Enforcement of Civil Rights Law in Private Workplaces: The Effects of Compliance Reviews and Lawsuits Over Time

Abstract

Has federal antidiscrimination law been effective in moving women and minorities into management? Early studies show that government affirmative action reviews improved the numbers, and rank, of blacks, but evidence of what has happened since 1980 is sparse. There is little evidence that civil rights lawsuits improved the employment status of women or African Americans. We examine establishment-level effects of compliance reviews and lawsuits on the percentage of women and blacks in management. We find that compliance reviews, which alter organizational routines, had stronger and more lasting effects than lawsuits, which create disincentives to discriminate. We also find that deregulation was more consequential for compliance reviews than for lawsuits: Compliance reviews initiated in the 1980s were less effective than Alexandra Kalev received her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2005 and is a postdoctorate fellow at the RWJ Program in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation examines how the restructuring of work in the United States affects women’s and minorities’ careers. She currently studies gender and racial disparities in health and safety at work. In a collaborative project with Frank Dobbin she studies how corporate responses to antidiscrimination laws shape workforce diversity. Frank Dobbin received his Ph.D. from Stanford, and taught at Princeton for fifteen years before moving to Harvard in 2003. An organizational and economic sociologist, he has studied corporate response to equal opportunity and affirmative action law in papers charting the creation of civil rights grievance procedures, equal opportunity departments, diversity programs, maternity leave, and sexual harassment programs. With Alexandra Kalev, he is now studying the effects of these and other corporate human relations practices on workforce diversity.