Donald Tomaskovic-Devey University of Massachusetts Amherst
More than forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act equal opportunity in employment remains an elusive goal. Analyzing more than five million establishment-level panel observations collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission since 1966, we propose to develop the necessary methodological tools to explore the dynamics of race and gender equal employment opportunity in U.S. workplaces. The richness and complexity of these data require us to first investigate unresolved but generally important analytic problems for modeling dynamic outcomes associated with long term panel data with multiple non-hierarchical clustering. Substantively, we examine what is probably the largest scale regulatory attempt to foster organizational change in U.S. history, hypothesizing that such change has been driven by firm, industry, and local labor market dynamics within the historically shifting context of federal regulatory efforts.
The broader impact of this project is to inform regulatory and managerial practice in fostering equal employment opportunity in a democratic society. We will complement existing and current research examining the effects of specific organizational policies and structures on EEO change by producing substantive knowledge as to which regulatory, political, and institutional contexts have influenced equal opportunity change since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and by implication, those which are likely to be influential in the future.
