The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (80 page)

The chapter is organized around several factual questions regarding affirmative action in the workplace. We start with the facts because they are pivotal to the arguments about affirmative action yet are often overlooked or misconstrued. First, what are America’s affirmative action policies? Second, do they make sense, given the relevant data? Third, what difference have they made? After reviewing the data on these issues, we turn to some broader questions that the facts raise but cannot altogether resolve. How should we think about the economic costs of affirmative action in the workplace? Assuming that just about everyone wants employment to be fair, what should “fairness” mean in the labor market?

Throughout, we concentrate on the situation regarding blacks. Affirmative action has expanded to embrace many other groups, but this policy came about because of an urgently felt national desire to redress the plight of blacks, and the focal point of tension, intellectual and social, has been affirmative action for blacks ever since. Many of the points we make about that story apply with modifications to other groups as well. Our policy recommendations also apply generally.

People apply for jobs. The employer hires some and not others. Later the employer promotes some and not others. An employer who appears to have based hiring or promotion decisions on the person’s being white (or one of the other outlawed reasons) is in violation of the law. A pure heart and good faith are not enough. If a rejected applicant or an unpromoted employee brings a complaint, an employer must be able to prove that the hiring and promotion processes meet legal definitions of fairness.

For some positions, employers may post job requirements and demonstrate that the hired or promoted employees had the best qualifications. But many jobs do not lend themselves to such case-by-case selection. In these cases, how does the employer demonstrate that the chosen employees have been selected without illegal discrimination? The obvious answer (or so it seemed in the beginning) is to use an objective job test and hire applicants with the highest scores. Testing has therefore been
at the center of the history of employment discrimination law, as it has played out from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Here are some features of the prevailing situation facing employers, with variations and an interlude described in the appendix, since the Supreme Court’s landmark
Griggs
v.
Duke Power Co.
decision in 1971:

If an employer uses a test in the employment process and the results ofthat test lead to different results for different protected groups (mainly blacks, Latinos, and women) that employer faces the prospect of lawsuits, fines, and damages that could cost the company millions—perhaps tens of millions—of dollars. Employers can protect themselves in three ways.

First, they may decline to use tests. Nevertheless, they will still be vulnerable if their alternative hiring process has disparate impact (the legal phrase) on the hiring of different groups.

Second, they can try to construct a test that has an urgent economic justification and a manifest, direct relationship with the skills required by the job. A general ability test is always unacceptable. Usually off-the-shelf tests of any kind will also be found unacceptable until they are validated for the particular job in question

Third, an employer may meet the 80 percent rule. Created as part of federal guidelines issued in 1978, the 80 percent rule says in effect that people in the protected groups have to be hired or promoted at 80 percent or more of the rate enjoyed by the group with the highest rate of success in being hired or promoted. Here is how it works in practice: Suppose that the Acme Corporation uses a test for all its job applicants. Let us say that 225 white males apply and 90 are hired. This hiring rate of 40 percent is the benchmark against which the hiring of other groups is measured. All other groups must be hired at a rate no lower than 80 percent of the 40 percent hiring rate of white males, which comes to 32 percent. If 150 white women apply and 50 are hired—33 percent—Acme meets the hiring rate for women. Suppose that 100 Latinos apply and 25 are hired. Now Acme is vulnerable to discrimination suits by the rejected Latino applicants because its hiring rate for Latinos is 25 percent, not 32 percent. It should hire at least seven more Latinos, bringing the Latino percentage up to the needed 32.
¹

Note that we have said nothing about how the test was used or even what the comparative scores were. With the 80 percent rule, those considerations
are irrelevant. It makes no difference if the rejected male applicants had scores that were twice those of the successful women applicants: All that matters is the bottom line: the 80 percent criterion. Less than 80 percent, and Acme is in trouble; more than 80 percent, and the government will probably leave Acme alone. Just “probably,” however. The 80 percent rule is a guideline, not a law, and there is no guarantee that meeting it will head off litigation.
²

Federal affirmative action policy toward employment testing is laden with assumptions not about fairness but about what is true as a factual matter. Specifically, Congress and the Supreme Court developed federal job discrimination policy on the assumptions that (1) tests of general cognitive ability are not a good way of picking employees, (2) the best tests are ones that measure specific job skills, (3) tests are biased against blacks and other minorities, and (4) all groups have equal distributions of cognitive ability.

To varying degrees, these assumptions were defensible when they were first voiced in the 1960s. Ethnic differences in test scores were known to exist, but many experts at that time still thought they reflected test bias, or that the differences would melt away as educational opportunity for minorities improved. The predictive validity of tests for job performance was poorly understood. But however understandable these views were in the 1960s, public policy over the next twenty years suffered from an increasingly severe case of psychometric lag. To summarize the by-now solidly established empirical situation described in Chapters 3 and 13:

• Cognitive ability has an economically important relationship to job productivity that applies across the range of jobs and the range of abilities.
  
• Cognitive ability tests are often the single most predictive method of picking employees—more predictive than grades, education, or a job interview.
  
• The predictive power of tests derives almost completely from their measure of general cognitive ability, not measures of job-specific skills.
  
• Cognitive ability tests either are not biased against blacks as predictors of job performance, or in some cases are biased in favor of blacks.
  
• Different ethnic groups have substantially different distributions of cognitive ability that are not explainable by cultural bias and not easily altered by remedial steps.
  

What
is
true regarding jobs, IQ, and group differences in cognitive ability is the opposite of what the courts, the Congress, and many others have supposed the truth to be. The dilemma is that job hiring and promotion procedures that are truly fair and unbiased in the sense in which everyone used those terms in 1964 will produce the ethnic and group disparities that public policy so vigorously tries to prevent. The most valid hiring tests may have the largest disparate impact. As a first step in coming to terms with affirmative action—however one balances the many other factors that make affirmative action desirable or undesirable—the government should scrap the invalid scientific assumptions that undergird policy and express policy in terms that are empirically defensible.

This step need not mean scrapping affirmative action. It means only discarding rhetoric about testing and affirmative action (“tests aren’t valid for minorities,” “tests of general ability don’t predict anything worth knowing about job performance”) that are not true and instead defending affirmative action on whatever grounds can be authentically defended. Some progress has been made on this front. The Hartigan Committee’s report on the General Aptitude Test Battery
³
was a step in the right direction, for example, acknowledging many of the key facts about tests while continuing to defend affirmative action (though the basis for their defense is in itself open to technical debate). A few other proponents of strong affirmative action are becoming more forthright about what they are really promoting—not just equal opportunity but equal employment outcomes despite unequal job performance.
⁴
But these are exceptions to a general public discussion of affirmative action that relies on inaccurate and to some degree dishonest representations of the state of knowledge about tests, employment, and competition among protected and unprotected groups.

The scholarly debate over the effects of antidiscrimination legislation in the workplace has been lively, and this is a good time to summarize where that debate stands. The answers are complicated, but scholars have done much better than the public commentators on this score.

According to official statistics, wages for blacks have risen since the 1960s and more blacks have entered prestigious occupations. Most people take for granted that these changes have happened to some important degree because of antidiscrimination laws. But what may seem obvious at first glance is not obvious upon further inspection. “Two decades of research have failed to produce professional consensus on the contribution of federal government civil rights activity to the economic progress of black Americans,” wrote economists James Heckman and Brook Payner in 1989,
⁵
and the situation has clarified only marginally since then. The nature of the problem facing the analysts is illustrated by the figure below for two categories of white-collar jobs that affirmative action was supposed to open up for blacks.
⁶
The vertical lines demarcate three landmarks in antidiscrimination law: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed job discrimination, the
Griggs
decision that put increased pressure on employers to hire the right number of minorities even if they were using consistent hiring practices, and adoption of the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures that established the 80 percent guideline (all described further in Appendix 7).

The uncertain effects of affirmative action in the workplace

Sources:
Bureau of Labor Statistics 1983, 1989; U.S. Department of Labor 1991. Figures prior to 1973, reported for “blacks and others,” are adjusted pro-rata to the black-only population.

To see why the analysts have a complicated task, consider clerical jobs (the gray line in the figure). The story here seems obvious: From 1959 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act, improvement was slow. Immediately after the act came a sudden increase in the percentage of employed blacks who held clerical jobs; thereafter the percentage continued rising but at a slower rate. Furthermore, the gap between black and white percentages for these jobs (not shown in this graph) also closed—again, faster for a while after 1964 than before. We might conclude that the Civil Rights Act itself was effective but that the two subsequent landmarks in affirmative action policy were not, at least for these jobs.

Now follow the black line in the above figure, representing professional and technical jobs. Its slope before 1964 was certainly no lower than its slope after; if anything, the slope decreased after the act. Blacks were making progress before the act; afterward they weren’t progressing any faster in their movement into these high-status, high-paying occupations. Trendlines for other job categories, not shown in the graph, that were supposed to open up for blacks—managerial and administrative, sales, and craft workers—similarly fail to register much of a gain from the new policies. The clerical job category is the unusual case; it is the
only
job category that shows a visible change in slope after 1964. If evidence of success is to be found for affirmative action, it must be disentangled from a web of other factors that seem to have been influencing the employment of blacks.
⁷

This is not to say that antidiscrimination law had no effect, only that the effects on hiring and promotion are not simply demonstrated. Our understanding of the impact of affirmative action policies, drawn from a number of technical assessments that have not taken cognitive ability into account, may be summarized as follows:
⁸

• Affirmative action policies had the expected effect in public bureaucracies. Police and firefighters are the most conspicuous examples, but affirmative action also has demonstrably increased the proportion of minorities throughout government bureaucracies, from the federal level on down.
  ⁹
  At the federal level, the strongest effects are at the clerical level and below. In cities with large minority populations, the effects are spread across a broader range of government positions, with de facto quotas up to the highest levels.
  
• Among private companies, affirmative action has had some effects, particularly in the South and among companies that do business with the federal government. Some unknown fraction of the increase in black employment by companies with government contracts is balanced off by compensating declines in companies without them.
  
• In private industry in the South (where much of the most demonstrable progress in private industry has been made), a complicated mix of forces seems to have been at work: partly the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its aftermath, partly the repeal of Jim Crow laws restricting job entry into certain industries, partly a broader breakdown of racial segregation, legal and otherwise.
  ¹⁰
  
• Whatever effects affirmative action may have had during the 1960s and 1970s, they had become too small to measure by the 1980s and will probably continue to be small in the future, largely for economic reasons.
  
• The behavior of employers has certainly been affected by job discrimination law. Every large company must maintain a bureaucracy to monitor compliance with federal regulations and to defend against (or, commonly, settle out of court) lawsuits alleging discrimination. The amounts of time, money, and resources devoted to compliance are substantial.