Custodes Futurifor the advancement of humanity

Societal factor, barrier 4 of 6

Discrimination and exclusion

Barriers based on race, gender, class, disability, or other characteristics prevent people from using their abilities. Field experiments, which send identical applications that differ only in a signal such as a name, give direct evidence on hiring. Exclusion also works through legal rules, funding decisions, who teaches, and across generations.

Evidence

  • U.S. hiring. A meta-analysis of 28 field experiments (55,842 applications) found that since 1989 white applicants received on average 36% more callbacks than African Americans and 24% more than Latinos. There was no change for African Americans over 25 years (Quillian et al., 2017).
  • Large employers. More than 83,000 fictitious applications to 108 large U.S. employers found distinctively Black names reduced the chance of contact by 2.1 percentage points. Discrimination was concentrated in a minority of firms (Kline, Rose, and Walters, 2022).
  • Wasted talent. In 1960, 94% of U.S. doctors and lawyers were white men, against 62% in 2010. A model-based study estimated that better allocation of talent explains 20% to 40% of U.S. growth in output per person over that period (Hsieh et al., 2019).
  • Limits of callback studies. Callbacks capture only the first step, and a methodological critique (Heckman and Siegelman, 1993) suggests gaps can be misstated in either direction. Reanalyses using a correction by Neumark (2012) found most estimates robust, though a Swedish reanalysis found the critique mattered for some studies.
  • Law, funding, and schools. Women have about two-thirds (67%) of the legal rights of men worldwide (World Bank, 2026). Black applicants' chance of winning a major NIH grant was about 10 percentage points lower than white applicants' (Ginther et al., 2011), though an unexplained gap is not by itself proof of reviewer bias. Black students randomly assigned a Black teacher in early grades were 13% more likely to graduate from high school (Gershenson et al., 2022).
  • Gaps across generations. In U.S. tax and census records, Black boys have lower adult incomes than white boys from comparable-income families in 99% of Census tracts (Chetty et al., 2020). Studies of redlining and mortgage lending also find persistent gaps, though they do not each identify present-day discrimination as the sole cause, and later research disputes whether the 1930s lending maps themselves caused the gaps (Fishback et al., 2021).

Proposed and experimental methods

Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the societal factor page.

  • Search help for families with housing vouchers, Creating Moves to Opportunity (Large trial, B). Helping voucher families move to high-opportunity neighborhoods addresses exclusion by place. See "Inequality and limited mobility" in the economic factors for the trial results.
  • Firm-level discrimination audits for enforcement (Theoretical, B). Correspondence audits send matched fake applications that differ only in names. In 83,000 applications to 108 large U.S. employers, applications with distinctively Black names got about 2.1 percentage points less contact, gaps varied widely by company and persisted over time, and 23 companies could be identified as discriminating against Black applicants (Kline et al., 2022). The authors suggest such firm-level audits as a tool for targeting enforcement, which has not yet been tested.
  • Legal reform of women's economic rights (Approved but not scaled, C). In Ethiopia, a family law reform that gave wives more access to marital property and removed limits on working outside the home was rolled out first in some regions, and women there became significantly more likely to work outside the home and in paid full-time jobs (Hallward-Driemeier and Gajigo, 2015). Worldwide, women have about 64% of the legal protections men have, and countries have on average set up less than 40% of the systems needed to implement equal-opportunity laws (World Bank, 2024).
  • Mandatory bias audits of hiring algorithms, NYC Local Law 144 (Approved but not scaled, contested, C). New York City's law was the first to require bias audits of automated hiring tools and public posting of results. Student investigators who checked 391 employers found only 18 audit reports and 13 transparency notices, partly because employers decide for themselves whether a tool falls under the law (Wright et al., 2024).
  • Failed: Anonymous résumés (Failed or reversed, B). Removing names and other identifying details from applications is meant to stop bias. In a French public employment service experiment, firms that volunteered were randomly given anonymous or named résumés, and those receiving anonymous résumés were less likely to interview and hire minority candidates, possibly because anonymization stopped firms from discounting negative signals for minority applicants (Behaghel et al., 2015).

Sources cited on this page

  1. Quillian, L., Pager, D., Hexel, O., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2017). Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time. PNAS, 114(41), 10870-10875. DOI A Strong: for the callback gap
  2. Quillian, L., Heath, A., Pager, D., Midtbøen, A. H., Fleischmann, F., & Hexel, O. (2019). Do some countries discriminate more than others? Evidence from 97 field experiments of racial discrimination in hiring. Sociological Science, 6, 467-496. Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality A Strong: for the existence of discrimination, B for country rankings
  3. Kline, P., Rose, E. K., & Walters, C. R. (2022). Systemic discrimination among large U.S. employers. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(4), 1963-2036. DOI B Moderate
  4. Hsieh, C.-T., Hurst, E., Jones, C. I., & Klenow, P. J. (2019). The allocation of talent and U.S. economic growth. Econometrica, 87(5), 1439-1474. DOI A Strong: for occupational shares, C for the 20% to 40% growth share
  5. World Bank (2026). Women, Business and the Law 2026 B Moderate: for legal rights, C for enforcement perceptions
  6. Ginther, D. K., Schaffer, W. T., Schnell, J., Masimore, B., Liu, F., Haak, L. L., & Kington, R. (2011). Race, ethnicity, and NIH research awards. Science, 333(6045), 1015-1019. DOI A Strong: for the gap
  7. Neumark, D. (2012). Detecting discrimination in audit and correspondence studies. Journal of Human Resources, 47(4), 1128-1157. JHR B Moderate
  8. Chetty, R., Hendren, N., Jones, M. R., & Porter, S. R. (2020). Race and economic opportunity in the United States: an intergenerational perspective. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(2), 711-783. Opportunity Insights A Strong: for the gaps, B for explanations
  9. Fishback, P., Rose, J., Snowden, K. A., & Storrs, T. (2022). New evidence on redlining by federal housing programs in the 1930s. Journal of Urban Economics, 103462. DOI (working paper version: NBER Working Paper 29244) B Moderate
  10. Gershenson, S., Hart, C. M. D., Hyman, J., Lindsay, C. A., & Papageorge, N. W. (2022). The long-run impacts of same-race teachers. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 14(4), 300-342. DOI A Strong: for the effect, C for the mechanism
  11. Walter, B. F., Howard, L. M., & Fortna, V. P. (2021). The extraordinary relationship between peacekeeping and peace. British Journal of Political Science, 51(4), 1705-1722. link B Moderate
  12. Behaghel, L., Crépon, B., & Le Barbanchon, T. (2015). Unintended effects of anonymous résumés. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(3), 1-27. link B Moderate
  13. Hallward-Driemeier, M., & Gajigo, O. (2015). Strengthening economic rights and women's occupational choice: The impact of reforming Ethiopia's family law. World Development, 70, 260-273. link C Limited
  14. Wright, L., Muenster, R. M., Vecchione, B., Qu, T., Cai, P., Smith, A., et al. (2024). Null compliance: NYC Local Law 144 and the challenges of algorithm accountability. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 1701-1713). link C Limited

Every source for this factor is listed on the societal factor page.