Someone to Watch Over Me:
Coupling, Decoupling, and Unintended Consequences in Corporate Equal Opportunity
Frank Dobbin
Daniel Schrage
Harvard University, Department of Sociology
Alexandra Kalev
University of Arizona, Department of Sociology

Abstract
In response to equal opportunity and affirmative action regulations of the 1960s, employers wrote personnel guidelines to discourage bias, created formal hiring and promotion procedures to encourage equal treatment, and set up special management recruitment and training programs to increase management diversity. Organizational institutionalists have suggested that such equal opportunity innovations were window dressing in most firms, decoupled from management practice and hence ineffective. We develop a theory of when innovations invite coupling, decoupling, and unintended consequences. Personnel guidelines are detached from routines and so are most likely to be decoupled and show no effects. Procedural innovations alter routines and so are less likely to be decoupled entirely, but they may lead to unanticipated consequences because they do not emphasize goals. Substantive innovations, such as special recruitment programs, designed to directly influence outcomes, are most likely to be effective. Theory suggests that regulatory oversight may increase the efficacy of these innovations by stimulating accountability. We examine the effects of program innovations and regulatory oversight on the representation of women and minorities in management positions at 816 American workplaces between 1971 and 2002.
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Since the early 1970s, equal opportunity experts have advised employers to write guidelines to ensure fairness in personnel decisions, establish non-discriminatory hiring and promotion procedures, and create programs to recruit and train women and minorities (Dobbin,
Sutton, Meyer, and Scott 1993). Have these innovations actually improved opportunity?
Institutionalists have long suggested that firms decoupled these innovations from daily practice so as to symbolize justice without altering management practice (Meyer and Rowan 1977).
Studies show mixed results. Some find that these innovations increase diversity (Baron, Hannan,
Hsu, and Koçak 2007; Elvira and Zatzick 2002; Reskin and McBrier 2000), while others find that certain innovations – particularly hiring and promotion procedures – can institutionalize existing sources of inequality (Castilla 2006; McKay and McDaniel 2006; Roth, Huffcutt, and
Bobko 2003).
We build on existing theory with some new ideas about decoupling. We expect that new guidelines are most likely to be decoupled from daily practice, and hence have no effect, because they do not require changes in routines. We expect that new procedures are less likely to be decoupled, because they alter routines, but that procedural changes may have unintended consequences because they do not emphasize goals. We expect that substantive programs are most likely to have the intended effects because they alter routines and at the same time focus attention on results rather than processes (Edelman and Petterson 1999; Konrad and Linnehan
1995; Selznick 1969).
We build on ideas from accountability theory in psychology (Tetlock 1983a; 1985a) to develop predictions about how external regulatory oversight mediates the effects of these innovations. Knowing that they may be called to account, subjects in laboratory studies take greater care to scrutinize their behavior. We expect that regulatory accountability will lead

managers to scrutinize program characteristics and implementation. In the case at hand, affirmative action regulations subjected firms with federal contracts to accountability via compliance audits without significantly increasing the risk of financial sanction. Noncontractors did not face these audits. We expect that equal opportunity programs will be more likely to improve opportunity in establishments subject to this extra regulatory accountability.
In quantitative analyses we examine how personnel guidelines, hiring and promotion procedures, and active recruitment and management training programs affect the shares of white,
African-American, Latino, and Asian-American men and women in management. Our analysis lays the foundation for a theory of decoupling and provides insight into the effectiveness of Civil
Rights enforcement. Our study is distinguished by exceptionally rich longitudinal data on 816 establishments, over three decades, which allow us to isolate program effects. Ours is one of the first studies to examine the effects of programs on Hispanic and Asian-American men and women, alongside whites and African-Americans.
RULE-BASED, PROCEDURAL, AND SUBSTANTIVE INNOVATIONS
Neo-insitutionalists have been skeptical of employer equal opportunity initiatives, describing them as ceremonial, ineffective, and decoupled from organizational life (Edelman and
Petterson 1999). Yet a number of studies suggest that fair employment laws have promoted diversity, without specifying whether corporate programs mediate the effects of the law (Kalev and Dobbin 2006; Leonard 1989; Leonard 1990; Skaggs 2008). Institutionalists have long argued that procedural innovations will do less to equalize opportunity than substantive programs oriented to specific goals (Nonet and Selznick 1978), yet scholars seeking to test the idea have been hampered by data constraints (Edelman and Petterson 1999; Konrad and Linnehan 1995).
We sketch predictions about the program characteristics that will foster decoupling and
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unintended consequences, distinguishing between guidelines, procedural changes aimed at creating universal hiring and promotion criteria, and programs oriented to substantive goals.
Decoupling and Unanticipated Consequences
Karl Weick (1976) observed decoupling and loose coupling between formal rules and actual practices in schools. New guidelines may outline the ideal way of doing things, but managers often stick with traditions they are used to. Meyer and Rowan’s (1977)
“Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony” described modern organizations more generally as engaged in a game of representation and social construction.
Executives embrace innovations that symbolize their commitment to fairness and efficiency, yet organizational members may sustain entrenched routines at odds with those innovations
(Selznick 1957). Innovations can also produce changes that lead to unintended consequences.
It is a common refrain that employers adopt equal opportunity programs to symbolize – to customers, employees, and judges – their commitment to equality of opportunity rather than to actually achieve it. As Lauren Edelman (1992:1543) argues, organizations decouple equal opportunity programs “from other personnel and governance activities (such as hiring and promotion) in order to reduce the extent to which law constrains management functions.” One consequence is, for example, that corporate equal-opportunity grievance procedures do not reduce complaints to the government because firms do not use them to resolve complaints.
Grievance procedures are decoupled.
Many institutionalists take decoupling to be endemic, but few have sought to specify the kinds of innovations that are most likely to be decoupled. Standing on the shoulders of Max
Weber (1978), Nonet and Selznick (1978) made a distinction between systems of autonomous law with formal impersonal rules and systems of responsive law focused on achieving societal
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goals. Substantive rules or programs in modern organizations emphasize goals, and in the case of equality of opportunity, take into account differences between demographic groups in the workforce (Nonet and Selznick 1978:77). Substantive innovations should be more effective than procedural innovations that are designed to create standardization and impose uniformity in decision making, but do not focus on outcomes. Others have made similar distinctions when describing equal opportunity programs. Nathan Glazer (1988) talks of race-blind and raceconscious policies. Alison Konrad and Frank Linnehan (1995) use the language of identityneutral and identity-conscious programs.
We make a further distinction, between guidelines and procedures. Procedures directly change the way things are done. Guidelines may not. For instance, firms encourage managers to advertise job openings to current workers in one of two ways. They create procedures, for instance, specifying that job openings must be posted on a website and candidates must apply through the human resources department. Or they issue hiring guidelines: “managers must notify eligible internal candidates of job openings.” The procedure is difficult to ignore, though managers may use it only ceremonially and continue to promote their favored sidekicks. The new guideline is easy to ignore. We expect that guidelines will be prone to decoupling.
Most analysts expect hiring and promotion procedures to quash discrimination by reducing managerial discretion (Bielby 2000; Reskin 2000). We expect hiring and promotion procedures to be more consequential than guidelines, because they alter practices and thus are not so easily decoupled. Yet because they are not oriented to specific substantive outcomes, we expect that they may not produce the intended consequences (Merton 1936). Feminist scholars have argued that bureaucratic rules may reinforce the status quo in organizations. In The
Feminist Case Against Bureaucracy, Kathy Ferguson (1984:7) argues that bureaucracy creates a
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“scientific organization of inequality.” Joan Acker (1990:154) argues that “rational-technical, ostensibly gender neutral, control systems [in organizations] are built upon and conceal a gendered substructure.” Hiring and promotion procedures can codify disadvantage in formal organizational structure rather than reduce inequality.
Evidence from previous studies is mixed, perhaps because most suffer from data limitations. Reskin and McBrier (2000) find that employers with formal personnel procedures have more women in management and Walker (1990) finds that they have more black men on the job. Baron, Hannan, Hsu, and Koçak (2007) find that firms founded with bureaucratic personnel systems have more women six years out. Elvira and Zatzick (2002) find that some minorities fare better when personnel decisions are bureaucratized. Other studies have not found that bureaucratic personnel systems are associated with diversity, notably studies by Edelman and Petterson (1999), Konrad and Linnehan (1995), and Castilla (2008). Still other studies have identified several mechanisms through which bureaucratic practices may thwart equality of opportunity. Generic job tests can disfavor minorities, performance evaluations scores typically favor white men (Bartol 1999), job ladders often exclude jobs in which women and minorities predominate (DiPrete 1989), and salary classification systems undervalue women’s work (see
Nelson and Bridges 1999). Substantive innovations, such as recruitment programs for women and minorities, are less likely to be decoupled than are guidelines because they involve the commitment of resources and personnel. They are less likely to lead to unintended consequences, because they focus attention not on uniformity of procedures, but on direct achievement of the goal. Findings about substantive programs are more consistent. Holzer and
Neumark (2000b) find that firms that make special efforts to recruit women and minorities are more likely to hire them. In a Canadian study, substantively oriented Employment Equity
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Programs were positively correlated with female employment (Leck, Saunders, and St. Onge
1992). Leonard (1985b:9) finds that substantive affirmative action goals have significant effects on diversity (see also Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly 2006). Edelman and Petterson (1999) and
Konrad and Linnehan (1995) find that active recruitment and special promotion programs are associated with increased diversity. These studies support Nonet and Selznick’s prediction that organizational innovations aimed at a substantive goal, rather than a procedural change, will be most effective.
We expect guidelines to be most likely to suffer from decoupling, procedures to be most likely to suffer from unintended consequences, and substantive innovations to be most likely to lead to the changes intended by their architects.
REGULATORY OVERSIGHT AND DECOUPLING
We posit that accountability, through regulatory oversight, can help to prevent decoupling. Sociologists have long recognized that behavior is shaped by concern about others’ perceptions. George Herbert Mead (1934) talks of the looking-glass self. Erving Goffman
(1959) talks of the presentation of self. Psychologists find that people behave differently when they expect their decisions to be scrutinized. Bias is attenuated in subjects who know in advance that they may be asked to explain themselves (Tetlock 1983a; Tetlock 1983b; Tetlock 1985a;
Tetlock 1985b). Subjects take more care to avoid using stereotypes in decision-making
(Kruglanski and Freund 1983). “Evaluation apprehension” has been shown to reduce age bias in hiring experiments (Gordon, Rozelle, and Baxter 1988). While accountability can simply lead people to spend more time amassing evidence for their initial (biased) views (see Lerner and
Tetlock 1999), we expect that affirmative action oversight it will cause managers to design and implement personnel innovations with more care.
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Two domains of federal law render employers accountable for employment discrimination. First, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and its amendments, outlaw discrimination in all American workplaces. Under the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC) collects annual workforce statistics from employers, receives and conciliates discrimination complaints from employees, and pursues lawsuits. Private parties can also initiate lawsuits. Accountability typically comes about when a charge is filed against an employer, and so is episodic rather than ongoing in most cases. Second, John F. Kennedy’s executive order 10925 of 1961 required federal contractors to take positive steps – affirmative action – to prevent discrimination. Federal contractors now face ongoing accountability to the
Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), which conducts audits of personnel systems and outcomes at its own discretion. Federal contractors face ongoing regulatory accountability even in the absence of discrimination charges, as well as episodic oversight due to discrimination charges filed under the Civil Rights Act. Federal contractor status does not increase the risk of direct economic sanction much, since the main sanction in these audits, debarment, is so rare (Anderson 1996; Blumrosen 1993).
Laboratory experiments suggest that it is prior knowledge of potential accountability, rather than experience of accountability, that leads subjects to scrutinize their own views and attenuate bias. Studies of federal contractor behavior during the 1970s reinforce this view, for all contractors (not just those subjected to audits) saw greater increases in black male employment
(Ashenfelter and Heckman 1976; Goldstein and Smith 1976; Heckman and Payner 1976;
Heckman and Wolpin 1976; Leonard 1984a; Leonard 1984b; Leonard 1989). Our expectation is that accountability will render equal opportunity guidelines, procedures, and substantive programs more effective among federal contractors.
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THREE FORMS OF INNOVATION
In this section we review evidence that the personnel innovations we study were stimulated by equal opportunity law (Dobbin et al. 1993), and arguments about which forms of innovation are most likely to produce decoupling and unintended consequences. Theory suggests that guidelines are most likely to be decoupled (they don’t change routines) and that procedural innovations are most likely to lead to unintended consequences (they change routines but emphasize process rather than outcome). There is evidence that certain hiring and promotion procedures can serve to reinforce existing differences between groups.
Personnel Guidelines
From the early 1970s personnel experts argued that guidelines could promote equal opportunity. In an early article on how to respond to fair employment law, Froehlich and
Hawver (1974:68) advocated new personnel guidelines and procedures which place “emphasis on the validity of the decision-making process – that is, on ensuring that the most qualified person is recruited, selected, placed, trained, transferred, and promoted. And this is exactly the focus of the Civil Rights Act, the governmental enforcement agencies, and the Supreme Court.”
The EEOC and the OFCCP backed personnel guidelines in their missives to employers and best practices lists (Anderson 1996; Dobbin et al. 1993). The courts supported guidelines as well. In a landmark 1972 decision, the Supreme Court directed the Savannah Sugar Company to establish promotion guidelines, noting “There are no written instructions or guidelines for supervisors” and as a result, “an individual supervisor could, if he were so inclined, exercise racial discrimination in his selection of candidates for promotion” (1972 350 F. Supp at 17-18). Equal opportunity experts were soon hawking written guidelines (Thorpe 1973:49). Hiring guidelines typically direct managers to advertise job openings, interview qualified applicants, and practice
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equal opportunity. Promotion guidelines typically direct managers to give fair consideration to all candidates, to look at internal as well as external applicants, and to comply with federal and state laws. Discharge guidelines usually direct managers to notify workers of poor performance verbally and then in writing, and to notify HR before discharging an employee.
We expect guidelines to be more likely to be decoupled than procedural innovations, and thus to have no effect, because they do not stipulate formal routines and as a result, managers can choose to neglect them and carry on with business as usual. We expect that regulatory accountability will prevent decoupling by making managers more careful to ensure that guidelines are having their intended effects.
Procedural Innovations
Early in the twentieth century, unions had favored personnel procedures to limit the discretion of managers to discriminate against union leaders (Baron, Dobbin, and Jennings 1986;
Kochan, Katz, and McKersie 1994:88-89; Stark 1986). By the 1950s many elements of “job control unionism” – job posting, job descriptions, salary classification, performance evaluations
– had spread to non-union firms hoping to rationalize placement decisions and link advancement to merit (Edwards 1979; Kochan, Katz, and McKersie 1986; Pfeffer and Cohen 1984; Selznick
1969). From the 1960s, personnel experts argued that these very procedures could prevent race and sex discrimination and, in the event of lawsuit, provide a paper trail documenting fair treatment. In 1984, Robert J. Samuelson wrote in The Washington Post, “Many firms have overhauled personnel policies. ... Promotions are less informal. When positions become open, they are posted so anyone (not just the boss's favorite) can apply. Formal evaluations have been strengthened so that, when a manager selects one candidate over another ... there are objective criteria” (Harvard Law Review (no author listed) 1989:668).
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While judges and consultants promoted changes in personnel procedures, both groups recognized that proceduralization was no panacea. Judges found procedures such as formal job tests to be discriminatory. Consultants described how certain procedures could backfire. A number of these innovations have been tied by previous research to declines in opportunity for women and minorities.
Opening hiring: Job posting.
—Unions had long advocated on-site job posting to prevent managers from punishing union activists by concealing promotion opportunities
(Burawoy 1985:133). In the early 1970s, judges accepted arguments that both Atlanta Chevrolet and Savannah Sugar had discriminated by concealing promotion opportunities from blacks, and required Savannah Sugar to post all openings (Rowe v. General Motors Corp., 457 F.2d 348 (5
Cir. 1972)). Experts now touted job posting as a must for employers concerned about lawsuits
(Garris and Black 1974:55,57; Slevin 1973:30). Fulmer and Fulmer (1974:492) wrote in
Personnel Journal that executives believed that job posting would “prevent difficulties” with federal regulators (EEOC officials favored them), and that “minorities seem to prefer the system” because they are “interested in maximizing job information.”
Job posting can be decoupled if managers ignore applications that come through the posting system. But unlike other procedures we discuss below, posting has not been tied to diminished opportunity for women or minorities. We therefore expect that posting systems will either have no effect, due to decoupling, or lead to greater managerial diversity.
Formalizing prerequisites: Job descriptions. — Judges often favored job descriptions to make promotion criteria, and promotion lines, transparent. Four oil refineries in Lake Charles,
Louisiana agreed to write job descriptions following a widely publicized race discrimination case in 1962. Managers had told black, but not white, applicants that skilled jobs required high
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school diplomas (New York Times (no author listed) 1962b:9). After a 1970 self-study found that managers had kept desirable jobs from qualified blacks, General Electric mandated job descriptions (Schofer 1971:949). The personnel journals soon championed job descriptions as equal opportunity measures (Chayes 1974; Foulkes and Morgan 1977; Fretz and Hayman 1973;
Giblin and Ornati 1974).
Yet some consultants cautioned that job descriptions often depict current incumbents, rather than outlining skill requirements, and thereby establish prerequisites – such as 10 years in insurance sales or a master’s in engineering – that needlessly exclude women (Boyle 1973:91).
Job descriptions have also been found to lead to the proliferation of job titles, and this has been shown to hinder the advancement of women and minorities bunched in narrowly defined jobs outside of promotion ladders (Baron and Bielby 1986; Tomaskovic-Devey and Skaggs 1999).
Job descriptions thus may have adverse effects on opportunity for women and minorities, particularly if they establish prerequisites that exclude those groups.
Selecting on ability: Job tests. — Examinations to select office holders date to the beginning of the Han Dynasty, in 206 B.C. (Bendix 1956; Guillén 1994; Stark 1986; Taylor
1911; Weber 1978). In the late 1960s, industrial psychologists argued that firms should statistically validate tests to ensure that they measure job-related skills, and do not exclude minorities by testing for skills unrelated to job performance that minorities are less likely to possess. The Supreme Court found in Griggs v. Duke Power Company (401 U.S. 424, 1971) that generic academic job tests might discriminate by excluding blacks who had attended inferior, segregated schools from jobs that didn’t require academic skills. A 1973 article in
Personnel Journal argued that the Court asked no more than “what industrial psychologists and
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authorities in the field of test administration have been advising for years: ‘Don’t use a selection criterion unless you can show that it is valid.’” (Thorpe 1973:647).
Tests were also used in some firms much as job descriptions were used, as a pretext to exclude blacks. An African-American Swift meatpacking worker reported in the early 1950s, “I took an exam for a checker’s job. The foreman told me I failed. Another fellow got the job, a foreigner who could hardly speak English. He didn’t take the exam” (Purcell 1953:111). After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some companies “resorted to testing as a rejection mechanism” for qualified minority applicants: “Tests provide a subtle means of screening out undesirables since the personnel manager is under no compulsion to divulge to an applicant how or why he failed”
(Puma 1966:36,154).
We expect that employment tests may exclude women and minorities from management, particularly because employers continue to use tests that have not been validated, such as the tests used by the New Haven Fire Department. The HR director at a medium-sized New Jersey manufacturer, without a federal contract, reported in an interview we conducted in 1999 that he used an unvalidated test to assess math skills: “We’ll throw ourselves on the mercy of the court if anything happens.”
Mapping careers: Job ladders . —Conventional job ladders sketched different career paths within the firm. In the 1970s, some personnel experts cautioned that job ladders could run afoul of equal opportunity law when the only promotable entry-level positions were dominated by white men (see DiPrete 1989:197).
They redesigned ladders to avoid “unwarranted restrictions to minority [and female] mobility,” and examined whether “women or minorities are concentrated in certain jobs outside any line of progression or in jobs that dead-end” (Boyle
1973:90; Giblin and Ornati 1974:40). When a 1974 consent decree opened up lateral moves
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across restrictive departmental job ladders in the steel industry, minorities quickly moved into skilled jobs (Ichniowski 1983). We expect that traditional job ladders may disadvantage women and minorities by tying management posts to lower-level jobs dominated by white men.
Rating jobs: Salary classification. — Salary classification systems, allocating jobs to wage bands based on skills and duties, were endorsed by courts as a means of ending the tradition of paying women less than men for comparable work (Edwards 1973:423; Fretz and
Hayman 1973:137). Research suggests that formal salary systems improve women’s wages
(Elvira and Graham 2002). Classification is also thought to improve promotion prospects of women and minorities by bringing them up to the rank they deserve. Yet experts have argued that salary classification can formalize differences in wages and rank based on race or gender rather than actual job duties, and that this may hinder promotion prospects (Boyle 1973:89).
Plaintiffs in a number of civil rights cases have claimed that salary classification systems have systematically ranked male-dominated jobs higher than comparable female-dominated jobs
(Nelson and Bridges 1999:43). We expect that jobs dominated by women and minorities may receive artificially low salary classifications, rendering incumbents ineligible for promotion to management. Thus salary classification may formalize existing race and class differences in firms.
Documenting past work: Performance evaluations.
—Federal judges viewed written performance evaluations as a way to prevent bias from tingeing personnel decisions. A federal court found in 1971 that Chevrolet created “a ready mechanism for discrimination against
Blacks” by keeping no records of employee performance and allowing supervisors to veto promotion applications without documentation (Rowe v. General Motors Corp., 457 F.2d 359 (5
Cir. 1972)). In the Savannah Sugar case the court found that written, objective, performance
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evaluations could check discrimination (Rowe v. General Motors Corp., 457 F.2d 348 (5 Cir.
1972)). Consultants responded by recommending annual rating systems (Boyle 1973; Froehlich and Hawver 1974). In 1978 the EEOC issued guidelines supporting performance evaluations.
Field and laboratory studies, however, suggest that performance evaluation scores themselves are often biased (Hamner, Kim, Baird, and Bigoness 1974; Kraiger and Ford 1985;
Nieva and Gutek 1980; Oppler, Campbell, Pulakos, and Borman 1992; Pulakos, White, Oppler, and Borman 1989; Tsui and Gutek 1984). Individual studies as well as meta-analyses show that blacks receive lower scores than whites for similar output (McKay and McDaniel 2006; Roth et al. 2003). Other studies suggest that women receive lower scores than men (Bartol 1999) .
Research also shows that firms may ignore ratings in any event, to make personnel decisions based on stereotypes (Auster and Drazin 1988; Castilla 2008; Elvira and Zatzick 2002). We expect new performance evaluation systems to have adverse effects on women or minorities in the average firm.
Protecting employee rights: Grievance procedures.
—Grievance procedures, originally designed to protect union leaders from managerial retaliation, were popularized beyond the union sector from the 1950s as part of the corporate due process portfolio (Selznick 1969). From the early 1970s, universities and federal agencies began to promote grievance procedures as a way to resolve complaints of race and sex discrimination (Edelman 1990; Sutton, Dobbin,
Meyer, and Scott 1994). Yet as we noted, Edelman, Uggen, and Erlanger (1999:425) find that grievance procedures do not reduce civil rights complaints to the government, which suggests that they may be decoupled. If so, they should not improve opportunity. Roscigno’s (2007) research suggests that grievance procedures could have adverse effects on opportunity, for
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grievances filed with the state exacerbate group hostility at the workplace and rarely result in remedies.
Thus grievance procedures may be decoupled, or may exacerbate inequality by heightening inter-group hostility. We expect that federal contractors should take greater care to ensure that grievance procedures are used to address complaints and to guard against backlash.
In summary, we expect that hiring and promotion procedures will alter personnel decision-making, and thus will be less likely to be decoupled than personnel guidelines.
However, court cases and past research suggest that with the exception of job posting, all of these procedures hold the potential for adversely affecting opportunity for women and minorities.
Finally, we expect regulatory accountability to render all of these procedures more effective at increasing opportunity. In particular, we expect that executives subject to federal accountability will design these programs with greater care and will monitor their implementation and effects.
Substantive Innovations
Recruitment programs for women and minorities, along with management training programs, were popularized at about the same time as hiring and promotion procedures. These innovations target disadvantaged groups, and we expect them to be more effective at expanding opportunity than either guidelines or procedures because they emphasize goals.
Beating the bushes: Active recruitment. — Leading employers had recruitment systems for managers in the 1950s and soon after Kennedy’s 1961 affirmative action order, federal contractors began to pledge active recruitment of blacks through “Negro colleges, civic groups, and newspapers” (Braestrup 1961c). Historically black Howard University had seen a handful of
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recruiters in 1961. In 1964 more than 400 recruiters visited the 450 seniors (Grove 1965:32).
Western Electric, which counted one black among nearly 15,000 supervisors and managers in
1961, began visiting urban high schools and historically black colleges (Braestrup 1961a; Lipner
1965:27). Kodak, Mobil Oil, Pacific Telephone, Metropolitan Life, and a host of industry leaders joined the bandwagon (Cray 1968:43; Lelyveld 1964:41; Stetson 1963:1). After the Civil
Rights Act and new affirmative action regulations extended protections to women, in 1965, companies began to visit women’s colleges and send women recruiters to co-ed colleges. By the early 1970s, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs was encouraging all federal contractors to follow suit (Shaeffer 1973:66).
Targeted recruitment programs should expand opportunity because they focus on the goal of increasing women and minorities in the workforce and not, like procedural innovations, on formalizing the personnel system. They should be especially effective among federal contractors facing extra accountability.
In your own backyard: Management training. — Personnel experts in many companies considering compliance with civil rights laws of the 1960s saw plenty of women and minorities on their payrolls who might be upgraded. Theodore Purcell’s 1960 study of Swift meat-packing found that black women were the best educated group on the production lines, but were missing in the office (Purcell 1960:49-50). Personnel directors at leading federal contractors recommended skill and management training programs that could help minorities and women to win better jobs (Bureau of National Affairs 1967; Bureau of National Affairs 1976). Consultants argued that companies should focus on training existing women employees for management:
“Many large corporations … have … a large percentage of women – all in low-level jobs – so development and upgrading objectives are of primary importance” (Boyle 1973:87). In the early
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1970s the Department of Labor endorsed training programs for federal contractors to bring women and minorities up in the firm (Shaeffer 1973:66).
Many companies initiated special enrollment programs: “Companies have specified that
… management training and development programs include some qualified minority and women applicants” (Boyle 1973:93). Some established quotas for minorities or women, and in 1979 the
Supreme Court upheld training quotas (Mintz 1978; Stryker 1996:13).
We expect management training programs to expand opportunity, and we expect targeted recruitment of women and minorities to this training to further expand it. These measures should be particularly effective in federal contractor establishments.
Summary Predictions
While the distinction between procedural and substantive innovations extends back decades in the organizational literature, few studies have explored whether these approaches to organizational change are different in terms of their efficacy. Fewer still have speculated about how effective new guidelines are, or whether antidiscrimination accountability mediates these effects.
Hypothesis 1a: We expect personnel guidelines to have no effect on diversity.
Hypothesis 1b: We expect formal hiring and promotion procedures to be followed by decreases in diversity. The sole exception is job posting systems, which we expect to have null or positive effects.
Hypothesis 1c: We expect substantive recruitment and training programs to lead to increases in diversity.
“Evaluation apprehension” may lead managers to implement new rules, procedures and programs in ways that are consistent with the goals of compliance.
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Hypothesis 2: Among federal contractors subject to affirmative action oversight, we expect all three kinds of programs to be more likely to increase diversity.
ALTERNATIVE SOURCES OF CHANGE IN THE MANAGERIAL WORKFORCE
We control for other factors thought to affect management diversity. We do not control for factors that do not vary with time, such as industry or location, because our fixed-effects models account for stable organizational traits.
Legal Sanction
Economic theorists have posited that legal sanctions increase employer attention to equal opportunity. Lawsuits and civil rights discrimination charges should increase the perceived risk of apprehension and the actual cost of non-compliance. Lawsuits have shown positive effects on diversity of the workforce in previous studies (Baron, Mittman, and Newman 1991; Kalev and
Dobbin 2006; Leonard 1984b; Leonard 1984c; Skaggs 2001; Skaggs 2008). We also expect federal affirmative action compliance reviews to increase opportunity, as they typically point to areas that require attention or improvement (Anderson 1996:298). Some studies show positive effects of compliance reviews on black employment (Goldstein and Smith 1976; Leonard 1984a;
Leonard 1984c).
Organizational Characteristics
Organizational expansion, and growth in the management ranks, create new career opportunities (Baron et al. 1991), but by signaling a firm’s good fortune, they may also increase competition for posts. Konrad and Linnehan (1995) and Leonard (1990:52) find that increased demand for managers helps white women but not African-Americans. Unionization tends to preserve segregation by favoring longstanding employees through seniority provisions (but see
Blau and Beller 1992; Kelly 2003; Leonard 1985a; Milkman 1985). Organizations with legal
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counsel may be more likely to pay attention to equal opportunity law in making appointments
(Edelman and Petterson 1999; Holzer and Neumark 2000a). Work/family policies may remove obstacles to the promotion of women (Williams 2000) .
Top management team diversity may affect managerial hires by creating role models or by challenging stereotypes (Elliot and Smith
2004; Kanter 1977; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). Diversity management programs, such as training and taskforces, may improve opportunity for women and minorities (Kalev et al. 2006).
We control for peer evaluations, whereby peers as well as supervisors are involved in performance assessments, which are thought to be more democratic than traditional supervisory evaluations and which may, hence, affect opportunity.
Labor Market and Economic Environment
Firms can more easily increase managerial diversity when internal and external labor pools are diverse (Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman 1998; Shenhav and Haberfeld 1992).
Demand for workers from underrepresented groups may be higher in industries with more federal contractors. In hard economic times, black men, and to a lesser extent women, are more vulnerable than are white men to being laid off (Elvira and Zatzick 2002; Kletzer 1998).
Growing industries can offer more attractive jobs, yet women and minorities have historically been relegated to less attractive sectors (Thomas 1990:298).
DATA AND METHODS
We conduct an analysis of longitudinal data on the workforce composition of 816 establishments to assess changes in managerial composition following the adoption of personnel innovations between 1971 and 2002. We explore the effects of personnel innovations on the log odds of white, African-American, Latino, and Asian men and women in management. We use pooled time-series, cross-sectional models with fixed effects for year and for establishment.
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Data
We merge data collected annually by the EEOC on employees at private sector workplaces with data from our retrospective survey of employer personnel practices and with federal data on labor market characteristics.
EEOC data.
—The Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, requires private employers with more than 100 employees and government contractors with more than 50 employees and contracts worth $10,000 to file annual EEO-1 reports detailing the race, ethnicity, and gender of employees in nine broad occupational categories. Excluded employers, such as state and local governments, schools and colleges provide different reports (EEOC n.d.). There are no better data on workforce composition (Robinson, Taylor, Tomaskovic-Devey, Zimmer, and Irvine
2005). We obtained the data from the EEOC through an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) agreement.
The EEOC reports cover 9 occupational categories, lumping together all managers above first line supervisors. We look at the effect of personnel innovations on women and minorities in this broad management category. Some argue that employers reclassified jobs in the 1970s, moving women and minorities into management categories to improve their federal reports
(Smith and Welch 1984). Leonard (1990) notes that “pure reclassification would cause black losses in the lower occupations [in the EEO data], which is generally not observed.” Jacobs
(1992) finds that the gender earnings gap declines over time, which suggests that women have moved up in the aggregate. In our sample few firms show sudden increases in women or blacks in management, but we checked results for robustness by eliminating those firms from the analysis. The results (available upon request) did not change.
Dependent variables.
—Our 8 dependent variables are the log odds of each group in
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management. Figures 1 and 2 present the trends in our sample. Between 1971 and 2002, management jobs held by white men declined from 81% to 61% in the average establishment.
Management jobs held by white women rose from 16% to 26%, those held by black women rose from 0.4% to 2%, and those held by black men rose from 1% to 3.1%. Over the same period,
Hispanic men grew from 0.6% to 2.5%, Hispanic women increased from 0.1% to 0.9%, Asian men improved from 0.5% to 1.8%, and Asian women rose from 0.1% to 0.7%. In the analyses, we use fixed year effects to control for time trends in workplace diversity. Our sample differs from the national population of workplaces in several ways. It excludes workplaces with fewer than 100 workers for the most part, which suits our purposes because the smallest employers rarely formalize employment practices. It is also biased against newer employers, as we discuss below, and contains no public sector employers. For these last two reasons, managerial diversity is lower in our sample than in the national workforce.
Figures 1 and 2 About Here
Minority women and men see dramatic proportional changes, but very small absolute changes, in their representation in management. Thus in the analyses presented below, we log the dependent variables. We log the odds (proportion/(1-proportion)), rather than the proportion, because the distribution of log odds is closer to normal, and thus this has become the convention (Fox
1997:78).
Organizational survey data.
—For information on personnel practices we surveyed a stratified random sample of establishments that submitted EEO-1 reports. We first compiled a dataset comprising all EEO-1 reports for the years 1971-2002. We selected half of the sample from establishments that had been in the dataset at least since 1980, and half from those that had been in the dataset at least since 1992. We selected 35% of the sample from establishments with
21

fewer than 500 employees in 1999. We chose firms in food, chemicals, electronics equipment, transportation equipment, wholesale trade, retail trade, insurance, business services, and health services, sampling no more than one establishment per parent firm. Some establishments were acquired or spun off during the period, sometimes more than once, and we follow these cases through ownership shifts. We interpolate workforce data for three missing years; 1974, 1976, and 1977.
We conducted telephone interviews with the assistance of the Princeton Survey Research
Center. We consulted previous survey instruments to develop the questionnaire (in particular
Kalleberg, Knoke, Marsden, and Spaeth 1996; Kelly 2000; Osterman 1994; Osterman 2000), and conducted 61 pilot interviews that are not included in the analysis.
Our procedure was to write to the head of human resources at each establishment to ask for the name of someone who could answer questions about the history of HR practices. The modal respondent was a human resources manager with 11 years of tenure. In phone interviews, we asked about the adoption, and discontinuation, of each of several dozen personnel practices.
Discontinuation was rare. When a respondent could not answer a question we asked her to consult with colleagues or records, following up with email, phone, and fax reminders. The 833 completed interviews represent a response rate of 67%, which is high for an employer survey
(Kalleberg et al. 1996; Kelly 2000; Osterman 1994; Osterman 2000). We matched the survey responses with EEO-1 reports to create a dataset with establishment-year spells. After excluding
17 cases with many missing values for EEO-1 or survey data, our final dataset included 816 cases and 18,452 establishment-year cells, with a median of twenty five years of data per establishment, a minimum of four years and a maximum of thirty-two. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics and the Census provide data on state unemployment, industry size, and the
22

representation of white, black, and Hispanic men and women in the industry and state labor markets, which we include as control variables. Data on Asians are not available for the full time period for state and industry labor market composition. To check sensitivity to this, we ran all reported models with and without the state and industry labor market controls for white, black, and Hispanic men and women, and the results were robust. We include these controls in the reported results.
Table 1 About Here
The independent variables.
—Most independent variables come from our survey. We use federal contractor status as coded in the EEO-1 reports, and calculate the proportion of industry establishments with government contracts from that dataset. In Figure 3 we present the proportion of firms in the sample having each of the guidelines and procedures over time. After they were recommended by consultants and courts as fair employment measures, guidelines and bureaucratic practices saw growing popularity (see Figure 3). Figure 4 presents special recruitment and training programs over time. These programs saw more modest growth than new rules and procedural changes. Management training has expanded consistently over time.
Recruitment of women and minorities to management training has risen steadily as well.
The denominator used in figures 3 and 4 changes to reflect the number of organizations in the sample in the current year. There are 816 establishments in 2002, but the number declines as we go back in time. We imputed missing values for individual items using OLS regression based on industry, establishment age and headquarters status. Six of the fifteen equal opportunity practices had between 5% and 9% of values missing, and the rest were well below 5%.
Summary statistics for key independent variables are presented in Table 1 (see Appendix Table
C for summary statistics for other variables).
23

Figures 3 and 4 About Here
Table 1 About Here
Method
We use pooled time-series, cross-sectional models to estimate the effects of various innovations on management diversity (Hicks 1994; Hsiao 1986). Our models present the average effects of innovations for the years when the innovation was in place which, as can be seen in figures 3 and 4, averaged ten years or so for most of the practices – ample time for an effect to appear. We introduce fixed effects for establishments to account for stable organizational characteristics that we cannot observe (Haveman 1993; Western 2002), achieved by subtracting the values of each observation from the establishment mean (Hsiao 1986:31). To account for unmeasured environmental shifts, we introduce a binary variable for each year, omitting 1971. Fixed effects models are less efficient than similar models with fewer parameters; however, they provide the most stringent tests of our hypotheses. The fixed effects also help to deal with non-constant variance of the errors (heteroskedasticity) that arises from the cross-sectional and temporal aspects of the pooled data.
The error terms of the dependent variables are likely to be correlated, because the 8 variables sum up to nearly 100% of all managers. Ordinary least squares would thus produce unbiased and consistent, but inefficient, estimates. We use seemingly unrelated regression
(SUR), which takes into account covariance between the errors and produces unbiased, efficient estimates (Felmlee and Hargens 1988; Greene 1997; Zellner 1962). Our results are not dependent, however, on the use of these simultaneous equation methods.
24

FINDINGS
We present two sets of models. In the first set we estimate change in management diversity following three types of organizational policy changes – personnel guidelines, hiring and promotion procedures, and active recruitment and management training – without considering regulatory accountability. In the second set we interact the program innovations with federal contractor status. A significant positive coefficient indicates that following a certain innovation, a group’s share of management positions increases. We interpret negative coefficients for white men or positive coefficients for the other groups to indicate increased opportunity for historically disadvantaged groups. We control for changes in organizational, regulatory, and labor market characteristics discussed above, reporting coefficients in appendices.
Guidelines, Procedural Innovations, and Substantive Innovations
Table 2 includes coefficients from the first set of models. In Figure 5 we plot the point estimates and 95% confidence intervals for each of the practices included in Table 2. Employers who put in guidelines for hiring, promotion, and discharge do not see changes in management composition. Effects are sparse and weak in magnitude. Hiring guidelines are followed by decreases in white men and increases in white women, but they are also followed by decreases in black women. Promotion and discharge guidelines are followed by small increases in white men, and promotion guidelines are also followed by an increase in Hispanic women, with no significant changes in any other group. We use fixed effects to allay concerns that adopters are different from non-adopters on an unmeasured dimension of importance. As a further test, we ran a separate analysis for each guideline, limiting the sample to adopters. The small positive effects of discharge and promotion guidelines on white men held up, suggesting that this effect is
25

not due to an unmeasured factor common to adopters. One might interpret the two positive coefficients for white men as evidence of adverse effects on diversity, but the overall pattern is weak and a conservative interpretation is that it suggests decoupling.
Table 2 and Figure 5 About Here
Hiring and promotion procedures fare no better than guidelines in Table 2 (and Figure 5).
Of the fifty-six coefficients estimating the effects of these programs on the eight race-by-sex groups, nine indicate significant positive effects on diversity and fourteen indicate significant negative effects. The rest indicate no significant effect. On the positive side, job posting increases the share of white and Hispanic women; job ladders decrease white men and increase black men and Asian men and women; and salary classification increases black men and Asian and Hispanic women. On the negative side, job tests decrease black and Hispanic men and white, black, Hispanic, and Asian women; performance evaluations decrease white women; job descriptions decrease black men; and grievance procedures decrease white, black, Hispanic, and
Asian women and black and Asian men. In these models, it looks as if formal hiring and promotion practices are doing little in the aggregate to improve opportunity for women and minorities. For both job tests and grievance procedures, we see a pattern of negative effects on management diversity. Following adoption of these two measures, the average firm sees declines in management diversity.
We considered the possibility that the effects of some hiring and promotion practices might be obscured by multicollinearity. When we entered the practices separately in a model identical to this, their performance did not improve. We also examined variance inflation factors
(VIFs) when including all the practices and found no evidence that multicollinearity had any substantial effect on our results.
26

Recruitment and management training programs fare much better. Of the forty coefficients, thirteen show significant positive effects on opportunity for women and minorities.
None shows a significant adverse effect. Recruitment programs for women showed negative effects on white men, and significant positive effects on every other group but Hispanic men.
Recruitment programs for women in management, which typically involve sending recruiters to colleges and professional schools, have positive effects not only on all four groups of women, but also on African-American and Hispanic men. This is likely because recruiters seek to expand diversity on all fronts. Recruitment programs for minorities increase the representation of African-American men and women. These programs often target historically black colleges, and so it is not surprising that the strongest effects are on blacks. Management training programs help white women who, fair employment experts argued, constituted the biggest untapped pool of college educated managerial prospects. Special programs to recruit existing women employees to management training programs show negative effects on white men, positive effects on white women, and positive effects on Asian men. Special efforts to recruit minorities to management training programs do not show any significant effects.
We considered the possibility that employers adopting recruitment and training programs might be more committed to promoting opportunity. While the fixed effects models should control for unobserved differences among employers, as with guidelines we reran models limiting the sample for adopters of each program in turn to verify that the results do not reflect unobserved differences between those with and those without the programs. The results held up.
Taken together, these results suggest that neither personnel guidelines nor procedures help to increase opportunity. Both can be harmful. Active recruitment and management training programs, which focus on the substantive goal of integration, do increase opportunity and have
27

no negative effects on diversity. Next we test the idea that accountability will improve the effects of these innovations.
The Mediating Effect of Accountability
In Table 3 we add interactions between the personnel innovations and federal contractor status, which brings an employer under Department of Labor oversight. For the recruitment and management training programs, the interactions did not change anything. The interactions did not produce significant effects, and their addition did not change the program effects. We conclude that recruitment and training programs were effective in expanding opportunity regardless of the level of oversight. For simplicity, we omit the recruitment/training by contractor interactions in the reported results.
Table 3 and Figure 6 About Here
The guidelines showed lackluster performance in Table 2, indicating decoupling, but we expected them to be more effective among contractors. That was not the case. In Table 3 we present the effects of these programs among contractors and non-contractors separately. These estimates are based on a model with contractor interactions for each program. The first row in each program pair reports the non-interacted effect of the program – the effect among noncontractors. The second row shows the effect of the program among contractors, calculated using the linear combination of the program effect and the contractor interaction effect. The results are also presented in figure 6, which plots the 95% confidence intervals for each practice among non contractors and contractors. Table 3 shows 9 significant coefficients for noncontractors, six of which indicate that guidelines increase opportunity. For contractors there were 12 significant coefficients, only two of which shows positive effect on diversity. We
28

conclude that accountability does not remedy the problem of decoupling of guidelines among contractors. The effects of guidelines among contractors appear to worsen, if anything.
By contrast, the effects of hiring and promotion procedures are clearly mediated by accountability. Most generally, among non-contractors personnel procedures show no effects or negative effects on diversity, apart from job posting and ladders, which show positive effects on white women. These negative effects often disappear or become positive among contractors.
This suggests that without the added regulatory oversight that attends federal contracts, procedures often reduce opportunity. Accountability can render the effects positive.
Job posting improves the odds of white women among non-contractors, but is followed by declines in black women in firms that do not face the extra accountability that goes with contractor status (see table 3 and figure 6). Among contractors positive effects appear for black men and women and for Hispanic women. The positive effect for white women disappears.
Job descriptions show no clear pattern across the two groups of employers. Noncontractors adopting job descriptions see decreases in black women. Contractors adopting them see decreases in white women and black men, but increases in Asian men and women.
Job tests provide a good test of the effect of proceduralization and accountability, because after the Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that job tests might be discriminatory, experts advised employers to design tests to avoid bias. We see that among employers not subject to additional federal accountability, adoption of job tests is followed by significant decreases in white women, black men and women, Hispanic men and women, and Asian men and women. In contractor establishments job tests have no negative effects on women or minorities, and they show a significant negative effect for white men and a positive effect for white women. Employers
29

under affirmative action regulations appear to be avoiding the problem of disparate impact, perhaps by validating job tests as personnel experts advised.
When non-contractors create job ladders they see increases in white women and decreases in Hispanic women and Asian men. When contractors adopt ladders, they do not see the same increases in white women, but they see increases in black men and Asian men and women, and no negative effect on Hispanic women.
Salary classification systems show no effects at all among non-contractors, which perhaps indicates decoupling. Among contractors, they show positive effects on black men,
Hispanic women, and Asian women. Previous studies suggest that these positive effects of salary classification on management composition may come about when jobs traditionally held by women and minorities, which have been historically undervalued, are assigned higher grades making their incumbents become eligible for promotion.
Performance evaluations show a positive effect on white men and a negative effect on white women in non-contractors, consistent with field and laboratory studies showing gender bias in performance assessments. The adverse effect on white women goes away among contractors, and the positive effect on white men turns negative. Two findings are not in keeping with the pattern: among contractors performance evaluations disadvantage black and Asian women.
Grievance procedures show a strong pattern. For every underrepresented group but
Asian women, they show a significant negative effect among non-contractors. This negative effect may be a result of managers reducing their own scrutiny of equality in hiring and promotion when they feel there is a grievance adjudication process in place (more on this in the
30

conclusion). Among contractors, there are only negative effects on black men and Asian men and women.
In analyses not reported here (available upon request) we examined whether the interaction effects differed between employers who first had a program, and then received a federal contract, and those who first had a contract, and then adopted a particular program. They did not differ: non-contractors who adopted a program and then became contractors saw the same pattern of effects as contractors who adopted the same program. The introduction of affirmative action oversight improves existing programs, just as it improves programs adopted after the oversight is in place.
Overall, formal hiring and promotion practices have negative effects on the diversity of the management team in establishments that do not face affirmative action accountability, but these effects tend to go away or turn positive in establishments subject to accountability. Among non-contractors the bureaucratic hiring and promotion practices show 19 significant coefficients that indicate reduced opportunity for women and minorities and 3 that indicate increased opportunity. Among contractors 17 of the 19 negative effects disappear, 4 of those turn positive, and there are 11 new positive effects and 5 new negative effects. In total, among contractors the various procedures produce 17 positive effects and 7 negative effects.
Federal regulatory accountability apparently wards off decoupling and unintended consequences of procedural innovations. Note that in Table 3, federal contractor status by itself increases white men, and decreases black men and women, Hispanic men, and Asian men. In
Table 2, before interactions, contractor status has adverse effects only on black women, Latino men, and Asian men. This suggests that if these personnel procedures were dismantled in contractor establishments, a number of groups might fare worse than they now fare.
31

As noted, because contractor interactions did not alter the effects of recruitment and training programs, for the sake of simplicity we do not report interactions. It is important to note that because white women hold more management jobs than any group but white men, the fact that the coefficients are of roughly the same magnitude for white women and for other groups suggests that these programs are having similar proportional effects on different groups, but much larger numerical effects on white women.
Controlling for Other Sources of Change
We include a host of controls for other factors thought to affect managerial diversity.
The results, reported in Appendix B, generally conform to expectations. Compliance reviews and lawsuits both have positive effects across a number of historically disadvantaged groups.
We experimented with interacting these factors with the program innovations and did not find the pattern we found for federal contractor status. That leads us to conclude, in the case of compliance reviews, that it is contractor status rather than the immediacy of a compliance review that mediates the efficacy of practices. Work-family programs benefit white, Hispanic, and
Asian women, and Asian men. Growth in industry and state diversity affect management diversity.
In addition to the controls included in the models, we use fixed effects for establishment and year to control, respectively, for stable establishment characteristics (such as industry) and historical changes in the labor market. The fixed effects help to minimize the chance that something that causes establishments to adopt programs, or to become federal contractors, is also influencing the outcomes. To further explore that possibility, we conducted additional robustness tests (results are available upon request). One such check, discussed above, addresses the concern that program adopters may be different from non-adopters in ways that are not
32

accounted for with the establishment fixed effects. We reran the analyses in tables 2 and 3 for each of the personnel innovations, each time including only establishments that adopted the innovation in question. The results of these restricted analyses are similar to those of the fullsample analyses. To examine the robustness of the results to within-unit serial correlation, we tested for the possibility that each error is partially dependent on the error of the previous year
(AR(1)). We found no evidence that serial correlation affects our findings.
We also considered the possibility that some of the non-effects resulted from our combining large and small firms in the same analysis, or from combining different historical periods. To explore whether certain programs worked only in large, or small, firms we introduced interactions with size. The overall pattern remained the same: size does not mediate the effects of these innovations. To examine whether, for instance, some programs worked better before of after the Reagan Administration, when federal agencies curtailed regulatory efforts, we interacted program variables with different time period dummies. The overall pattern was consistent across time periods.
CONCLUSION
Organizational institutionalists have suggested that corporate equal opportunity innovations were adopted as window-dressing, designed to signal that management was making a good-faith effort to comply with the law (Edelman 1992; Edelman et al. 1999; Meyer and
Rowan 1977). New programs, they argue, are decoupled by managers who continue to use traditional means of recruiting, assessing, and promoting workers. Firms install formal performance evaluation systems, for instance, but managers continue to use sex and race to choose whom to reward (Castilla 2008).
33

While decoupling remains a core idea in the field of organizations, it has been the subject of little empirical or theoretical attention (but see Edelman and Petterson 1999). Many scholars assume decoupling to be widespread, and assume that organizations adopt all sorts of programs for symbolic reasons and then fail to alter day to day practice. We have elaborated on Nonet and
Selznick’s (1978) and Meyer and Rowan’s (1977) original insights, describing three broad forms of organizational changes – new guidelines, procedural innovations, and substantive innovations
– and making predictions about the likelihood each type will lead to decoupling, unintended consequences, and intended consequences. We expect that guidelines will most likely be decoupled because they require no specific changes in routines. We expect that procedures are more likely to have effects because they alter routines, but we posit that they will be most likely to have unintended consequences because they create uniform routines without emphasizing new goals, and uniform bureaucratic routines can exacerbate inequality rather than reduce it. We expect that substantive innovations are most likely to lead to intended consequences because they emphasize goals.
We have, further, examined how accountability affects these processes. Psychological research shows that when individuals expect they may have to account for themselves, they scrutinize their behavior more carefully. We expect that executives may implement innovations with more care when they believe they may be asked to account. In this case, the Civil Rights
Act gives the EEOC and the courts authority to scrutinize employers charged with discrimination, and presidential affirmative action orders give the OFCCP authority to audit federal contractors whenever so inclined. All employers are subject to EEOC oversight and lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act, and only contractors are subject to additional regulatory scrutiny under affirmative action orders. Although sanctions are rare in affirmative action audits,
34

we predict that accountability apprehension coming from this additional source of oversight will render equal opportunity innovations more effective among federal contractors. They face the possibility that, without cause, federal auditors can descend and ask them to account for their personnel practices, and for the consequences of those practices.
The findings support our predictions and suggest some amendments. As expected, guidelines show no clear pattern of effects, which suggests that they were decoupled. Procedures do show effects, but on their own they tend to have adverse consequences. Substantive programs tend to show positive effects on diversity. Regulatory oversight shows mixed effects on guidelines, the expected effects on procedural innovations, and no effects on substantive programs. Procedures that on their own had negative effects on integration generally show no effects, or positive effects, under increased regulatory accountability. We conducted sensitivity analyses to explore whether selectivity might have driven the findings.
It is easy enough to understand how innovations may be decoupled – managers conduct business as usual and ignore the innovation -- but why should they backfire? Research suggests that by formalizing personnel procedures around norms and structures that favor current incumbents, management may privilege dominant groups. Skill tests screen for irrelevant skills held disproportionately by dominant group members. Performance evaluation scores are biased toward the dominant group. Job ladders more often lead upward from entry-level jobs held by the dominant group. Formal job descriptions for managerial jobs require experience in lowerlevel jobs held by the dominant group. Most generally, promotion procedures may institutionalize one group’s disadvantages by subjecting it to criteria set up to judge members of another group (Nonet and Selznick 1978).
35

Three other mechanisms may contribute. First, by symbolizing commitment to equal opportunity, innovations may relieve pressure on managers to scrutinize their own decisions for evidence of bias. A recent laboratory study suggested that while subjects check their own decisions for evidence of bias when evaluating women, when told they are in an organization that is deliberately meritocratic, they let their guard down and are less likely to favor women
(Castilla and Benard 2008). In the case at hand, formal hiring and promotion procedures may cause managers to be less vigilant in scrutinizing their own behavior for signs of bias, thinking,
“I don’t have to worry about fairness; we have procedures for that.” We expect that regulatory oversight may counteract this by activating accountability.
Second, managers may use formal procedures when it suits them and ignore them when it does not, activating procedures most often when they favor members of the dominant group.
Roscigno’s (2007) analysis of discrimination claims filed with the Ohio Civil Rights
Commission illustrates how managers apply formal procedures selectively in order to hire, promote, and fire whom they please. Roscigno’s study supports the general pattern found at
Swift meatpacking in the 1950s, where managers promoted white cronies who hadn’t taken a promotion test and then denied promotions to blacks on the basis of their test scores (Purcell
1953:111). This brings up the question of whether the decreases in management integration we see following procedural innovations are actually intended consequences. Merton himself made the point: “ unforeseen consequences should not be identified with consequences which are necessarily undesirable (from the standpoint of the actor)” (Merton 1936:894) .
Some argue that white men prefer to reserve management jobs for their own, and that they may be satisfied with equal opportunity programs that appear to fend off lawsuits without disrupting traditional career patterns (Acker 1990; Jacobs 1989; Parkin 1972).
36

Third, some suggest that fear of sanction leads managers to avoid hiring women and minorities when they are sensitized to the legal issues surrounding equal opportunity. This may explain the striking effect of grievance procedures which, in the absence of federal contracts, show negative effects for seven of the eight historically disadvantaged groups. Perhaps the creation of grievance procedures leads managers to avoid hiring women and minorities for fear that they may bring discrimination charges. If that is the underlying mechanism, there is no small irony in the situation, for Edelman and colleagues (1999) find that procedures do not reduce public charges, which suggests that few complaints are resolved through corporate grievance systems. If grievance procedures cause managerial aversion toward women and minorities, and fail to resolve complaints of discrimination, they are certainly not fulfilling their promise.
What are the organizational policy implications of our findings? We find that guidelines do not produce consistent positive effects, and that their effects are not rendered positive by extra public policy oversight. Max Weber (1978) recognized that rule-making was not the best way to achieve new goals generally, and in the particular case of ending cronyism, recommended bureaucratic hiring and promotion procedures. We find that new procedures are more likely to lead to consequences of some sort: adverse effects where regulatory oversight is weak and small positive effects when it is a bit stronger. It is important for employers, lawyers, legal scholars, and students of organizations and stratification to understand that some new hiring and promotion procedures designed to expand opportunity can backfire.
Programs designed to make substantive changes in the number of women and minorities in management jobs showed consistent positive effects. Recruitment programs for women helped all groups of women, and all groups of minority men but Latinos, suggesting that
37

recruiters visiting colleges to hire women take their charge broadly. Recruitment programs for minorities, which typically focus on historically black colleges, helped black men and women.
New management training programs helped white women, and special programs to recruit women to management training helped them further. None of these programs needed extra policy oversight to work, and none showed a pattern of adverse effects.
Taken together, these findings may help to explain the slow progress America has made in reducing job segregation over the last quarter century (Tomaskovic-Devey, Zimmer,
Stainback, Robinson, Taylor, and McTague 2006). Many of the most popular workplace innovations do not consistently lead to improvements in opportunity; some of them even backfire, including job tests, performance evaluations, and grievance procedures. Many of the programs that work are not popular, notably special recruitment for women and minorities and special programs to enroll them in management training. The program that is most common in this group, management training, has positive effects for white women in both regulatory conditions.
What are the public policy implications? First, federal civil rights legislation helped to popularize a wide range of innovations, many of which have adverse effects in the typical workplace. Civil Rights compliance measures became a field of symbolic representation and little attention has been devoted to efficacy. Regulators might use evidence based studies of program effects to determine which innovations in hiring and promotion to encourage. Second, the preference of the courts for formalized hiring and promotion procedures to eliminate bias may be short-sighted, and the same might be said for diversity consultants’ current enthusiasm for “transparency” in rules governing hiring and promotion. Having these things in place without making sure they have the right effects will not promote the goals of diversity and of
38

Title VII. Third, psychological research suggests that accountability apprehension (the expectation that one may have to account for one’s behavior) leads people to regulate their own biases. It appears that such apprehension encouraged employers to ensure that many procedural innovations did not exacerbate inequality. Perhaps federal regulators could ratchet up oversight of non-contractors as well by extending the authority to conduct audits to the EEOC, for instance.
Given the long history of employer equal opportunity programs, it is surprising that few previous studies have tried to pin down program effects. We have made significant progress, yet some questions remain about the mechanisms underlying the negative effects of personnel procedures among firms subject to equal opportunity law alone. We have not been able to determine whether formal hiring and promotion procedures create, in Ferguson’s (1990) terms, a
“scientific organization of inequality,” whether they render managers less vigilant in fighting bias, or whether they offer managers a means of justifying discriminatory decisions. We have not been able to determine whether regulatory accountability prevents the adverse consequences of procedures by making managers implement procedures with more care or by causing them to pay more attention to the effects of procedures. We have described some surprising new findings for future research to build on.
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Table 1: Means and Standard Deviations of Variables Used in the Analysis. N=18,452.
a
Proportion of group among managers
White men
White women
Black men
Black women
Hispanic men
Hispanic women
Asian men
Asian women
Guidelines
Hiring guidelines
Promotion guidelines
Discharge guidelines
Formal procedures
Job tests
Job ladders
Performance evaluations
Internal job posting
Grievance procedures
Job descriptions
Salary classification
Active recruitment practices
Special recruitment - women
Special recruitment - minorities
Management training
Management training targeted women
Management training targeted minorities
SD
0.236
0.213
0.058
0.040
0.050
0.021
0.044
0.018
0.284
0.325
0.407
0.490
0.480
0.462
0.489
0.499
0.439
0.499
0.277
0.344
0.489
0.320
0.309
0.462
0.260
0.535
0.088
0.120
0.791
0.599
0.358
0.692
0.603
Mean
0.702
0.220
0.024
0.013
0.017
0.005
0.012
0.004
0.084
0.137
0.394
0.116
0.107
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Min
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
Max Source
1.000 EEO-1
1.000 EEO-1
1.000 EEO-1
0.667 EEO-1
0.714 EEO-1
0.500 EEO-1
0.851 EEO-1
0.500 EEO-1
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey
1 Survey a
Descriptive statistics for labor market and economic variables and other organizational characteristics are listed in Appendix A.
40

Table 2: Estimates of the Log Odds of Eight Demographic Groups in Management Following
Personnel Innovations, 1971-2002.
White
Men
White
Women
Black
Men
Black
Women
Hispanic
Men
Hispanic
Women
Asian
Men
Asian
Women
Guidelines
Hiring Guidelines
Promotion Guidelines
Discharge Guidelines
-0.039 *
(0.016)
0.033 *
(0.017)
0.061 ** -0.038
(0.020) (0.020)
0.061 *** -0.015
(0.017) (0.018)
-0.007
(0.015)
-0.017
(0.018)
-0.021
(0.016)
-0.053 ***
(0.014)
0.000
(0.017)
0.013
(0.015)
0.016
(0.023)
0.025
(0.028)
0.001
(0.024)
-0.029
(0.020)
0.051 *
(0.025)
-0.029
(0.021)
0.028
(0.023)
-0.034
(0.027)
-0.016
(0.024)
-0.006
(0.019)
-0.037
(0.023)
-0.020
(0.020)
Procedural Innovations
Job Posting
Job Description
Job Tests for Managers
Job Ladders
Salary Classification
Performance Evaluations
Grievance Procedure
-0.015
(0.015)
0.022
(0.016)
-0.021
(0.024)
0.057 *** 0.000
(0.016) (0.014)
-0.021
(0.016)
-0.049 *
(0.025)
-0.052 ***
(0.015)
-0.108 ***
(0.022)
0.014
(0.013)
-0.022
(0.014)
-0.096 ***
(0.021)
-0.002
(0.022)
-0.028
(0.023)
-0.070 *
(0.034)
-0.114 *** 0.034
(0.023) (0.024)
-0.013
(0.016)
0.011
(0.017)
-0.005
(0.016)
0.004
(0.016)
-0.055 **
(0.017)
-0.035 *
(0.017)
0.099 ***
(0.022)
0.048 **
(0.015)
0.017
(0.015)
0.015
(0.020)
0.015
(0.014)
-0.009
(0.014)
0.024
(0.033)
0.004
(0.023)
-0.029
(0.024)
-0.077 *** -0.049 *** -0.042
(0.015) (0.014) (0.023)
0.063 ** -0.023
(0.019) (0.021)
0.008
(0.020)
0.034
(0.022)
-0.093 ** -0.048
(0.030) (0.034)
-0.001
(0.029)
0.042 *
(0.020)
-0.026
(0.021)
-0.051 *
(0.021)
0.075 *
(0.033)
0.008
(0.022)
-0.011
(0.023)
-0.018
(0.018)
0.013
(0.019)
-0.099 ***
(0.029)
0.082 **
(0.028)
0.054 **
(0.019)
-0.035
(0.020)
-0.124 *** -0.045 *
(0.023) (0.019)
Substantive Innovations
Recruitment Program
for Women
Recruitment Program
for Minorities
Management
Training
Recruit Women
to Mgt. Training
Recruit Minorities
to Mgt. Training
-0.063 *
(0.027)
0.129 *** 0.078 **
(0.027) (0.025)
-0.038
(0.021)
-0.015
(0.014)
0.035
(0.022)
0.051 ***
(0.015)
0.077 ***
(0.020)
0.016
(0.013)
-0.129 *** 0.136 *** -0.043
(0.035)
0.012
(0.035)
(0.036)
-0.008
(0.037)
(0.032)
-0.035
(0.033)
0.085 ***
(0.023)
0.063
(0.038)
0.088 *** -0.015
(0.018) (0.030)
0.007
(0.012)
0.030
0.016
(0.021)
-0.034
(0.030)
0.035
(0.031)
(0.049)
0.057
(0.050)
0.097 **
(0.033)
0.017
(0.027)
0.012
(0.018)
0.009
(0.044)
-0.040
(0.045)
0.171 *** 0.084 **
(0.037) (0.032)
-0.027
(0.030)
0.033
(0.020)
0.108 *
0.034
(0.025)
-0.012
(0.017)
-0.040
(0.048)
-0.058
(0.049)
(0.041)
0.035
(0.042)
Federal Contractor
Constant
0.023
(0.017)
0.022
(0.018)
-0.021
(0.016)
0.170 *** -0.123 ** -0.024
(0.041) (0.042) (0.038)
-0.040 **
(0.015)
0.010
(0.035)
-0.077 ** -0.030
(0.024)
-0.107
(0.058)
(0.022)
0.008
(0.051)
-0.049 *
(0.024)
-0.031
(0.057)
R-Squared 0.3335
0.3100
0.2752
0.3600
0.3179
0.3366
0.3599
* p<.05 ** p<.01 *** p<.001. N=816 organizations, 18.452 organizational spells. Coefficients for 38 control variables are reported in Appendix Table B. Models include fixed effects for year that are not reported. Standard errors are in parentheses.
-0.030
(0.020)
0.001
(0.049)
0.3771
41

Table 3: Estimates of the Log Odds of Eight Demographic Groups in Management Following
Personnel Innovations, by Contractor Status, 1971-2002.
White
Men
Guidelines
Hiring Guidelines -0.068 **
(0.022)
Among Contractors -0.002
(0.022)
White
Women
Black
Men
0.083 *** -0.029
(0.022) (0.020)
-0.023
(0.023)
0.009
(0.021)
Black
Women
Hispanic
Men
-0.054 ** -0.002
(0.019) (0.031)
-0.061 **
(0.019)
0.022
(0.032)
Hispanic
Women
-0.019
(0.027)
-0.050
(0.028)
Asian
Men
-0.024
(0.030)
0.072 *
(0.031)
Asian
Women
-0.028
(0.026)
0.007
(0.027)
Promotion Guidelines
Among Contractors
0.063 *
(0.026)
0.051 *
(0.025)
-0.070 **
(0.026)
-0.005
(0.026)
0.049 *
(0.024)
0.036
(0.022)
-0.070 ** -0.022
(0.024) (0.022)
0.079 *
(0.036)
-0.021
(0.036)
0.135 *** 0.069
(0.032)
-0.017
(0.032)
(0.036)
-0.129 ***
(0.035)
Discharge Guidelines
Among Contractors
0.005
(0.022)
-0.007
(0.023)
0.128 *** -0.030
(0.024) (0.025)
Procedural Innovations
Job Posting 0.007
(0.020)
Among Contractors -0.044 *
(0.021)
Job Description 0.016
(0.021)
0.050 *
(0.020)
0.070 **
(0.022)
0.005
(0.022)
-0.047 *
(0.022)
Among Contractors
Job Tests for Managers
0.023
(0.022)
0.027
(0.030)
Among Contractors -0.109 **
(0.037)
-0.140 ***
(0.030)
0.103 ** -0.037
(0.039)
0.010
(0.021)
-0.054 *
(0.022)
-0.034
(0.018)
0.041 *
(0.020)
-0.037
(0.020)
(0.020)
-0.142 ***
(0.028)
(0.035)
0.045 *
(0.019)
-0.023
(0.021)
-0.038 *
(0.017)
0.033
(0.032)
-0.023
(0.034)
-0.008
(0.028)
0.078 *** 0.014
(0.018)
-0.037 *
(0.018)
-0.065 ** -0.008
(0.019)
-0.153 ***
(0.026)
0.002
(0.032)
(0.030)
-0.049
(0.030)
-0.005
(0.031)
-0.150 ***
(0.042)
0.089
(0.053)
-0.004
(0.028)
-0.056
(0.030)
0.031
(0.025)
0.104 *** -0.011
(0.027)
-0.002
(0.027)
0.016
(0.027)
-0.180 ***
(0.037)
0.056
(0.047)
-0.009
(0.031)
-0.005
(0.034)
-0.028
(0.028)
(0.029)
-0.016
(0.030)
0.086 **
(0.030)
-0.104 *
(0.041)
0.074
(0.052)
-0.049
(0.031)
-0.020
(0.030)
0.004
(0.027)
-0.038
(0.029)
-0.025
(0.024)
-0.003
(0.025)
-0.025
(0.025)
0.057 *
(0.026)
-0.126 ***
(0.035)
-0.035
(0.045)
Job Ladders -0.136 *** 0.100 **
(0.033) (0.034)
Among Contractors -0.106 *** -0.008
(0.029) (0.029)
0.058
(0.031)
-0.013
(0.028)
0.130 *** 0.036
(0.027) (0.025)
-0.034
(0.047)
0.066
(0.040)
-0.094 *
(0.041)
0.068
(0.036)
-0.099 *
(0.046)
-0.012
(0.039)
0.196 *** 0.144 ***
(0.040) (0.034)
Salary Classification 0.010
(0.021)
Among Contractors -0.040
(0.022)
0.023
(0.021)
-0.015
(0.022)
0.014
(0.019)
0.006
(0.018)
0.087 *** 0.033
(0.020) (0.019)
-0.022
(0.029)
0.040
(0.031)
0.026
(0.026)
0.066 *
(0.027)
0.015
(0.029)
0.004
(0.030)
0.014
(0.025)
0.103 ***
(0.026)
Performance Evaluations 0.076 *** -0.113 *** -0.013
(0.022) (0.023) (0.021)
Among Contractors -0.049 *
(0.023)
Grievance Procedure 0.005
(0.020)
0.002
(0.023)
-0.058 **
(0.021)
0.037
(0.021)
-0.089 ***
(0.019)
0.018
(0.019)
-0.043 *
(0.019)
-0.062 ***
(0.018)
-0.038
(0.032)
-0.025
(0.032)
-0.075 **
(0.029)
-0.010
(0.028)
-0.047
(0.028)
-0.086 ***
(0.026)
0.019
(0.031)
-0.040
(0.031)
-0.147 ***
(0.028)
0.024
(0.027)
-0.099 ***
(0.027)
-0.024
(0.024)
0.008
(0.023)
-0.057 ** -0.033
(0.021) (0.019)
0.004
(0.032)
-0.008
(0.028)
-0.105 ** -0.073 **
(0.031) (0.027)
Among Contractors -0.023
(0.022)
Substantive Innovations
Recruitment Program
for Women
Recruitment Program
for Minorities
Management Training
-0.064 *
(0.027)
-0.036
(0.021)
-0.015
(0.014)
0.127 *** 0.082 *** 0.088 *** 0.069
(0.027)
0.032
(0.022)
0.054 ***
(0.015)
(0.025)
0.076 ***
(0.020)
0.014
(0.013)
(0.023)
0.085 ***
(0.018)
0.007
(0.012)
(0.038)
-0.016
(0.030)
0.017
(0.021)
0.104 **
(0.033)
0.016
(0.027)
0.012
(0.018)
0.182 *** 0.091 **
(0.037)
-0.025
(0.030)
0.035
(0.020)
(0.032)
0.036
(0.025)
-0.011
(0.017)
Recruit Women
to Mgt. Training
Recruit Minorities
to Mgt. Training
Federal Contract
Constant
-0.129 *** 0.137 *** -0.047
(0.035)
0.009
(0.035)
(0.036)
-0.004
(0.037)
(0.032)
-0.033
(0.033)
0.024
(0.030)
0.038
(0.031)
-0.037
(0.049)
0.057
(0.050)
0.010
(0.044)
-0.044
(0.045)
0.099 *** -0.009
(0.027) (0.028)
-0.096 *** -0.064 ** -0.160 *** -0.049
(0.025) (0.024) (0.039) (0.034)
0.174 *** -0.128 ** -0.022
(0.041) (0.042) (0.038)
0.015
(0.035)
-0.106
(0.058)
0.016
(0.051)
0.108 *
(0.048)
-0.065
(0.050)
-0.051
(0.041)
0.040
(0.042)
-0.103 ** -0.057
(0.038)
-0.023
(0.057)
(0.033)
0.003
(0.049)
R-Squared 0.3357
0.3123
0.2776
0.3622
0.3192
0.3386
0.3624
0.3787
* p<.05 ** p<.01 *** p<.001. N=816 organizations, 18.452 organizational spells. Coefficients for 38 control variables are reported in Appendix Table C. All models include fixed effects for year that are not reported. Standard errors are in parentheses.
42

Figure 1: White Men and Women in Management
Figure 2: Minority Men and Women in Management
43

Figure 3: Personnel Guidelines and Procedures
Figure 4: Recruitment and Management Training Programs
44

Figure 5: Estimates of the log odds of eight demographic groups in management following adoption of guidelines (top), procedural innovations (middle) and substantive innovations (bottom), 1971-2002, based on Table 2. Dots correspond the point estimates, and bars the 95% confidence intervals for the estimates. Estimates whose intervals do not cross zero are significant at .05 or better. For each race group estimates for men are on the left and estimates for women are on the right.
45

Figure 6: Estimates of the log odds of demographic eight groups in management following adoption of guidelines (top), procedural innovations (middle) and substantive innovations (bottom), among non-contractors and contractors, 1971-2002. Estimates among contractors (linear combinations of the practice coefficient and the interaction term) are shown below the estimates for each practice. Dots correspond to point estimates, and bars provide 95% confidence intervals. Estimates whose intervals do not cross zero are significant at .05 or better. For each race group, estimates for men are on the left and estimates for women are on the right.
46

Appendix Table A: Summary Statistics of Variables Reported in Appendix Tables. N=18,452.
Govt Contractor
Compl. Review
Advertise Jobs
Peer Evaluations
Managerial Ratio
Firm size
Union
Work/Fam Index a
HR Dept.
Af-Am. In Top Mgt b
Wom. In Top Mgt b
Industry WM
Industry WW
Industry BM
Industry BW
Industry HM
Industry HW
State WM
State WW
State BM
State BW
State HM
State HW
Legal Dept.
Lawsuit
EEOC Charge
Industry Size
Regional Unemp.
Contracts in Ind.
AA Plan
Diversity Comm.
EEO Staff
Div. Perf. Evals.
Diversity Training
Networking
Mentoring
Mean
0.481
0.145
0.449
0.096
0.124
SD
0.500
0.352
0.497
0.295
0.089
730.918
924.620
0.250
0.433
0.905
0.821
3.294
0.981
0.384
9.767
Min
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.002
Max
1.000 EEO-1/Survey
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.789
10.000 14195.000
0.000
1.000
Source
Survey
Survey
Survey
EEO-1
EEO-1
Survey
0.000
0.000
4.000
1.000
0.000
100.000
16.231
0.444
0.327
0.041
0.042
0.063
0.043
23.498
0.153
0.146
0.019
0.025
0.037
0.022
0.000
100.000
0.145
0.103
0.742
0.624
0.009
0.004
0.006
0.000
0.106
0.119
0.231
0.141
0.388
0.353
0.043
0.048
0.051
0.061
0.063
0.030
0.034
0.064
0.116
0.093
0.000
0.001
0.001
0.595
0.496
0.186
0.201
0.286
0.037
0.284
0.340
0.313
0.046
0.451
0.474
0.464
0.001
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.249
1.000
1.000
1.000
3747.232
2777.350
995.600 11457.900
6.152
2.032
2.000
18.000
0.487
0.449
0.048
0.070
0.066
0.104
0.064
0.035
0.226
0.497
0.213
0.256
0.247
0.305
0.245
0.184
0.061
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.821
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
Survey
Survey
Survey
Survey
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
CPS
Survey
Survey
Survey
CPS
BLS
EEO-1
Survey
Survey
Survey
Survey
Survey
Survey
Survey
Group in Non-Mgt.
White men
White women
Black men
Black women
Hispanic men
Hispanic women
Asian men
Asian women
0.407
0.384
0.052
0.057
0.041
0.027
0.014
0.014
0.253
0.253
0.091
0.097
0.098
0.064
0.036
0.034
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
1.000
1.000
0.940
0.893
0.897
0.735
0.656
0.493
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
Group in Core Job
White men
White women
Black men
Black women
Hispanic men
Hispanic women
Asian men
Asian women
0.385
0.388
0.056
0.061
0.044
0.032
0.014
0.017
0.316
0.320
0.108
0.113
0.115
0.086
0.042
0.050
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
1.000
1.000
0.963
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.794
1.000
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
None in Mgt.
White men
White women
Black men
Black women
Hispanic men
Hispanic women
Asian men
Asian women
0.007
0.125
0.551
0.711
0.664
0.815
0.708
0.841
0.082
0.331
0.497
0.453
0.472
0.388
0.455
0.366
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
0.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
1.000
a
Includes paid maternity leave, paid paternity leave, policy allowing flexible work hours and top management support for work-family balance.
b
Percents were obtained in 10 years intervals (2002, 1992 and 1982). Values for the years in between were interpolated using a linear function.
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
EEO-1
47

Appendix Table B: Estimates of the Log Odds of Eight Demographic Groups in Management
Following Personnel Innovations, 1971-2002. Controls for Model Presented in Table 2.
White White Black Black Hispanic Hispanic Asian Asian
Compl. Review
Advertise Jobs
Peer Evaluations
Managerial Ratio
Log firm size
Union
Work/Fam Index
HR Dept.
Af-Am. In Top Mgt
Wom. In Top Mgt
Industry WM
Industry WW
Industry BM
Industry BW
Industry HM
Industry HW
State WM
State WW
State BM
State BW
State HM
State HW
Group in Non-Mgt.
Group in Core Job
(0.024)
-0.094 ***
(0.019)
-0.076 ***
(0.016)
0.296
(0.369)
-2.981 ***
(0.346)
0.369
(0.738)
-2.078 ***
(0.603)
-2.264 ***
(0.631)
-0.814
(0.764)
1.240 ***
(0.059)
-0.119 ***
(0.035)
(0.008)
-0.031
(0.019)
-0.002
(0.001)
0.000
(0.001)
0.267 **
(0.084)
-0.055
(0.064)
-0.110 ***
(0.020)
-0.080 ***
Men
-0.075 ***
(0.019)
0.004
(0.018)
-0.034
(0.018)
-1.049 ***
(0.101)
-0.030 **
(0.011)
-0.012
(0.032)
-0.062 ***
(0.021)
0.130 ***
(0.016)
0.004
(0.014)
-0.543
(0.319)
-1.767 ***
(0.299)
-2.479 ***
(0.637)
1.997 ***
(0.521)
-0.848
(0.545)
-0.424
(0.660)
1.288 ***
(0.150)
-0.570 ***
(0.098)
(0.007)
-0.059 ***
(0.016)
0.007 ***
(0.001)
0.002 **
(0.001)
0.150 *
(0.073)
0.164 **
(0.056)
0.002
(0.017)
0.024
Women
0.008
(0.016)
0.002
(0.015)
0.004
(0.016)
-4.463 ***
(0.087)
-0.638 ***
(0.009)
-0.022
(0.027)
0.016 *
(0.023)
0.121 ***
(0.018)
0.006
(0.015)
-0.295
(0.344)
-1.272 ***
(0.323)
-3.988 ***
(0.688)
1.516 **
(0.562)
-0.756
(0.588)
-1.226
(0.712)
1.483 ***
(0.181)
0.289 *
(0.127)
(0.007)
-0.053 **
(0.018)
0.012 ***
(0.001)
-0.002 ***
(0.001)
0.400 ***
(0.078)
0.196 **
(0.060)
0.092 ***
(0.019)
0.013
Men
0.066 ***
(0.017)
-0.041 *
(0.017)
0.019
(0.017)
-3.915 ***
(0.094)
-0.480 ***
(0.010)
-0.048
(0.029)
-0.002
(0.025)
0.088 ***
(0.020)
0.072 ***
(0.016)
-0.541
(0.380)
3.111 ***
(0.357)
0.253
(0.760)
3.032 ***
(0.621)
1.187
(0.650)
1.307
(0.788)
1.347 ***
(0.064)
-0.175 ***
(0.037)
(0.008)
-0.061 **
(0.019)
-0.001
(0.001)
0.002 **
(0.001)
-0.198 *
(0.087)
0.156 *
(0.067)
0.087 ***
(0.021)
0.061 *
Women
0.062 **
(0.019)
-0.018
(0.018)
0.064 ***
(0.019)
0.478 ***
(0.104)
-0.017
(0.011)
-0.073 *
(0.032)
0.047 ***
(0.011)
-0.035
(0.027)
0.000
(0.002)
0.002 *
(0.001)
0.312 **
(0.120)
-0.090
(0.092)
0.061 *
(0.029)
-0.032
Men
0.049
(0.026)
0.074 **
(0.025)
-0.051 *
Women
0.019
(0.023)
-0.043
(0.022)
-0.042
Men
0.112 ***
(0.026)
-0.029
(0.025)
-0.018
(0.026) (0.023) (0.026)
-2.987 *** -3.918 *** -3.505 ***
(0.144) (0.127) (0.141)
-0.501 *** -0.611 *** -0.571 ***
(0.015) (0.014) (0.015)
0.036
(0.045)
0.007
0.016
(0.040)
0.021 *
0.031
(0.044)
0.056 ***
(0.010)
-0.045
(0.024)
-0.004 *
(0.002)
0.001
(0.001)
0.122
(0.106)
0.120
(0.081)
0.000
(0.025)
-0.025
(0.011)
-0.100 ***
(0.026)
-0.005 *
(0.002)
0.000
(0.001)
0.200
(0.117)
0.012
(0.090)
-0.003
(0.028)
-0.018
(0.034)
0.043
(0.027)
(0.031) (0.034)
0.095 *** -0.001
(0.024) (0.027)
0.013
(0.023)
-0.020
(0.020)
-1.794 *** -0.884
0.042
(0.022)
-0.910
(0.524) (0.464) (0.515)
-2.414 *** -2.061 *** -1.257 **
(0.492)
-2.342 *
(1.047)
-2.287 **
(0.855)
0.260
(0.436)
-0.821
(0.928)
-2.334 **
(0.758)
-1.876 *
(0.483)
-1.802
(1.029)
-0.231
(0.841)
-2.611 **
(0.897)
-0.943
(1.085)
(0.794)
4.539 ***
(0.964)
1.629 *** 2.473 ***
(0.302) (0.312)
0.155
-0.620 **
(0.222) (0.209)
(0.880)
4.734 ***
(1.068)
4.125 ***
(0.582)
0.324
(0.430)
(0.029)
0.135 ***
(0.023)
-0.011
(0.019)
-0.164
(0.441)
-2.403 ***
(0.414)
-0.640
(0.881)
-1.762 *
(0.720)
-1.246
(0.754)
1.552
(0.914)
4.741 ***
(0.489)
-0.502
(0.278)
(0.009)
-0.085 ***
(0.023)
-0.005 **
(0.002)
0.001
(0.001)
0.143
(0.100)
0.173 *
(0.077)
0.050 *
(0.024)
-0.007
Women
0.077 ***
(0.022)
0.028
(0.021)
0.031
(0.022)
-4.049 ***
(0.121)
-0.636 ***
(0.013)
-0.048
(0.038)
0.029 **
Continued
48

Appendix Table B Continued
Legal Dept.
Lawsuit
EEOC Charge
Industry Size
Regional Unemp.
Contracts in Ind.
AA Plan
Diversity Comm.
EEO Staff
Div. Perf. Evals.
White
Men
-0.079 ***
(0.022)
-0.083 ***
(0.014)
-0.009
(0.015)
0.000 ***
(0.000)
0.016 ***
(0.004)
0.586 ***
(0.121)
-0.069 ***
(0.015)
-0.102 ***
(0.025)
0.006
(0.027)
0.063 *
(0.026)
White
Women
0.135 ***
(0.023)
0.120 ***
(0.015)
0.015
(0.016)
0.000 ***
(0.000)
-0.025 ***
(0.004)
-0.627 ***
(0.124)
0.053 ***
(0.016)
0.160 ***
(0.026)
0.061 *
(0.028)
0.021
(0.026)
Black
Men
0.040 *
(0.020)
0.024
(0.013)
0.050 ***
(0.014)
0.000 *
(0.000)
0.001
(0.003)
0.166
(0.113)
0.036 *
(0.014)
0.104 ***
(0.024)
0.143 ***
(0.025)
-0.088 ***
(0.024)
Black
Women
0.000
(0.019)
0.034 **
(0.012)
0.014
(0.013)
0.000
(0.000)
-0.011 ***
(0.003)
-0.307 **
(0.104)
-0.004
(0.013)
0.227 ***
(0.022)
0.161 ***
(0.023)
-0.026
(0.022)
Hispanic
Men
0.036
(0.031)
0.046 *
(0.021)
0.042
(0.022)
0.000 **
(0.000)
-0.012 *
(0.005)
0.286
(0.172)
0.061 **
(0.022)
-0.035
(0.038)
0.052
(0.036)
Hispanic
Women
-0.011
(0.028)
0.001
(0.018)
0.043 *
(0.019)
0.000
(0.000)
-0.010 *
(0.005)
-0.258
(0.152)
0.028
(0.019)
0.153 *** 0.157 ***
(0.036) (0.032)
0.195 ***
(0.034)
0.017
(0.032)
Diversity Training
Networking
Mentoring
None in Mgt.
Constant
-0.013
(0.020)
-0.072 **
(0.025)
0.006
(0.032)
-0.323 ***
(0.042)
0.170 ***
(0.041)
-0.026
(0.020)
0.068 **
(0.026)
-0.010
(0.033)
-0.202 ***
(0.011)
-0.123 **
(0.042)
0.053 **
(0.018)
-0.063 **
(0.023)
0.055
(0.030)
-0.571 ***
(0.010)
-0.024
(0.038)
-0.057 ***
(0.017)
0.014
(0.022)
0.165 ***
(0.027)
-0.649 ***
(0.010)
0.010
(0.035)
0.028
(0.028)
0.078 *
(0.036)
0.031
(0.025)
0.012
(0.032)
0.034
(0.027)
0.038
(0.035)
0.080
(0.045)
0.222 ***
(0.040)
0.178 ***
(0.044)
-1.413 *** -1.389 *** -1.509 ***
(0.017)
-0.107
(0.058)
R-Squared 0.3335
0.3100
0.2752
0.3600
* p<.05 ** p<.01 *** p<.001. N=816 organizations, 18,452 organizational spells.
0.3179
All models include fixed effects for year that are not reported. Standard errors are in parentheses.
(0.017)
0.008
(0.051)
0.3366
(0.017)
-0.031
(0.057)
0.3599
Asian
Men
0.053
(0.031)
0.000
(0.020)
0.064 **
(0.021)
0.000 **
(0.000)
-0.018 ***
(0.005)
-0.247
(0.169)
0.055 **
(0.021)
0.260 ***
(0.035)
0.067
(0.037)
-0.096 **
(0.036)
Asian
Women
0.013
(0.026)
-0.017
(0.017)
0.035
(0.018)
0.000 **
(0.000)
-0.011 **
(0.004)
-0.267
(0.144)
-0.018
(0.018)
0.247 ***
(0.030)
0.180 ***
(0.032)
0.017
(0.030)
0.005
(0.023)
0.032
(0.030)
0.257 ***
(0.038)
-1.484 ***
(0.017)
0.001
(0.049)
0.3771
49

Appendix Table C: Estimates of the Log Odds of Eight Demographic Groups in Management
Following Personnel Innovations, by Contractor Status, 1971-2002. Controls for Model
Presented in Table 3.
Compl. Review
White
Men
-0.078 ***
White
Women
0.070 ***
Black
Men
0.046 *
Black
Women
-0.005
Hispanic
Men
0.018
Hispanic
Women
0.005
Asian
Men
0.071 **
Asian
Women
0.051 *
Advertise Jobs
Peer Evaluations
Managerial Ratio
Log firm size
Union
Work/Fam Index
HR Dept.
Af-Am. In Top Mgt
Wom. In Top Mgt
Industry WM
Industry WW
Industry BM
Industry BW
Industry HM
Industry HW
State WM
State WW
State BM
State BW
State HM
State HW
Group in Non-Mgt.
Group in Core Job
(0.065)
-0.111 ***
(0.020)
-0.082 ***
(0.024)
-0.087 ***
(0.019)
-0.075 ***
(0.016)
0.279
(0.369)
-2.985 ***
(0.346)
0.310
(0.737)
-1.947 **
(0.602)
-2.301 ***
(0.631)
-0.820
(0.764)
1.232 ***
(0.059)
-0.111 **
(0.035)
(0.020)
0.006
(0.018)
-0.032
(0.018)
-1.073 ***
(0.101)
-0.034 **
(0.011)
-0.005
(0.032)
(0.020)
-0.022
(0.018)
0.062 **
(0.018)
-0.041 *
(0.017)
0.020
(0.017)
0.003
(0.015)
0.006
(0.028)
0.072 **
(0.025)
-0.050
(0.025)
-0.045 *
(0.022)
-0.040
(0.027)
-0.034
(0.025)
-0.015
(0.023)
0.032
(0.021)
0.032
(0.019) (0.017) (0.016) (0.026) (0.023) (0.026) (0.022)
0.509 *** -3.913 *** -4.474 *** -2.981 *** -3.927 *** -3.526 *** -4.056 ***
(0.104)
-0.015
(0.094)
-0.476 ***
(0.087)
-0.637 ***
(0.144)
-0.499 ***
(0.127)
-0.609 ***
(0.141)
-0.570 ***
(0.121)
-0.637 ***
(0.011)
-0.077 *
(0.033)
(0.010)
-0.045
(0.029)
(0.009)
-0.018
(0.027)
(0.015)
0.036
(0.045)
(0.014)
0.023
(0.040)
(0.015)
0.039
(0.044)
(0.013)
-0.046
(0.038)
-0.064 ***
(0.008)
-0.040 *
(0.019)
-0.002
(0.001)
0.000
(0.001)
0.047 ***
(0.008)
-0.049 *
(0.020)
-0.002
(0.001)
0.002 *
(0.001)
0.297 *** -0.220 *
(0.084) (0.087)
-0.034
0.139 *
-0.002
(0.007)
-0.046 **
(0.018)
0.012 ***
(0.001)
-0.002 ***
(0.001)
0.369 ***
(0.079)
0.181 **
0.015 *
(0.007)
0.007 ***
(0.001)
0.002 **
(0.001)
0.132
(0.073)
0.157 **
0.006
(0.011)
-0.055 *** -0.024
(0.016) (0.027)
0.000
(0.002)
0.002 *
(0.001)
0.278 *
(0.120)
-0.099
0.020 *
(0.010)
-0.037
(0.024)
-0.004 *
(0.002)
0.001
(0.001)
0.104
(0.106)
0.112
0.054 ***
(0.011)
-0.093 *** -0.088 ***
(0.026) (0.023)
-0.004 *
(0.002)
0.000
(0.001)
0.179
(0.118)
0.011
0.032 ***
(0.009)
-0.005 **
(0.002)
0.001
(0.001)
0.136
(0.101)
0.186 *
(0.067)
0.087 ***
(0.021)
0.063 *
(0.025)
0.083 ***
(0.020)
0.069 ***
(0.357)
0.303
(0.759)
2.875 ***
(0.621)
1.197
(0.650)
1.278
(0.787)
1.335 ***
(0.064)
-0.167 ***
(0.037)
(0.060)
0.093 ***
(0.019)
0.014
(0.023)
0.119 ***
(0.018)
0.006
(0.016)
-0.525
(0.015)
-0.262
(0.014)
-0.531
(0.023) (0.020)
-1.771 *** -0.854
(0.022)
-0.894
(0.379) (0.343) (0.318) (0.523) (0.464) (0.515)
3.078 *** -1.224 *** -1.740 *** -2.394 *** -2.012 *** -1.208 *
(0.323)
-3.957 *** -2.524 *** -2.366 *
(0.687)
1.530 **
(0.562)
-0.677
(0.588)
-1.228
(0.712)
1.468 ***
(0.181)
0.301 *
(0.127)
(0.056)
0.003
(0.017)
0.026
(0.021)
0.128 ***
(0.016)
0.006
(0.299)
(0.637)
2.031 ***
(0.521)
-0.852
(0.545)
-0.419
(0.659)
1.268 ***
(0.150)
-0.566 ***
(0.098)
(0.092)
0.062 *
(0.029)
-0.029
(0.034)
0.042
(0.027)
0.014
(0.492)
(1.047)
-2.255 **
(0.856)
0.326
(0.897)
-0.956
(1.085)
1.632 ***
(0.302)
0.160
(0.222)
(0.081)
0.001
(0.025)
-0.023
(0.030)
0.094 ***
(0.024)
-0.018
(0.436)
-0.848
(0.927)
-2.274 **
(0.758)
-1.805 *
(0.794)
4.607 ***
(0.963)
2.492 ***
(0.312)
-0.641 **
(0.209)
(0.090)
-0.002
(0.028)
-0.015
(0.034)
0.003
(0.027)
0.045 *
(0.483)
-1.902
(1.027)
-0.032
(0.840)
-2.486 **
(0.880)
4.722 ***
(1.067)
4.065 ***
(0.582)
0.342
(0.430)
(0.077)
0.051 *
(0.024)
-0.005
(0.029)
0.138 ***
(0.023)
-0.007
(0.019)
-0.198
(0.440)
-2.454 ***
(0.415)
-0.799
(0.880)
-1.700 *
(0.720)
-1.367
(0.755)
1.600
(0.913)
4.665 ***
(0.489)
-0.471
(0.278)
Continued
50

Appendix Table C Continued
Legal Dept.
Lawsuit
EEOC Charge
Industry Size
Regional Unemp.
Contracts in Ind.
AA Plan
Diversity Comm.
EEO Staff
Div. Perf. Evals.
Diversity Training
Networking
White
Men
-0.072 **
White
Women
0.129 ***
(0.022)
-0.082 ***
(0.014)
-0.010
(0.023)
0.121 ***
(0.015)
0.015
(0.015)
0.000 ***
(0.016)
0.000 ***
(0.000) (0.000)
0.017 *** -0.027 ***
(0.004) (0.004)
0.609 *** -0.648 ***
(0.121)
-0.062 ***
(0.125)
0.052 **
(0.015)
-0.100 ***
(0.025)
0.016
(0.027)
0.058 *
(0.025)
-0.013
(0.020)
-0.072 **
(0.025)
(0.016)
0.156 ***
(0.026)
0.059 *
(0.028)
0.029
(0.026)
-0.021
(0.020)
0.069 **
(0.026)
Black
Men
0.035
(0.021)
0.024
(0.013)
0.051 ***
(0.014)
0.000 *
(0.000)
0.001
(0.003)
0.105
(0.113)
0.027
Black
Women
-0.005
(0.019)
0.035 **
(0.013)
0.015
Hispanic
Men
0.027
(0.031)
0.049 *
(0.021)
0.043 *
(0.013)
0.000
(0.022)
0.000 **
(0.000) (0.000)
-0.011 *** -0.012 *
(0.003)
-0.342 **
(0.105)
-0.010
(0.005)
0.209
(0.173)
0.050 *
(0.014)
0.107 ***
(0.024)
0.131 ***
(0.013)
0.225 ***
(0.022)
0.152 ***
(0.022) (0.036)
0.155 *** -0.046
(0.025) (0.023)
-0.089 *** -0.023
(0.024)
0.052 **
(0.022)
-0.058 ***
(0.038)
0.052
(0.036)
0.027
(0.018)
-0.070 **
(0.023)
(0.017)
0.008
(0.022)
(0.028)
0.068
(0.036)
Hispanic
Women
-0.018
(0.028)
0.001
(0.018)
0.044 *
(0.019)
0.000
(0.000)
-0.010 *
(0.005)
-0.323 *
(0.153)
0.023
(0.019)
0.155 ***
(0.032)
0.185 ***
(0.034)
0.016
(0.032)
0.031
(0.025)
0.002
(0.032)
Asian
Men
0.049
Asian
Women
0.006
(0.031)
0.003
(0.020)
0.064 **
(0.026)
-0.015
(0.017)
0.034
(0.021)
0.000 *
(0.018)
0.000 **
(0.000) (0.000)
-0.017 *** -0.011 *
(0.005)
-0.328
(0.169)
0.044 *
(0.004)
-0.284 *
(0.145)
-0.026
(0.022)
0.262 ***
(0.035)
0.055
(0.038)
-0.104 **
(0.036)
0.031
(0.027)
0.026
(0.035)
(0.018)
0.246 ***
(0.030)
0.181 ***
(0.032)
0.016
(0.030)
0.001
(0.023)
0.020
(0.030)
Mentoring
None in Mgt.
Constant
R-Squared
0.009
(0.032)
-0.017
(0.033)
0.058 *
(0.030)
0.164 ***
(0.027)
0.083
(0.045)
0.227 ***
(0.040)
0.190 ***
(0.044)
0.262 ***
(0.038)
-0.325 *** -0.199 *** -0.570 *** -0.649 *** -1.411 *** -1.384 *** -1.505 *** -1.480 ***
(0.042) (0.011) (0.010) (0.010) (0.017) (0.017) (0.017) (0.017)
0.174 *** -0.128 **
(0.041)
0.3357
(0.042)
0.3123
-0.022
(0.038)
0.2776
0.015
(0.035)
0.3622
* p<.05 ** p<.01 *** p<.001. N=816 organizations, 18,452 organizational spells.
-0.106
(0.058)
0.3192
All models include fixed effects for year that are not reported. Standard errors are in parentheses.
0.016
(0.051)
0.3386
-0.023
(0.057)
0.3624
0.003
(0.049)
0.3787
51

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