White Men are the Beneficiaries of Preferential Hiring

With DEI under attack, it’s time to get clear on the facts: white men still get far more than their fair share of opportunities in 2025. And systemic racism in hiring remains real and deleterious.

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You would have to be living under a rock not to notice: “DEI” is under attack by Donald Trump and his Republican brethren. The term is the new “woke.” It’s a synecdoche for any effort on the part of institutions to combat racism and sexism, especially in hiring.

And so, for those of us committed to the cause of anti-racism and anti-sexism, it’s as well to be apprised of the facts. Your talking point, in a nutshell: how many companies discriminate against white people, according to the largest study of hiring practices to date? Zero. Many, on the other hand, exhibited pronounced anti-Black bias.

The 2024 study, by the economists Patrick Kline, Evan Rose, and Christopher Walters, adopted the well-known method of sending CVs with white-coded versus Black-coded names to over 11000 job openings all around the country. So the CV was the same, but the name would be “Allison” or “Todd” versus “Leroy” or “Lakisha.” (This isn’t just based on stereotypes; it’s based on research into names which showed that 90% of children with those names were white and Black, respectively.) This was a massive study (summarized here), which sent out more than 83000 applications to a total of 97 companies, across a wide swathe of industries, geographic areas, and encompassing both private sector entities and federal contractors. On average, presumed white applicants were called back nearly 10 percent more often than presumed Black ones. One fifth of the companies were especially bad offenders, responsible for nearly half of the callback gap for white and Black applicants—and included, notably, some eight federal contractors as well as fifteen companies in the private sector. Some companies, happily, had managed to minimize racial biases at this level of hiring, with Black applicants receiving only 3% fewer callbacks. But how many companies were totally non-discriminatory, or even discriminated in favor of Black applicants? Zero. Just… zero.

On the gender discrimination front, the findings were more complex: while some industries, like automotive ones, discriminated in favor of men, others—like clothing retailers—preferred female applicants. This isn’t terribly surprising, when you think about it for a moment: and lest we forget, white women have historically been the major beneficiaries of affirmative action in education.

In some ways, the above study represents good news: in the original study of this kind, published in 2003, people presumed white, named “Greg” and “Emily,” were on average 50% more likely to be called back for a job interview than people presumed Black, named “Jamal” and “Lakisha.” Today, using data gathered between 2019 and 2021, the picture looks different: even the two companies with the most egregiously racist hiring practices favored white applicants by 43% and 33%, a substantial improvement.

Image credit: Brookings

However, as the researchers acknowledge, this study is also likely to understate racist biases: it looked at how likely an applicant presumed white versus Black was to be called back for an interview, not how likely they were to be hired for the position at the end of the day. Other studies suggest that racist biases kick in even more perniciously at the interview stage, and affect who actually gets the job, even for Black applicants who remain in the pool after their CV has been scanned (sometimes, by an algorithm not a human). For example, a 2020 study led by the sociologist Lincoln Quillian found that, while white candidates were 53% more likely to get a callback than a non-white counterpart, they were a shocking 145% more likely to actually get a job offer. Moreover, this study only canvassed job openings for entry-level positions. (It also didn’t look at how non-white applicants of other races fare in the job market.)

The evidence suggests that the biases in favor of white men only mount at higher levels of rank, prestige, and salary. For example, women and minorities in STEM fields had to have a grade point average of 4.0 to attract the same level of enthusiasm from potential employers as white men with a grade point average of 3.75. An A+ non-white person or white woman is equivalent to an A- white guy from the perspective of STEM hiring. Moreover, white men remain over-represented as managers and executives in every state in America. In almost every state, white men are vastly over-represented in highly-paid jobs that don’t require a college degree, such as skilled craft and trade jobs. Such effects—pro-white male bias—appears to be greater in states with a larger minority population, perhaps suggesting backlash.

I wrote this post not for people skeptical of anti-racist hiring practices or already using “DEI” as a slur. I wrote it to arm the—I hope vocal—opposition with the facts. Here, then, are things to remember and repeat loudly going forward:

• Again: the biggest, highest-quality, most recent study of hiring practices suggests that discrimination against Black employees persists, is pernicious in some companies, and every single company exhibited some level of pro-white bias. Stated another way, the number of companies where even entry-level hiring represented a level playing field or was positively skewed toward Black applicants was zero. Zero.

• This study was completely, utterly representative. When Sarah Green Carmichael, a columnist for Bloomberg, set out to find a recent study that showed even one company that discriminated in favor of Black folks, she found nothing. Bubkes. “Despite making a concerted search, I found no evidence that less-qualified women get hired over more-qualified men,” she added. The economist Patrick Kline responded similarly when Carmichael interviewed him about his landmark study canvassed in opening: he had never seen a resume study where the candidate with a stereotypically Black name was favored.

• When researchers go looking for biases against white men they don’t find them. In a 2021 study, the economists Judd Kessler, Corinne Low, and Colin Sullivan asked employers to rate potential hires from an Ivy League university (the University of Pennsylvania). “We thought if we’re going to see [a preference for female or minority candidates] anywhere, we’re going to see it in these prestigious employers who tell us up and down they’re trying to hire for diversity.” But that’s not what the data showed: it showed that they were either equitable or that they discriminated, again, in favor of white male candidates.

• Any hiring preference on the basis of gender, race, and other protected characteristics, such as age and sexual orientation, is strictly prohibited for all businesses covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (the overwhelming majority). This is just as true of discriminating in favor of women and minorities as against us. Such characteristics can’t even be used as a tiebreaker in hiring decisions. Hiring quotas are strictly forbidden. And while federal contractors were, until this past month, supposed to take affirmative action to ensure they’re not discriminating on the basis of race, gender, and other protected characteristics, they were still prohibited, of course, from practicing so-called positive discrimination. Moreover, they often fail to be even vaguely equitable in practice: remember, eight federal contractors were among the worst offenders in Kline’s study. And while education is another story for another day for the most part, it’s worth noting in this context that, as of 2023, we’re no longer permitted to weigh the diversity an applicant would add to our pool of students as a factor in admissions decisions—thanks, SCOTUS!

• Finally, but crucially, if the topic of preferential hiring is brought up in the specific context of the tragic and shocking plane crash that occurred in Washington DC this week, that cost sixty-seven people their lives, do not let your interlocutor even fucking go there. The only clearly relevant fact we know at the moment is that the air traffic control office was grossly understaffed at the time, with one person doing a job normally done by two people. Trump’s attempt to link this tragedy to diversity hiring is white male supremacy, plain and simple. It is a cynical lie—as well as a racist dog whistle.

I know, I know, I know. This one particular white guy swears up and down that he was passed over for a job for a less qualified woman or minority candidate. Don’t indulge this fantasy. It’s the result of his sense of entitlement to the position, not the facts about hiring. And it has probably been echoed and repeated back to him because of our tedious and predictable sympathy—what I term “himpathy”—with the entitled white men who behave poorly and demonstrate insufficient skill, competence, and knowledge. Some such expect to fail upwards and, when they don’t, whine loudly and make life miserable for everyone around them.

None more so than those who are presently running this country—lord help us.