Consider a man I’ll call Adam. He’s just gotten his PhD in biology and is applying for roles in a prestigious lab. He makes it to the final interview but doesn’t get the job. The hiring manager explains that although they liked his application, their last three hires were also white men, so this time they chose a woman of color.
Many of us have heard some version of this story in recent years. Anecdotes like this get trotted out regularly as evidence that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have made it harder for qualified white men to find jobs. And such stories are central to the charge that Vice President Kamala Harris is a “DEI hire” — a term that has also been applied to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, who is Black, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the court. The attack is gaining steam politically because it taps into a sense of unfairness felt by a small but vocal share of the electorate. I hear it in the emails I get from white men when I write about DEI efforts; I see it on the Quora and Reddit threads that rise to the top of a Google search; and it’s apparent in several recent lawsuits accusing companies of discriminating against white male candidates.
But for all the griping about DEI, what do we know about its impact? Are white men actually at a disadvantage in today’s job market? In this column, I’ll try to definitively answer those questions. Because the reality is we don’t have to guess — or rely on what Uncle Tony’s co-worker’s brother told him that one time: Scholars across disciplines have spent decades studying how hiring works. There’s rigorous data we can use to assess the process, and to understand how DEI is playing out in the real world. And although academic studies often come to contradictory conclusions (Study A says coffee is good for you; Study B says it’s bad for you), the research on this topic all points in one direction.
You make it sound like everyone hates DEI. How big is the backlash really?
Most people support diversity efforts. But there’s a growing, and vocal, minority who don’t.
The belief that jobs are being awarded not on the basis of qualifications, but because of race or sex, is one of the reasons that over 40% of men today believe that U.S. society discriminates against them, according to the Survey Center on American Life. And 60% of men think women already have equal job opportunities, according to Gallup, perhaps rendering DEI efforts aimed at women unnecessary — or even unfair to men.
Indeed, in a Pew survey conducted in April 2024, 40% of male Trump voters under 50 agreed that “the gains women have made in society have come at the expense of men.”
Race is hardly less divisive. Almost 3 out of 4 Trump voters think Black people’s current position in U.S. society is not affected by the legacy of slavery, according to that same Pew survey.
The reckoning that took place in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd prompted some Americans to reconsider their attitudes about race. But according to Pew, that phenomenon was short-lived: The organization finds that the percentage of Americans who believe white people “benefit from privileges that Black people do not have” has fallen sharply in recent years. Even among Democrats, who are generally more likely to see DEI efforts as necessary, the share who said they believed this “a great deal” went from 60% in 2020 to 44% by June 2024.
This may be why 1 in 6 Americans, according to an earlier Pew survey, think focusing on increasing diversity at work is a bad thing. Those numbers rise to about 1 in 5 among men and white people, and almost 1 in 3 among Republicans. Among such critics, DEI is often rebranded as “Didn’t Earn It.”
Is it even legal to base hiring decisions on a person’s race or gender?
No. Private-sector employers haven’t been allowed to use race, gender or “protected characteristics” since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (That makes them different from universities, which in most states were allowed to weigh such factors in admissions until a Supreme Court ruling last year.) Federal contractors are supposed to take “affirmative action” to ensure they’re not discriminating against people based on race, gender or other protected characteristics.
Hiring quotas are “strictly forbidden,” according to the Department of Labor. Race and gender can’t even be used as a tiebreaker between equally qualified candidates. Some states also have laws on top of these federal rules.
So, let’s get to the big question: Is it more difficult for white guys to get hired than other groups?
The evidence suggests it’s not. Scholars have spent decades using matched resume studies to examine whether women or men, or Black or white people, get an easier ride from potential employers. In the old days, researchers did this by mail, sending out identical resumes with only the names changed and tracking who got a call back. Today, thanks to the internet, they can send out thousands of comparable resumes, with the only difference being the name at the top — Conor and Emily, for example, versus Jamal and Lakisha.
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I reviewed dozens of these types of studies, especially looking at those published in the last five years. They all told the same story.
A trio of papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, published between 2020 and 2024, found it’s easier to get hired if you’re white. After submitting tens of thousands of resumes to a subset of Fortune 500 companies, Berkeley economist Patrick M. Kline and his coauthors found that most don’t discriminate in hiring, but a slice of companies strongly prefer white candidates. The companies with the clearest preference for white candidates, the researcher concluded, included automotive companies Auto Nation, Advance Auto Parts, Genuine Parts, Goodyear, O’Reilly Automotive and CarMax; entertainment giant Disney; drugstore chain CVS Health; and VF Corporation, the parent company of several retail brands, including Vans, North Face and Smartwool.
Gender discrimination was rarer, with a handful of employers in the construction trades preferring men and a handful in retail preferring women.
By submitting so many resumes, “we were able to average out the idiosyncrasies associated with any one particular hiring manager,” Kline explained. He said no companies showed a clear preference for Black candidates — and in fact, he’s never seen a resume study where the candidate with a stereotypically Black name was preferred.
These findings are in line with other recent studies that looked only at race, like a 2023 paper by Rutgers sociologist Quan D. Mai. After submitting 12,000 comparable resumes to marketing, sales and administrative openings across 50 U.S. metro areas, Mai found some variation across different localities. But across the board, white people were most likely to get called back and Black people the least. Asian and Latino applicants ranked in the middle.
Callbacks are just the tip of the iceberg. The gaps appear to widen as the hiring process chugs along. A 2020 study led by Northwestern University sociologist Lincoln Quillian found that white candidates were 53% more likely to get a callback than comparable minority candidates — and a whopping 145% more likely to get a job offer.
There are some differences by income level. In a 2019 report from sociologists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, researchers found that blue-collar men face the most competition from women and minorities for lower-paying jobs. Higher-paying jobs are a different story. Among managers and executives, white men are disproportionately represented in every state, particularly in California and the South. White men are even more over-represented in in the highest-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree (such as skilled craft and trade jobs, or working as a machine operator) in almost every state. In states with large minority populations, white men tend to claim a larger share of the highest-paying jobs.
But what about at elite companies? Or high-paying jobs in science, technology, engineering and math? Aren’t those companies desperate for women and minorities?
Apparently not. Women and minorities studying STEM had to have a 4.0 grade point average to get the same level of enthusiasm from employers as a white man with a 3.75 GPA, according to research by Wharton economists Judd Kessler and Corinne Low.
In a 2021 study written with Purdue economist Colin D. Sullivan, Kessler and Low asked elite employers to rate randomized resumes in hopes of matching with potential hires from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school.
“We thought if we’re going to see (a preference for female or minority candidates) anywhere, we’re going to see it in these prestigious employers who tell us up and down they’re trying to hire for diversity,” Low told me. But that’s not what they found. “We see either no preference, or we actually see a penalty toward female and minority candidates,” she explained.
When Lauren Rivera of the Kellogg School of Management studied hiring in professional services firms, like banks, law firms and consultancies, she found that white men were more likely to get a second look. Being judged “too stiff,” “too casual” or “too nervous” doomed people of color, but were dismissed as “coachable” flaws in white men. Hobbies — especially elite hobbies like marathoning or SCUBA diving — often played a more important role in advancing to the next round than technical skills.
At a consulting company that used the case interview method, in which interviewees solve business problems in real time using a mix of math and conceptual frameworks, the content of the candidates’ answers didn’t always seem to matter much. With South Asians and Hispanics, evaluators obsessed over candidates’ “polish.” With women, they fretted over their math skills, perhaps driven by stereotypes that women are bad at math.
White men who made minor errors were assumed to be having an “off day.” Women and minorities got much less slack. In her 2015 book “Pedigree,” Rivera recounts the story of a white man and a white woman who both had stellar resumes and interviewed well, but made minor mistakes in the math portion of their interview. Both had previously held jobs that were highly quantitative. Ultimately, the committee decided the man must be “OK at numbers” because of his previous job, whereas the woman must have gotten her prior job by mistake. “Someone clearly messed up that one!” crowed one of the (female) interviewers.
Of course, the hiring managers in Pedigree still thought they were being objective — even when, as in one case, a Red Sox fan strenuously objected to hiring a Yankee fan. (Never fear, New Yorkers. He got the offer.)
Are there any studies that show that women or people of color have an easier time getting hired?
Despite making a concerted search, I found no evidence that less-qualified women get hired over more-qualified men.
I found only one study (from 2015) that suggested a woman has an edge over an equally qualified man, and that was limited to hiring in the hard sciences in academia.
There was a 2019 LinkedIn study (not peer reviewed, but interesting because it uses real-world data) that found women have a higher success rate when applying to jobs, but that’s because women are more selective in their job search — men cast a wider net, applying to more jobs for which they aren’t a great match. (The study also found that recruiters were 13% less likely to click on a woman’s profile.)
As for race, I found two studies that suggested less-qualified people of color are ever hired; the effects were quite small, isolated to federal contractors, and most importantly, both papers were decades old — one was from the 1970s and the other, the 1990s. I contacted Harry Holzer, a Georgetown economist who coauthored the 1990s paper, and he said he wasn’t sure the findings were still relevant. He also pointed out that in his study, those less-credentialed minority applicants performed just as well on the job.
Based on the data we have, the idea that white men as a group have a harder time getting hired simply isn’t true.
Is it possible that academic research hasn’t yet captured a post-George Floyd shift?
Papers published in 2024 can contain data collected in, say, 2018. But according to unemployment numbers, which are updated and revised in almost real time, white men are still consistently among the demographic groups most likely to be employed.
So why do so many people think white men have a harder time getting hired?
Shifting demographics have a lot to do with it. The white male labor force is shrinking. While fewer new jobs are going to white workers overall, that’s not because white men are being passed over — it’s because the non-white labor force is growing as the U.S. becomes more racially diverse, as my colleague Justin Fox has explained.
Moreover, white men today have less of an educational advantage than their fathers did. For every 100 men in graduate school there are 148 women. This represents a massive generational shift: Millennial women are almost twice as likely to have gone to college as their mothers. Today, men are a minority of graduate-degree holders in law, medicine and many of the sciences. (This doesn’t represent discrimination against men — men have historically been able to get high-paying jobs that don’t require expensive degrees. Many of the better-paying female-dominated jobs — like nursing — do require degrees.)
And looking at education by race, although Black and Hispanic people remain less likely to have advanced degrees than white people, the disparity has shrunk a lot. These changes mean that today, employers looking for highly educated workers have a lot more options.
Go back to “Adam.” Men make up a minority of new biology PhDs. The Adams of the world are not losing jobs to less qualified women or people of color, but to more qualified women and people of color. In fact, if labs like the one that rejected Adam’s application have a bias problem, it’s that they aren’t hiring enough women in a field where women are the majority of graduates.
But what about Adam’s hiring manager, who all but said he wasn’t hired because he was a white guy?
White men certainly have good reason to believe they were unfairly passed over when a hiring manager says, “We liked your application, but we really needed to hire for diversity.” And a 2022 survey of 1,000 hiring managers by ResumeBuilder found that about half of hiring managers believed their company practiced some degree of “reverse discrimination.”
But — and this is vital — hiring managers may not be the best judges of their own behavior. A huge body of psychology literature suggests human beings are far less objective than we think we are; and organizational scholars have repeatedly shown hiring managers often only think they are being fair and consistent. (Remember the guy who almost didn’t get a job because he was a Yankee fan?)
I asked an array of DEI scholars why a hiring manager would say they were rejecting a white male candidate on the basis of his race and gender, particularly if it’s illegal. Each independently offered a similar theory: The hiring manager is trying, very clumsily, to soften the blow.
By appealing to what the hiring manager assumes is a shared value — diversity — he or she is hoping to spare the candidate’s feelings. This is, obviously, not working. Instead, they’re stoking his frustration and sense of unfairness. They’re also fostering the myth that when it comes to being hired, white men are at a disadvantage.
That myth is corrosive to our society and it’s getting in the way of fair hiring. “Employers think that they prefer female and minority candidates,” explains Wharton’s Low. That means those candidates get less credit for prestigious internships or good grades. “We think that’s because of the psychology of ‘Oh, it was actually easier for them … because everyone prefers these candidates.’”
“We have the data that shows that they don’t prefer those candidates,” she continues. “If anything, female and minority candidates are being penalized relative to white male candidates.”
No one should be rejected from a job because of unfounded, unfair assumptions. Not white guys, and not anyone else.
Scholars have spent decades studying how companies can make hiring fairer — for everyone. But companies have too often ignored what works (like recruiting a more diverse set of applicants) in favor of what seems easiest or cheapest (computer-based bias training). And they’ve tended to prefer policies that will insulate them from lawsuits (like grievance procedures) rather than approaches that will level the playing field (offering more mentoring and flexibility to all workers).
As a result, we’ve spent decades talking about the importance of diversity; allowed a significant share of white men to become convinced that they’re at a disadvantage; and still have companies that show bias against women and people of color, particularly Black people. If that’s not the worst outcome of decades of DEI, it can’t be far off. Admitting that is the first step to doing better.
Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and editor. Previously, she was an executive editor at Harvard Business Review.
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