surrounding civil rights law and its regulation. The central goal of this book is to describe the trajectories of U.S. private-sector employment opportunities for white men, black men, white women, and black women. In this chapter, we assemble our analytic tools, both theoretical and methodological, for accomplishing this task. First we explain why the simple enactment of equal employment opportunity law will not automatically produce EEO progress. There are compelling historical and scientific reasons that suggest that EEO progress requires much more than simple legal change. Analytically, we contrast the causal forces that encouraged stability in racial and gender stratification with those that encouraged equal opportunity. Because our field of observation is large and heterogeneous—large private-sector U.S. firms since 1966—we confront the analytic problem of combining historical analysis with large- 4    Documenting Desegregation sample statistical demography. We proceed by first identifying the historical moments in which racialized and gendered assumptions and practices were challenged and then observing the linked change in the trajectories of organizational behavior. We use theory, previous research results, and some elegant statistical techniques to strategically narrow and expand our field of observation. There is a tension in our work between a holistic model of social change and a theory-guided approach that highlights the most probable or important causes. Our work is holistic in that we incorporate insights about the continued importance of the past in the present, the need to see social change as partial and localized, and the insidious insertion of inequality practices, both new and old, into the psychology and social relations of everyday life. From this perspective, we approach our subject like students of history, assuming that the past is always present and the present is always at least potentially dynamic with the ability to move away from any particular past. We also describe as completely as possible the key moments and distributions in the march away from institutionalized employment segregation. On the other hand, we incorporate contemporary scientific understandings of cognitive psychology, organizational behavior , workplace relations, and political processes as the simplifying frames through which change and stability in racial and gender employment inequality are observed. It is this combination of history, demography, and causal analysis that is both empirically and theoretically powerful for simplifying such a large amount of data and so long a period of observation. The Limits of Law Scholars have linked the development and passage of U.S. equal employment opportunity laws to the political mobilization of disadvantaged groups, changes in public opinion, and political party alignment. Another influential literature, largely historical in nature, seeks to isolate the pivotal historical actors who shaped not only the meaning of EEO and the larger cultural discourse of equality and inclusion but also the response of organizations to these legal shifts in the implementation of recruitment, evaluation, promotion, and termination policies. Surprisingly little research examines how well these public and private policy initiatives brought about the intended social change. We use these literatures and our own analyses of data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) since 1966 to examine a series of questions related to EEO progress in the post–Civil Rights Act era. How much change has taken place since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and for whom? In which industrial, occupational, and spatial...

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