Engineering
Employment
Discrimination
70%
of engineering jobs in the United States are occupied by white males.
33%
of workforce is represented by people of color and Hispanics.
90%
of engineering jobs are occupied by males.
10%
is the average pay gap between male and female engineers.
The
Issue of
Employment Discrimination
Systemic racism is a prevalent growing issue in US society, it affects minority groups in a variety of different ways and often goes unnoticed. One of the more important branches of systemic racism is employment discrimination. Employment discrimination is the mistreatment of job applicants and employees based on race, color, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability age etc. and takes three different forms: as discrimination in the hiring process, as limited promotion opportunities, and as a wage disparity. Recent research has shown employers often aren’t actively avoiding employing people of minority groups, so does that mean employment discrimination isn’t a thing? Although the findings maybe be interpreted as “employment discrimination doesn’t exist”, the researchers concluded that it is more likely to be “inherent societal racism” or “subconscious discrimination”. This shows that the issue is deeply rooted and requires immediate action.
Forms of Employment Discrimination
Wage
Discrimination
This is one of the most common and noticeable forms of employment discrimination and its when an employer will offer different wages to employees of the same job based on the employee's sex, race, color, religion etc. The most common form of wage discrimination takes place as gender discrimination, female engineers get paid around 10% less on average than male engineers in the same field.
Hiring Discrimination
This form of employment discrimination takes place during the hiring process, and it is where employers will discriminate against an applicant because of his or her sex, race, color, religion etc. For example, an experiment conducted in 2004 found that applications with white‐sounding names were 50 percent more likely to receive an employer response, i.e. callbacks or interview offers.
Promotion
Discrimination
This form of discrimination takes place after an applicant has been hired. If an employers decisions for job assignment or promotion is based on an employee's sex, race, color, religion etc. it is considered promotion discrimination. This creates racial and gender segregation in the job markets. For example, people of white race occupy over 60% of top paying jobs in the United States.