Business people working on laptops during a meeting
There is widespread ethno-racial segregation between workplaces in the US, even within the same job sector. Research suggests that as many as 50 percent of all African American and Hispanic workers would have to change jobs to achieve integrated workplaces.
Employers contribute to this segregation through hiring decisions, but what is the role of the choices that we, as employees, make when looking for a workplace? People tend to live, work and socialize within their own ethno-racial group. This has both positives and negatives.
On the positive side, a segregated city may offer a safe zone for individuals belonging to discriminated minorities. In a community with similar others, spaces can be created where the larger society’s racial hierarchy does not apply. On the negative side, the problem is that in societies where there is a lot of ethno-racial inequality, segregation tends to reinforce these differences.
In segregated societies, minorities tend to live in impoverished areas with high crime rates and poor public and commercial services. We know from previous research that ethno-racial inequality is also connected to occupational segregation: children of poor families tend to aim for blue-collar jobs, while children of wealthy families tend to aim for high-level white-collar jobs.
What has been less known, is what causes segregation between workplaces in the same sector. The aim of our study was to find another piece of the puzzle.