Labour market data in the US holds evidence of a hiring bias

livemint.com:

They wanted a person of colour," or its cousin: “No one wants to hire a White guy right now." Such rejoinders are casually asserted as fact these days: Being a Caucasian man, they claim, makes it harder to get hired in the US, especially in elite positions. Since the Supreme Court ruling curtailing the use of race in university admissions, corporate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are being targeted as discriminatory. Labour market data, however, supports the opposite conclusion: Caucasian men have every advantage.

Check the unemployment numbers for men by ethnicity across different levels of education. As a rule, unemployment falls as education levels rise. Last month, the jobless rate for workers who did not complete high school was 6%, but it was 2% for those with an advanced degree.

Dig deeper and you find that African-American men don’t accrue the same advantage from education as their Caucasian peers. Instead, a step-behind rule applies: They have the joblessness rate of the majority men a tier beneath them educationally. The US labour market treats African-American men with a college degree the same as Caucasian men without one.

Through the 1980s, Caucasian male high school dropouts had a lower unemployment rate than African-American men who finished high school. Since the 1990s, the two groups have had similar unemployment rates. This gap persists for men with more education as well.

African-American men with an advanced degree (like law, medicine or business) historically had higher unemployment rates than Caucasian men with just a bachelor’s. The difference has closed over five years, but it’s clear that minority men find it harder getting employed. For decades, economists have relied on audit