HR's race row

HR's diversity

One of HR's most defining attributes is often its desire to be an industry that thrives on diversity, but new evidence suggests human resources may not be as tolerant as it thinks.

The news comes after the publication of a recent study in the Journal of Labor Statistics, which claims that the race or ethnicity of managers making hiring decisions can often have a strong impact on the racial makeup of a company's workforce.

The report - based on data from a large retail chain - looked at stores where a change in management had also resulted in the change of ethnicity for the hiring manager, thereby offering the researchers a comparison between the hiring patterns of consecutive managers of different races within the same store.

The results are particularly interesting, finding that when a black manager is replaced by either a white, Asian or Hispanic manager, the share of newly hired black employees drops by four percent, from 21 to 17.

Worryingly, contrasting results show how the share of white workers hired rises from 60 to 64 percent.

Diversity

While the researchers try to offer possible explanations behind the differences, whatever way you look at it, the findings offer significant issues for HR leaders.

The researchers suggest all managers tend to hire people who live close to them, meaning that if black managers live in predominantly black neighborhoods, they are more likely to have a predominantly black hiring network.

But the study also raises the issue that black managers may hire fewer whites because whites may be less willing to work for black managers. In fact, the study found that when a white manager is replaced with a black manager, the rate at which white workers quit their jobs increases by 15 percent.

According to Laura Giuliano of the University of Miami, who co-authored the study with both David Levine and Jonathan Leonard from the University of California, Berkeley: "We interpret the white quit rate increase as evidence of discriminatory sorting by white jobseekers.

"It implies that whites who dislike working for black managers often avoid working for black managers in the first place."

Its a worrying statistic, and one that hardly promotes diversity.

Inclusion

Of course, while this particular study only looks at the how the issue is impacted by race or ethnicity, there is a chance that similar patterns may exist in terms of gender or sexual orientation.

For instance, there has long been a fight from female leaders, a push from female executives, looking to find their place at the table of some of Corporate America's biggest firms. BusinessWeek, in fact, currently offers a Special Report on the relationship between women and leadership.

But, despite this drive having previously been welcomed by HR, it could be intoned from the findings of this new report that a similar trend could be present in the reign of a female leader. In other words, when a female manager comes in, can we assume that more females are hired? That more men leave - unhappy about working underneath a female executive?

Of course, these concerns are merely speculative, but they do seem fair.

After all, for HR to really call itself "diverse," surely it needs to address the existing ethnicity gap - and, potentially, other areas as well - so that managers really can offer the inclusive workforces the industry seems so intent on perpetuating.

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