That there is a pay gap between races is all too evident, with data showing that Black Americans earn up to 35% less than their white peers. Research from Harvard Business School shows that Black workers are also less likely to have supportive managers, a good work-life balance, and even a positive work culture.

The results highlight that inequality isn’t confined to hard measures, like pay, but that managers also need to consider various softer measures of workplace quality.

Workplace inequality

The author analyzed over 930,000 employee reviews left for around 8,800 employers on Indeed.com. By cross-referencing the anonymous reviews on Indeed with data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission database, they were able to accurately gauge the racial makeup of each firm.

This showed that Asians tended to do best in terms of their work environment, followed by White and Hispanic employees, with Black employees faring worst of all. The author explains that these gaps weren’t huge, but were nonetheless both consistent and significant.

They propose a couple of possible reasons for the difference, with the first being a spillover from the inequalities that exist in society more broadly. This means that Black people are more likely to be represented in blue-collar positions, which are more likely to offer poorer work conditions.

Similarly, there are regional variations, as those in the South tend to have fewer workplace protections than those in the Northeast, and Black people make up a larger proportion of the population in the South. Even when these differences were factored in, however, the gap for Black workers remained.

Racial sorting

This prompted the author to explore the possibility that Black workers were being sorted into lower-quality workplaces. This emerges when higher quality employers are more selective, with discrimination resulting in Black workers being frozen out of such firms. This can emerge not only due to explicit discrimination but also the biases that exist when vacancies are filled via referrals, which inevitably perpetuate the existing racial makeup of an organization. The findings are illustrative, however, in terms of differences in employee engagement between races.

The findings highlight the importance of looking beyond pay when we’re looking to assess racial discrepancies in the workplace as there are also likely to be differences in working environment that are equally important. The author hopes that by highlighting this prospect it will be the first step toward rectifying things.