Affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy. However, the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on ...whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy. Indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates. This paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job. We evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high-performing women fail to enter competitions they can win. We show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry. The response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women. The consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Jobs and justice Patrias, Carmela
Jobs and justice,
c2012, 20120130, 2011, 2012, 2011-01-01, 2012-01-30, 20120101
eBook
Juxtaposing a discussion of state policy with ideas of race and citizenship in Canadian civil society, Carmela K. Patrias shows how minority activists were able to bring national attention to racist ...employment discrimination during the Second World War and obtain official condemnation of such discrimination.
In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively ...white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all sizes, including small landlords sharing the property and larger landlords with multiple properties. It is most pronounced among hosts who have never had an African American guest, suggesting only a subset of hosts discriminate. While rental markets have achieved significant reductions in discrimination in recent decades, our results suggest that Airbnb's current design choices facilitate discrimination and raise the possibility of erasing some of these civil rights gains.
To be fat hasn't always occasioned the level of hysteria that this condition receives today and indeed was once considered an admirable trait. Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture ...explores this arc, from veneration to shame, examining the historic roots of our contemporary anxiety about fatness. Tracing the cultural denigration of fatness to the mid 19th century, Amy Farrell argues that the stigma associated with a fat body preceded any health concerns about a large body size. Firmly in place by the time the diet industry began to flourish in the 1920s, the development of fat stigma was related not only to cultural anxieties that emerged during the modern period related to consumer excess, but, even more profoundly, to prevailing ideas about race, civilization and evolution. For 19th and early 20th century thinkers, fatness was a key marker of inferiority, of an uncivilized, barbaric, and primitive body. This idea--that fatness is a sign of a primitive person--endures today, fueling both our $60 billion war on fat and our cultural distress over the obesity epidemic. Farrell draws on a wide array of sources, including political cartoons, popular literature, postcards, advertisements, and physicians' manuals, to explore the link between our historic denigration of fatness and our contemporary concern over obesity. Her work sheds particular light on feminisms' fraught relationship to fatness. From the white suffragists of the early 20th century to contemporary public figures like Oprah Winfrey, Monica Lewinsky, and even the Obama family, Farrell explores the ways that those who seek to shed stigmatized identities--whether of gender, race, ethnicity or class--often take part in weight reduction schemes and fat mockery in order to validate themselves as civilized. In sharp contrast to these narratives of fat shame are the ideas of contemporary fat activists, whose articulation of a new vision of the body Farrell explores in depth. This book is significant for anyone concerned about the contemporary war on fat and the ways that notions of the civilized body continue to legitimate discrimination and cultural oppression.
Objective
To examine experiences of racial discrimination among black adults in the United States, which broadly contribute to their poor health outcomes.
Data Source and Study Design
Data come from ...a nationally representative, probability‐based telephone survey including 802 non‐Hispanic black and a comparison group of 902 non‐Hispanic white US adults, conducted January–April 2017.
Methods
We calculated the percent of blacks reporting discrimination in several domains, including health care. We used logistic regression to compare the black‐white difference in odds of discrimination, and among blacks only to examine variation by socioeconomic status, gender, and neighborhood racial composition.
Principal Findings
About one‐third of blacks (32 percent) reported experiencing discrimination in clinical encounters, while 22 percent avoided seeking health care for themselves or family members due to anticipated discrimination. A majority of black adults reported experiencing discrimination in employment (57 percent in obtaining equal pay/promotions; 56 percent in applying for jobs), police interactions (60 percent reported being stopped/unfairly treated by police), and hearing microaggressions (52 percent) and racial slurs (51 percent). In adjusted models, blacks had significantly higher odds than whites of reporting discrimination in every domain. Among blacks, having a college degree was associated with higher odds of experiencing overall institutional discrimination.
Conclusions
The extent of reported discrimination across several areas of life suggests a broad pattern of discrimination against blacks in America, beyond isolated experiences. Black‐white disparities exist on nearly all dimensions of experiences with public and private institutions, including health care and the police. Evidence of systemic discrimination suggests a need for more active institutional interventions to address racism in policy and practice.
Unequal Treatment Smedley, Brian D; Stith, Adrienne Y; Care, Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health
11/2002
eBook
Odprti dostop
Racial and ethnic disparities in health care are known to reflect access to care and other issues that arise from differing socioeconomic conditions. There is, however, increasing evidence that even ...after such differences are accounted for, race and ethnicity remain significant predictors of the quality of health care received.
In Unequal Treatment , a panel of experts documents this evidence and explores how persons of color experience the health care environment. The book examines how disparities in treatment may arise in health care systems and looks at aspects of the clinical encounter that may contribute to such disparities. Patients' and providers' attitudes, expectations, and behavior are analyzed.
How to intervene? Unequal Treatment offers recommendations for improvements in medical care financing, allocation of care, availability of language translation, community-based care, and other arenas. The committee highlights the potential of cross-cultural education to improve provider-patient communication and offers a detailed look at how to integrate cross-cultural learning within the health professions. The book concludes with recommendations for data collection and research initiatives. Unequal Treatment will be vitally important to health care policymakers, administrators, providers, educators, and students as well as advocates for people of color.
This comprehensive, state-of-the-art reference work provides the first systematic review to date of how sociologists have studied the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality ...over the last thirty years in eighteen different national contexts.
Using her experience of living under apartheid and witnessing its downfall and the subsequent creation of new governments in South Africa, the author examines and compares gender inequality in ...societies undergoing political and economic transformation. By applying this process of legal transformation as a paradigm, the author applies this model to Afghanistan. These two societies serve as counterpoints through which the book engages, in a nuanced and novel way, with the many broader issues that flow from the attempts in newly democratic societies to give effect to the promise of gender equality. Developing the idea of ’conditional interdependence’, the book suggests a new approach based on the communitarian values which underpin newly democratic societies and would allow women’s rights to gain momentum and reap greater benefits. Broad in its thematic approach, the book generates challenging and complex questions about the achievement of gender equality. It will be of interest to academics interested in gender and human rights, international and comparative law.
We demonstrate that widely used measures of antigay sentiment and the size of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) population are misestimated, likely substantially. In a series of ...online experiments using a large and diverse but nonrepresentative sample, we compare estimates from the standard methodology of asking sensitive questions to measures from a “veiled” methodology that precludes inference about an individual but provides population estimates. The veiled method increased self-reports of antigay sentiment, particularly in the workplace: respondents were 67% more likely to disapprove of an openly gay manager when asked with a veil, and 71% more likely to say it should be legal to discriminate in hiring on the basis of sexual orientation. The veiled methodology also produces larger estimates of the fraction of the population that identifies as LGBT or has had a sexual experience with a member of the same sex. Self-reports of nonheterosexual identity rose by 65%, and same-sex sexual experiences by 59%. We conduct a “placebo test” and show that for nonsensitive placebo items, the veiled methodology produces effects that are small in magnitude and not significantly different from zero in seven out of eight items. Taken together, the results suggest antigay discrimination might be a more significant issue than formerly considered, as the nonheterosexual population and antigay workplace-related sentiment are both larger than previously measured.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2503
.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics
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This is a book about prejudice and democracy, and the prejudice of democracy. In comparing the historical struggles of two geographically disparate populations - Indian Dalits (once known as ...Untouchables) and African Americans - Gyanendra Pandey, the leading subaltern historian, examines the multiple dimensions of prejudice in two of the world's leading democracies. The juxtaposition of two very different locations and histories, and within each of them of varying public and private narratives of struggle, allows for an uncommon analysis of the limits of citizenship in modern societies and states. Pandey, with his characteristic delicacy, probes the histories of his protagonists to uncover a shadowy world where intolerance and discrimination are part of both public and private lives. This unusual and sobering book is revelatory in its exploration of the contradictory history of promise and denial that is common to the official narratives of nations such as India and the United States and the ideologies of many opposition movements.
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