Absence of conflict of interest.
Citation
Highlights
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The study’s objective was to examine the impact of court-ordered requirements to post Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) notices within workplace establishments on the representation of white women, black men, and black women employed in managerial positions. The authors investigated similar research questions for other interventions, the profiles of which can be found here:
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The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered requirements to post EEO notices within workplace establishments on the representation of white women, black women, and black men in managerial positions one year after the court settlement or verdict. Study authors used data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and a database on the settlements and verdicts of major employment discrimination lawsuits to analyze the impact of court-ordered requirements to post EEO notices on changes in sex and race composition of managerial positions.
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The study found a significant relationship between court-ordered requirements to post EEO notices and lower odds of white women, black women, and black men being represented in managerial positions.
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This study receives a low causal evidence rating. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to court-ordered requirements to post EEO notices; other factors are likely to have contributed.
Intervention Examined
Court-Ordered Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Postings
Features of the Study
The authors did not provide details for each individual case that legally required workplace establishments to post Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) notices; however, these policies were summarized as concrete policies to raise awareness of employees' legal rights within organizations. Specifically, EEO notices and legal rights information serve to empower employees to pursue EEO enforcement themselves both internally and externally.
The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered requirements to post EEO notices on the representation of white women, black women, and black men employed in managerial positions. Study authors used data from high-profile employment discrimination lawsuits settled from 1996 through 2008 that required the firm to post EEO notices in the court settlements or verdicts for each subsidiary establishment. The authors measured managerial diversity one year following the lawsuit settlement or verdict. In addition to controlling for unobservable characteristics, the statistical model controlled for several lawsuit and organizational characteristics such as monetary awards for plaintiffs, the number of plaintiffs and lawsuits that each firm faced, establishment size, firm size, the percent of white male managers, within-establishment labor supply and local labor market, and the year.
Findings
Employment
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The study found that legally required EEO notice postings were significantly related with lower odds of representation of white women, black women, and black men in managerial positions.
Considerations for Interpreting the Findings
Given that high profile lawsuits and their resulting court-mandated policy requirements were public information, it is likely that employees within the sampled establishments anticipated the posting of the legally required EEO notices. Additionally, the data sources used did not provide information on previous policies/outcome data of the establishments required to implement the use of EEO postings prior to the court settlements or verdicts. Because of this, the authors were not able to appropriately control for the anticipation and associated affected behavior prior to the intervention.
Causal Evidence Rating
The quality of causal evidence presented in this report is low because the authors did not account for trends in outcomes prior to the participant’s anticipation of the court mandated EEO postings. This means we are not confident that the estimated effects are attributable to court mandated EEO postings within the workplace establishments; other factors are likely to have contributed.