It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.
If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.
There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?
What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?
The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.
I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.
Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”
As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.
The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.
If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.