Talking the Walk

Here's more evidence, as if we needed it, that many employers are lying liars and that race still matters in hiring. Even when the job is a menial one and the applicants are ex-cons, the white guy is likely to get a better shake.

To test the extent of discrimination, Princeton University sociologist Devah Pager and her colleague Lincoln Quillian of Northwestern University conducted a hiring "audit" and followup telephone survey at 199 randomly selected businesses in the greater Milwaukee area. They first sent out pairs of black and white testers to apply for entry-level and unskilled jobs advertised in the local newspaper. Half of the faux job seekers told employers that they had criminal records and half said they did not.

Pager and Quillian then surveyed these same employers about their willingness to hire ex-offenders. They also read descriptions of a potential applicant to employers, and then asked how likely the employers were to hire the person they described. They were careful to match the characteristics of the hypothetical job seeker with the characteristics of the applicants in the earlier audit, even down to the specific crimes the applicants said they had committed.

Then they compared what bosses said in the survey with what they actually did when the testers applied.

Busted!

"Employers who indicated a greater likelihood of hiring ex-offenders in the survey were no more likely to hire an ex-offender in practice," they wrote in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review. "Furthermore, although the survey results indicated no difference in the likelihood of hiring black versus white ex-offenders, audit results show large differences by race."

(In fact, these employers were three times more likely to hire the white ex-con as the black one with similar background and qualifications. Whites without records were about twice as likely to be hired over similarly qualified blacks with spotless pasts.)

Quillian and Pager claim their data suggest that attitudinal surveys of employers, a favorite technique of the government and other researchers for measuring bias in the workplace, "may be insufficient for drawing conclusions about the actual level of hiring discrimination against stigmatized groups."

The Beer Belt

A new study done in Europe suggests that fat people earn less than thin folks -- except in those countries where beer is the national beverage of choice.

A number of recent studies in the United States and elsewhere show that workers who are obese are paid less for the same job than their thinner colleagues, all other factors being equal. So Béatrice d'Hombres and Giorgio Brunello of the University of Padua in Italy were surprised when they analyzed data from nine European countries and found an unexpected pattern.