Racist hiring practices hurt everyone involved. Victimized applicants, obviously, suffer because they are denied jobs based on an attribute unrelated to professional skill. But employers who judge applicants by the color of their skin suffer too. By narrowing the pool of potential hires by race,prejudiced employers are excluding viable applicants, and thus limiting the potential of their business’ strength. A newstudy from Harvard University, the first of its kind, shows just how much: Over a six-year period, businesses that had been identified as racially discriminatory were twice as likely to fail compared to those that had not been identified as such.
“The fact that so many businesses that we observed discriminating went out of business within a six-year window was quite a surprise,” says Devah Pager, a sociology professor at Harvard and lead author on the study. “This is something that economic theory has predicted, but we haven’t really had good measures of in the past.”
[For more of this story, written by Maura Ewing, go to https://psmag.com/racist-hirin...1c0ad206d#.dh6rvhvoo]
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