What Happens to Minority Women When We Eliminate Affirmative Action?

President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 in 1961 introducing Affirmative Action to the American workplace. More than 40 years later, the ramifications still deeply affect millions of lives. Affirmative Action was a way to provide a more level playing field for groups that faced systemic discrimination. It initially included protected groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, but President Johnson extended it to include women as well. It had positive employment and occupational advancement effect, especially for minority women, allowing them to participate in work spheres that were previously inaccessible to them (Kurtulus 2012, Kurtulus 2015).

In 1996, California became the first state to repeal Affirmative Action in state and local government employment with the passing of Proposition 209. In the next years, other states such as Washington, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and New Hampshire did away with it as well. In this week's HKS WAPPP Seminar, Dr. Fidan Ana Kurtulus, Associate Professor Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, talked about her latest paper, which looks at the consequences of these bans on minority and female employment.

Professor Fidan Ana Kurtulus, UMASS Amherst

The repeals of Affirmative Action in these states presented the opportunity to study what researchers refer to as a 'natural experiment'. The bans were an exogenous shock that allowed Kurtulus to study the before and after share of minorities and women in the workforce of state and local government agencies where the bans went into effect as compared to the before and after shares of minority employment in places where Affirmative Action remained in place.

Another unique feature of her research is the dataset she worked with. The EEO-4 dataset has not been generally available to researches. It is a dataset that contains the demographic characteristics of  employees of state and local agencies, and covers a long time span, from 1990 to 2009. “There had not been any scientific researchers that had used these data in its full form”, explained Kurtulus, adding that she was excited to be working with this resource.

And while the dataset itself is interesting, the results of her research are even more so. Kurtulus found that once Affirmative Action is repealed, the share of Hispanic men that work in state or local government decreases by 7%; the share of black women goes down by 4%, and the share of Asian women is reduced by 37%. The figure for Asian women might seem disproportionately large but she explained that the reason for this is that there were very few Asian women in that workforce to begin with, so any change would produce a large effect. In all, the loss of workplace diversity is significant.

 “Can these results say anything to people that oppose Affirmative Action?" Kurtulus asked, and answered her own question with an emphatic 'yes', this is "data driven evidence on the implications of removing Affirmative Action". In addition, the findings are very timely. "It is very timely because other states are considering the possibility of banning Affirmative Action... A lot of the debate is really being driven by rhetoric that is not empirical in nature", she commented. This research can bridge that gap, so we can hold a debate on this issue that is better informed.

Heroes and Sheroes - Inspiring Women's Political Participation

All of us have heroes. People we’ve seen succeed; whom we want to emulate. When we have something in common with those heroes, it’s even more inspiring: that success feels even more tangible because, “if they can do it, so can I!”

But female political heroes are unfortunately too difficult to come by. Women represent over half of the population in most countries. And when women are involved in policy-making, there are often better education, health, and economic mobility outcomes for the whole society. Yet women make up only 11% of elected political office in India, 18% in the US, and 22% in the UK and China! Getting a few more women---even by quotas---should inspire others to participate too, right?

At today’s WAPPP Seminar, Lakshmi Iyer of Harvard Business School presented her research on “Path Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success?” Professor Iyer and her colleagues look at state level elections in India to see whether simply having women candidates run and succeed affects whether more women will try to run in the future. They crunch a lot of interesting data, and conclude that there is, in fact, an increase in the number of women who run as candidates after they see other women succeed.

But in looking at some of the details, they also find that most of this increase is simply because earlier female candidates run again (rather than new women necessarily getting inspired), and that there’s no impact on whether more women will vote.

If you want to increase and sustain the number of women in higher elected office, simply encouraging quotas---a requirement on the number of women in an elected body---may not be the best way. In India, the nature of democracy may be a stranger impediment: parties tend to select candidates not based on their aptitude or ideology, but by their "winnability"---which often includes association or family connections. Leaving the process to itself, according to Professor Iyer, may not change the situation for generations.

Yet the effect of their presence---even if enforced by quotas---on policy-making may be an important factor. If the mere presence a woman on a governing body can have a tangible influence on how that organization functions and what it does, it might well be worth it, regardless of how she got there.

Professors Are Biased Too

An ordinary e-mail once caught the eye of Modupe Akinola,Assistant Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. It was from a prospective Ph.D. student, an African-American woman, asking for a meeting.

Dr. Akinola wondered: “Would I have reacted differently if this was from a man? Would it make a difference if the request was for today and not next week?” She joined with colleagues Katherine Milkman and DollyChugh to turn these questions into research questions in a field experiment measuring discrimination in academia.

The creative and elaborate experiment started with putting together a representative sample of over 6,500 faculty members from 260 universities. The team used publicly available demographic information on professors to ensure a good sample. The researchers then created a few prospective Ph.D. students. The names of these imaginary students were tested and proved to be easily recognizable as either male or female and as Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese.

At 8:00 am on a Monday, e-mails from Brad Andersons, Latoya Browns and 18 others went out to unsuspecting subjects, asking to meet “today” in half the cases and “next Monday” in the other half. The research team was impressed by how quickly most faculty wrote back and how often they agreed to meet, but when and with whom they agreed to meet was more interesting.

One would think academia, with its affirmative action and enlightened world views, might be a post-racial, post-gender sphere. As it turns out – not so much, especially not when there is time to think about it.

In the now condition, Akinola, Milkman and Chugh found no significant difference between number of responses to white males and to others, but when the request was for later, white men received both more responses and more meeting acceptances than any other prospective students. The white men fared better than all other racial categories across almost all disciplines. The effect remained even when the race or gender of faculty and student matched.

According to construal level theory (CLT) immediate events demand concrete reasoning focused on feasibility, whereas decisions about distant events trigger abstract thinking and a focus on desirability of the event. Thus, future events create more room for unconscious stereotypes and biases to enter the decision-making process. In this study, for instance, the responses received to the “now” requests systematically displayed a focus on “how,” whereas the “later” e-mails were more likely to be answered with a request for credentials or more information – a “why” response.

The point of this experiment and other studies that spotlight the influence of stereotypes and biases on consequential decisions is not to call people racist or sexist. The point is to come up with ways to address the biases and to improve minority outcomes. For instance, referring all prospective students to the Ph.D. program coordinator would take the burden off individual professors and ensure that all students get their questions answered. This is just one option that an experiment like this might bring up for discussion.

Unfortunately, some faculty did not take kindly to the experiment. When debriefed and told that they had been used in a study of bias, many expressed outrage and demanded to speak with the Institutional Review Board.

To me, their reaction suggests the thorny subjects of race and gender are not studied enough in academia. Perhaps academia, more so than other spheres, makes it taboo to have biases, but shaming does not make biases go away! Nobody wants to be called a racist or sexist, not even a little bit, but simply feeling guilty is not productive. We can structure decision-making in ways that level the playing field, and we need creative researchers like Akinola, Milkman and Chugh to make that happen.

Anya Malkov is an MPP2 at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.

When Affirmative Action Works. When it doesn’t.

The Woman: Johanna Mollerstrom, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Economics

The Talk: The Downside of Affirmative Action

The Question: Do quotas negatively impact group dynamics?

Discussions around quotas and affirmative action policies can polarize conversations. At their core, we find ourselves asking, “Is this a ‘fair’ way to increase representation?”

The Research from Mollerstrom finds that when groups are created via a quota system, the amount of cooperation within the group decreases. While I won’t go into the details of the study (and more research is still in progress), she essentially hypothesizes three reasons why this may happen:

1. Mood: If a person believes it is unfair for someone to be in the group, then he or she is less likely to cooperate.
2. Entitlement: If a person is in the group for reasons besides credentials or merit, then resentment may occur.
3. Punishment: If a person follows the a type of in-group-out-group bias, then he or she may favor his or her respective in-group.

While few in the United States promote the idea of a quota – the argument being that it tokenizes diversity and discredits qualifications – the current numbers are pretty stark. Only 17 percent of the US Congress is female; women constitute only 3.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs; and women hold only 16.1 percent of Fortune 500 board seats.

But globally these numbers are not much better. On average, women hold 19.5 percent of parliamentary seats and represent only 9.8 percent of board members (with this number swinging from less than 1 percent in Japan to 35.6 percent in Norway). Quotas are often discussed as an option to increase representation and parity. In 2006 Norway imposed a quota system that requires companies to have 40 percent of their board to be women. This past January, France joined them.

Is this about diversity, or how this diversity came to be?

While many are doing research in this field, the discussion around why we believe certain groups deserve representation is culturally and socially fascinating. For example, in the US, we consider the athletic quotas that stem from Title IX to be completely acceptable. Why is this? Why are we okay with some quotas, but not others?

Mollerstrom is doing more research around this question. Perhaps it’s rooted in historical legacies. Perhaps it depends on whether the environment is competitive or cooperative. Or perhaps it’s framing and relevance. Regardless, I will be interested to see what she finds next.

Melissa Sandgren is a MPP1 at the Harvard Kennedy School and a participant in WAPPP's From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program. She is also the author of the "For Struggling Boards, the Answer May Be Closer than You Think" in the 2012 Kennedy School Review.