Diversity matters in any organization.  Indeed, a study conducted a few years ago by MIT highlighted just how big an impact it makes on the bottom line.   The study analyzed an American company in a service industry to explore how much social capital is built up in a traditional office, and how this might impact upon such social characteristics as collaboration, trust and employee engagement.

“The more homogeneous offices have higher levels of social capital,” the researchers observe. “But the interesting twist is that … higher levels of social capital are not important enough to cause those offices to perform better. The employees might be happier, they might be more comfortable, and these might be cooperative places, but they seem to perform less well.”

Unfortunately, despite this evidence a recent study from Vanderbilt Law School highlights the long way we still have to go before we have equality in the workplace.  The study found that immigrants with darker skin were paid up to 25% less than lighter-skinned immigrants, with that gap widening the longer the (legal) immigrant was in the United States.

A fair workplace

The authors suggest that whilst skin color is clearly related to things such as race, nationality and ethnicity, it can also vary significantly within each of these.  It also seems to cut across education levels and work experience.

The researcher attempted to control for all of these factors, plus education, family background and employment history to isolate the direct impact skin color has on wages.  The study builds upon previous work that explored whether legal immigrants in the United States suffer a wage penalty, and especially whether immigrants with darker skin do so.  With this subsequent follow-up study, they are able to examine whether this wage penalty deteriorates over time.

Data was collected from the New Immigrant Survey, which aims to provide a longitudinal insight into the lives of legal immigrants who attained permanent status in 2003.  The survey checks in with them every four years to see how their lives have changed.  The survey captures the demographics of each migrant, their background and present circumstances, whilst interestingly also capturing the skin color of the individual on a 10-point scale.

“The data is so rich that I was able to also take into account whether the disparity would have arisen in the United States or because their country of origin has a bias against darker skin color, and account for that,” the author says.

Wage penalties

The original study, which was published over a decade ago, showed that the darkest-skinned immigrants suffered a 17% wage penalty in their first year in the United States against lighter-skinned peers with similar backgrounds.

Sadly, far from this gap shrinking over time, it seems to have gotten wider, with this follow-up study revealing that it has mushroomed out to 25% when they were surveyed again four years later.  This is important because the data shows that whilst all migrants typically earn less than native workers when they first arrive, this gap usually closes as they settle in to American life.  All migrants that is, except those with darker skin.

Whilst there is no overt evidence of discrimination, the author believes that it’s difficult to attribute this finding to anything else, especially as anti-immigrant sentiment is still so strong across the United States at the moment.  What’s more, they highlight how the number of discrimination cases filed at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is on the rise, and that they see this trend continuing.

“The changing demographics of the U.S. population indicates that there are more color differences without a clear racial distinction,” they say. “So I think we’re leading to the opportunity for even more people to make use of their rights under Title VII to file a lawsuit based on color discrimination.”

I’ve written before about the tremendous benefit migration can bring to society.  For instance, research has shown that both science and innovation benefit when people travel and live outside of their homeland.  We seem to be missing out on such benefits when it comes to migrants with darker skin, with their skills and talents being wholly undervalued.  Whilst the study provides no hints as to how the situation can be improved, it does nonetheless highlight that it exists, and that will hopefully provide the first step towards rectifying matters.