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Abstract
We explore the extent of employment inequalities between Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Latina) women (and their coethnics) in public sector managerial positions in multiethnic US cities. Our analysis of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data from 1987 and 2001 indicates that all groups of women suffer from underrepresentation at the administrator level, especially in agencies that have regulatory and distributive policy commitments, but that Latinas and African American women show the lowest levels of representation. Moreover, Latinas and African American women are substantially underrepresented among professional workforces in almost all municipal departments; however, white (non-Latina) women achieve parity in many cities. Among pairs of coethnics (e.g. African American females versus African American males), we find that males are usually better represented than females, but even in multiethnic cities large disparities remain between white males and all other groups in the ability to claim and retain the most prestigious municipal government positions. We are concerned that the continuing lack of progress made by members of traditionally disadvantaged groups may further compromise the representativeness and legitimacy of bureaucracies in many multiethnic cites—and may also present a serious barrier to addressing important public policy challenges in these cities.
An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Southwestern Political Science Association, New Orleans, LA, March 27–30, 2002. The authors wish to thank the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Office of Research, Information, and Planning, for providing data for this study. We also thank Dr. Ronald Edwards of the EEOC for helpful comments.
Notes
1. The data we use for this analysis were obtained from reports filed by municipal governments with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The “Hispanic” category combines the three major Latino groups—Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans—as well as most other Spanish-speaking groups, into what is in effect, a single ethnic category. The aggregation of these different groups may, in some respects, be unfortunate; however, these data constitute the most complete set of US municipal-level employment indicators available.
2. Many studies that examine both race/ethnic and gender employment patterns draw on sociological or economics perspectives and rely on national workforce data. These data include primarily private sector positions. Although our primary concern is public sector employment patterns, we find it useful to review briefly some of the recent findings based on national workforce data. CitationBound and Dresser (1999) find that between 1973 and 1989 the wage gap between Black women and white women increased primarily because of industrial restructuring. Similar to the findings for Blacks, the economic fortunes of women of Mexican origin deteriorated between 1970 and 1990 (CitationCorcoran, Heflin, and Reyes 1999). Other studies using national workforce data find that Latinas and African American women face dual constraints on their opportunities: they are segregated into the lower paying female dominated positions, and they are further drawn into occupations that are heavily represented by coethnics (CitationReskin 1993; CitationBrowne, Tigges, and Press 2001). Similarly, the Department of Labor in its study of corporate glass ceilings found that both women and race/ethnic minorities were typically tracked into positions such as human resources, corporate research, and/or administration, positions that typically did not have a direct impact on corporate earnings (CitationUS Department of Labor 1991).
3. CitationDaley (1996) also examines federal public sector ethnic-gender categories with workforce data that combine all women into two categories, minority female and white female. He finds that women and minorities are much more dependent on formal, objective factors such as education, prior experience, and performance ratings for their career success than are their white male colleagues (CitationDaley 1996, 143). Also, jobs held by women and minorities are more likely to be in offices substantially staffed by women and minorities, thus limiting their contact with “career advancement gatekeepers” who are overwhelmingly White and male (CitationDaley 1996, 159–160).
4. At the federal level one of the most commonly used data sets is constructed from the 1991/1992 Career Development Survey (made available by the US Merit Systems Protection Board) which combines all race/ethnic groups into a single category labeled “minority” (CitationDaley 1996; CitationNaff 2001). This data set makes it impossible to distinguish between different race/ethnic groups.
5. These data were obtained subject to the provisions of an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) Agreement authorized by the federal government. The terms of the agreement explicitly prohibit (1) sharing of data and (2) discussion or publication of empirical analysis that permits individual cities to be identified. Only summary statistics may be reported or discussed. Replication of this analysis can be accomplished by (1) executing an IPA Agreement and (2) obtaining the requisite data from the EEOC.
6. We conduct analysis on medium- and large-sized multiethnic cities only—those with more than 1000 employees which have populations that are at least five percent Latino and five percent African American in both 1987 and 2001. The data tapes include the entire population of these types of cities; we do not attempt to generalize to other types of cities such as smaller cities or those which are not multiethnic.
7. We do not conduct analysis on smaller ethnic populations such as Asian Americans and Native Americans. If we apply the five percent population floor for these groups, the list of cities subjected to analysis will become extremely small. In other words, very few cities in the US include populations that are five percent Latino, five percent African American, five percent Asian American, and five percent Native American.
8. We examine two job categories listed on US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Form 164 (also known as the EEO-4 Form), officials/administrators and professionals. Officials/Administrators are occupations in which employees set broad policies, exercise overall responsibility for execution of these policies, or direct individual departments or special phases of the agency operations, or provide specialized consultation on a regional, district, or area basis (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4). Administrative occupations include: department heads, bureau chiefs, division chiefs, directors, deputy directors, controllers, wardens, superintendents, sheriffs, police and fire chiefs and inspector, examiners (bank, hearing, motor vehicle, warehouse), inspectors (construction, building, safety, rent-and-housing, fire, alcohol beverages control board, license, dairy, livestock, transportation), assessors, tax appraisers and investigators, coroners, farm managers, and kindred workers; this category is often referred to as managerial in this study. Professionals are occupations which require specialized and theoretical knowledge which is usually acquired through college training or through work experience and other training which provides comparable knowledge (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4 Form). Professional occupations include: personnel and labor relations workers, social workers, doctors, psychologists, registered nurses, economists, dieticians, lawyers, systems analysts, accountants, engineers, counselors, teachers, police and fire captains and lieutenants, librarians, management analysts, and kindred workers (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4 Form).
9. Because only a few cities reported employees in hospitals, corrections, and employment security, we do not present the analyses of these functions in the tables.
10. The formula for each year is the following: Representativeness ratio (ijk) = % race/ethnic group by sex employed in each department (ijk) / % race/ethnic group by sex in the city population as reported by the Census Bureau, where i represents job category (i.e. administrators or professionals), j represents the municipal department, and k represents race/ethnicity by sex as reported on the EEO-4 Form.
11. We use the percentage of the city population rather than the percentage of a particular group in the workforce because our primary concern is about representation in the highest level policymaking positions and not about recruitment from the workforce or employment pools.
12. The exceptions to this generalization are health and finance/administration.
13. We do examine some functions that include relatively few cities such as hospitals (n = 5) and corrections (n = 3). In these functional areas the representativeness ratios for Latinas among managerial workforces is higher than ratios in the other functions. Nevertheless, only a handful of cities report in these areas, and it is still that case that Latinas suffer from the lowest levels of representation in these functions.
14. Although community development, housing, and finance/administration are not classified as redistributive agencies, some of their programs have redistributive features.