The Millenium Hilton in New York City
The travel industry, while not perfect, shines in many areas, and some companies in the industry shine in their non-discriminatory hiring practices, according to the results of a massive audit study released last week.
Hiring practices for entry-level positions at Hilton Worldwide, the seventh-largest hotel group by number of locations, was one of several companies in the travel industry that showed no racial bias in the study, entitled “A Discrimination Report Card,” released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Another in the group with the smallest difference in a company’s responses to job applications by race was Avis Budget Group, a car rental agency holding company that is one of the three big rental car holding companies in the United States.
Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain, and Hertz, the largest rental car company in the United States, also fared reasonably well in the findings.
While the results of the audit study were originally released several years ago, the names of the companies included in the survey were first revealed this past Monday.
The new study comes 21 years after two economists at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan published a seminal paper that analyzed racial discrimination in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes in response to help-wanted adverts in local newspapers in Boston and Chicago.
Their seminal study, entitled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal,” revealed that the non-existent applicants Emily and Greg et al received 50% more invitations to job interviews than did Lakisha and Jamal and their ilk.
In 2021, Chicago economist Evan Rose, working with Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters, expanded on this research on a massive scale.
They sent a total of 80,000 resumes in response to 10,000 job posts at 97 companies in the period 2019 through 2012, applying for entry-level positions that didn’t require a university degree or substantial work experience. The researchers not only tested race and gender but added other it to include other characteristics protected by law, such as sexual orientation and age.
However, some companies displayed no preference one way or the other in how they treated applicants, be they presumed to be white or black.
Companies which were subject to regulatory scrutiny, such as federal contractors, as well as companies with a centralized employee recruitment team as well as organizations with a diverse workgroup of job recruiters displayed little if any discrimination in hiring.
In addition, the more profitable a company was, the less biased it tended to be, a finding in line with a long-held economic theory posited by late American economist Gary Becker, a Noble prize winner who was considered to have been a leader in the third generation of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought, that held that discrimination is simply bad for business.
Of equal significance are the study’s findings that having a chief diversity officer, offering diversity training, or having a diverse board of directors showed no correlation with decreased discrimination in hiring on an entry-level basis.
On average, the researchers found that large U.S. employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5% more often than the those presumed to be black, but this did vary greatly by industry and company size, among other factors.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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