A new interesting study...

Diminishing and ultimately eliminating gender and racial disadvantage in the workplace and labor market is a worthy goal of any policy maker, businessman or civil rights advocate. However, fixing it requires understanding the underlying causes of this persistent problem. One major theory is that certain institutional or organizational mechanisms are inadvertently promoting discrimination. A recent study by researchers at the University of Arizona titled “Cracking the Glass Cages? Restructuring and Ascriptive Inequality at Work” examined the various structural changes that could help to erode the existing gender and racial disadvantages. To determine these best practices, the researchers used data from over 800 American organizations over the last 20 years.
Major Findings:
• As of 2002 approximately 60% of American workplaces had incorporated team work into some aspect of their staff interactions, this is important because it gives women and minorities a chance to gain visibility which is often a major obstacle.
• Provision of further job training for workers to encourage management skills grew from being present in only 45% of jobs in 1980 to nearly 80% in 2002.
• Increased diversity in managerial positions may be a cause of the above two improvements, the ratio of white male managers fell from 75% in 1980 to 62% in 2002, while the ratio of white females rose from 19% to 26%, black female’s from less than 1% to 2%, and black male’s from 2.4% to 3.1%
• The introduction of self-directed team work was associated with a decline in the probability of white male managers by 8% and an increase of probability of a white female by 9%, a black female 3.5% and a black male by 5%
• The adoption of cross-training improved the probability of white women, black women and black men of being a manager by 4% and decreases the probability for white men by 7.5%.
The researchers concluded that their evidence “provides strong support for the argument that restructuring work to weaken job segregation improves the access of women and minorities to management.”