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The Multiracial Complication: The 2020 Census and the Fictitious Multiracial Boom

By on December 3, 2024 in Articles

Paul Starr, Christina Pao

Sociological Science December 3, 2024
10.15195/v11.a40

Abstract

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The Census Bureau set off reports of a “multiracial boom” when it announced that, according to the 2020 census, multiracial people accounted for 10.2 percent of the U.S. population. Only the year before, the bureau’s American Community Survey had estimated their share as 3.4 percent. We provide evidence that the multiracial boom was largely a statistical illusion resulting from methodological changes that confounded ancestry with identity and mistakenly equated national origin with race. Under a new algorithm, respondents were auto-recoded as multiracial if, after marking a single race, they listed an “origin” that the algorithm did not recognize as falling within that race. However, origins and identity are not the same; confounding the two did not improve racial statistics. The fictitious multiracial boom highlights the power of official statistics in framing public and social-science understanding and the need to keep ancestry and identity distinct in both theory and empirical practice.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Paul Starr: Sociology Department, Princeton University
E-mail: starr@princeton.edu

Christina Pao: Sociology Department, Princeton University
E-mail: christina.pao@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: Presentations by Ricardo Lowe and colleagues helped inform the empirical strategy in our article. We also thank participants in the May 2024 Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research for their responses to our research.

Reproducibility Package: R code for replication is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), https://osf.io/8ebup/?view_only=67a953b996684d128c9384d4841ed1c5. Data are available from IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2024): https://usa.ipums.org/usa/index.shtml

  • Citation: Starr, Paul, and Christina Pao. 2024. “The Multiracial Complication: The 2020 Census and the Fictitious Multiracial Boom.” Sociological Science 11: 1107-1123.
  • Received: September 17, 2024
  • Accepted: October 21, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Michael Rosenfeld
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a40


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Do Some Countries Discriminate More than Others? Evidence from 97 Field Experiments of Racial Discrimination in Hiring

By on June 17, 2019 in Articles

Lincoln Quillian, Anthony Heath, Devah Pager, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Fenella Fleischmann, Ole Hexel

Sociological Science, June 17, 2019
10.15195/v6.a18

Abstract
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Comparing levels of discrimination across countries can provide a window into large-scale social and political factors often described as the root of discrimination. Because of difficulties in measurement, however, little is established about variation in hiring discrimination across countries. We address this gap through a formal meta-analysis of 97 field experiments of discrimination incorporating more than 200,000 job applications in nine countries in Europe and North America. We find significant discrimination against nonwhite natives in all countries in our analysis; discrimination against white immigrants is present but low. However, discrimination rates vary strongly by country: In high-discrimination countries, white natives receive nearly twice the callbacks of nonwhites; in low-discrimination countries, white natives receive about 25 percent more. France has the highest discrimination rates, followed by Sweden. We find smaller differences among Great Britain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, the United States, and Germany. These findings challenge several conventional macro-level theories of discrimination.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lincoln Quillian: Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
E-mail: l-quillian@northwestern.edu

Anthony Heath: Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College
E-mail: anthony.heath@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Devah Pager: Deceased, formerly Department of Sociology, Harvard University

Arnfinn H. Midtbøen: Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway
E-mail: a.h.midtboen@samfunnsforskning.no

Fenella Fleischmann: Interdisciplinary Social Science, Utrecht University
E-mail: F.Fleischmann@uu.nl

Ole Hexel: Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, and Observatoire Sociologique du Changement, Sciences Po, Paris, France
E-mail: ole.hexel@u.northwestern.edu

Acknowledgements: We have received financial support for this project from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. We thank Larry Hedges for methodological advice. We dedicate this article to Devah Pager, who learned a little from us and taught us much more.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Quillian, Lincoln, Anthony Heath, Devah Pager, Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Fenella Fleischmann, and Ole Hexel. 2019. “Do Some Countries Discriminate More than Others? Evidence from 97 Field Experiments of Racial Discrimination in Hiring.” Sociological Science 6: 467-496.
  • Received: March 7, 2019
  • Accepted: April 23, 2019
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v6.a18


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Benefit Inequality among American Workers by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity, 1982–2015

By on July 19, 2018 in Articles

Tali Kristal, Yinon Cohen, Edo Navot

Sociological Science, July 19, 2018
10.15195/v5.a20

Abstract
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Gender, racial, and ethnic gaps in wages are well known, but group disparities in employer-provided benefits, which account for one-quarter of total compensation, are not. We use benefit costs data to study levels and trends in gender, racial, and ethnic gaps in voluntary employer-provided benefits. Analyzing Employer Costs for Employee Compensation microdata on wages and benefit costs for the years 1982 to 2015, matched to Current Population Survey files by wage decile in the industrial sector, we find that (1) benefit gaps were wider than wage gaps for minorities but were narrower for gender, (2) racial and ethnic gaps in benefits increased faster than wage gaps, and (3) the gender gap in benefits decreased faster than the wage gap. We show that these findings reflect the types of jobs women, blacks, and Hispanics have held for the past three decades.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Tali Kristal: Department of Sociology, University of Haifa
E-mail: kristal@soc.haifa.ac.il

Yinon Cohen: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
E-mail: yc2444@columbia.edu

Edo Navot:United States Department of Labor
E-mail: navot.edo@dol.gov

Acknowledgements: We thank the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation for its partial support of this project. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the summer meeting of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (in 2017) and the Intergenerational Mobility and Income Inequality Workshop held at the University of Haifa (in March 2018). We thank Yitchak Haberfeld and the participants in these meetings for their comments. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and its staff, who facilitated this research with generosity and patience. The research was conducted with restricted access to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The views expressed in any publication resulting from an analysis of these data do not necessarily reflect the views of the BLS. Additionally, the views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Department of Labor or any agency within it.

  • Citation: Kristal, Tali, Yinon Cohen, and Edo Navot. 2018. “Benefit Inequality among American Workers by Gender, Race and Ethnicity, 1982–2015.” Sociological Science 5: 461-488.
  • Received: April 17, 2018
  • Accepted: June 5, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a20


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