Do black lives matter to employers? A combined field and natural experiment of racially disparate hiring practices in the wake of protests against police violence and racial oppression

David S. Kirk; Marti Rovira

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0267889

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJanuary 22, 2022
29 Mar 2022 Decision Letter - Jonathan Jackson, Editor PONE-D-22-02153Do Black Lives Matter to Employers? A Combined Field and Natural Experiment of Racially Disparate Hiring Practices in the Wake of Protests against Police Violence and Racial OppressionPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kirk, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Together, the three reviewers are expert in the substantive and methodological issues under investigation in your manuscript. Reviewer 1 recommended minor revisions and detailed a few ways you might like to improve the manuscript. The first involves adding a little more reflection on how the design and analytical choices you made might have affected the results. The second is about providing some consideration of alternative interpretations of the results (e.g. the labour market may have been different in the two time periods). Like reviewer 3, reviewer 1 raises the issue of generalisation to other occupational groups. To my mind, the results and discussion sections were concise, which is great, but also felt a little short. You could lengthen the discussion section by responding to reviewer 1’s comments there (PLOS ONE has no strict word limit). Finally, reviewer 1 recommends adding some information on Black /White employment rates in the two periods (which would help the discussion about unemployment rates being linked to minority disadvantage), making a comparison with Quillian et al.s (I assume this is 2017, the PNAS piece) study, and providing some more descriptive statistics. Reviewer 2 recommended straight accept and was very positive indeed. Reviewer 3 recommended minor revisions. The recommendations cover two things. First, you might want to say something a little more explicit about the timing of the work (no reader is going to think that you started the project hoping for an exogenous shock like George Floyd, but reviewer 3 might be correct in saying you could saying something more about the purpose and timing of the study). Second, there is the issue of generalisation not only to other occupational groups (mentioned also by reviewer 1), but also in terms of timing (the murder of George Floyd was a particular moment in history, and former White police officers might have been particularly punished at such a moment). You could therefore say a little more about whether the findings might be different if one were to do the same study at a time when the exogenous shock is (for instance) not quite so strong as George Floyd and the widespread national protests that followed. On the bases of these reviewers and my own reading of the paper, I am asking for minor revisions. This is a very interesting paper and I look forward to reading the revised version. You do not necessarily need to redraft the manuscript in each and every instance (reviewer 1 asks for more on occupational generalisibility while reviewer 3 suggests it’s so obvious it doesn’t need saying — I would recommend saying more rather than dropping it), but please do detail in a ‘response to review’ document your responses to the referee comments. Please submit your revised manuscript by May 08 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript: A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). 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Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Jonathan Jackson, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. 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Thank you for stating in your Funding Statement: (This work was supported by the British Academy (PF19\\100020 to MR), the John Fell Fund of the Oxford University Press (to DK), and the Leverhulme Trust through the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (to DK). The funders did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish, or the preparation of the manuscript.) 4. Please provide an amended statement that declares all the funding or sources of support (whether external or internal to your organization) received during this study, as detailed online in our guide for authors at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submit-now. Please also include the statement “There was no additional external funding received for this study.” in your updated Funding Statement. Please include your amended Funding Statement within your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf. 5. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I recommend an acceptance without the need for any further revision. I reviewed an earlier version of this paper at a different journal. The authors addressed all the points I had in my earlier review. I believe this article would be a good fit for PLOS One. It is methodologically sound and makes an important contribution to the social sciences by studying what effect (if any) critical events can have in discriminatory behavior in the marketplace. Reviewer #2: This is a well-written and highly interesting study of changes in racial discrimination before and after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The authors have conducted a field experiment in two waves, using the murder as an “exogenous shock” that separates the two waves. In line with their hypothesis, nicely argued along the lines of group threat theory, they find that the black/white difference in interview callbacks is reversed in wave two, suggesting an employer preference for black applicants in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. I definitely think that this paper merits publication. It is an original contribution to a field of research on its way to get “saturated” and the study is carefully executed, including convincing arguments for the choice of names, occupations, and the fictitious applicants’ prior professions. The analyses are also well done and presented in an accessible way. Still, I would recommend a bit more reflection on how some of the authors’ choices may affect their findings, as well as pointing out some alternative interpretations of the results that should be discussed. The authors have made an interesting choice in letting the fictitious applicants have former work experience as police officers, firefighters, or code enforcement officers. In the supporting information document, they argue convincingly that it is not uncommon for individuals with such work experience to seek new career paths. However, the special type of prior professions begs the question of whether one would find the same effects for applicants with completely different qualifications and work experiences, or whether the change in employer behavior would be similar across different backgrounds. In other words: do the authors interpret their findings as a general reduction in hiring discrimination against black or primarily a reduction in discrimination against individuals with prior experience as police officers and fire fighters? Relatedly, the authors point out on p. 15 that the “results may not fully generalize to the population of jobs in a labor market.” This is an understatement. All field experiments suffer from this limitation, but this one most certainly so as the four different categories of service-related jobs that are applied to represent a very small set of available jobs. I would strongly recommend that the authors acknowledge this limitation and offer some more space in reflecting on its implications. The authors also point out that the general labor market situation characterizing the two waves was quite different because the first wave was conducted in the midst of the pandemic when the unemployment rates increased dramatically. However, I do not find that they really reflect on this problem besides arguing that a focus on black/white differences in callbacks is the most relevant outcome measure in both waves. Now, I certainly do not think that the reversal of the black/white disparities could be explained by a change in general employment levels, but some previous studies (e.g., the work of Stijn Bart) suggest that minority disadvantage tend to be higher when unemployment rates are high. Indeed, it would be beneficial if the authors added information about the average black/white employment rates in the two periods and in the areas of which the study was conducted. If the black/white difference was reduced, this would probably explain some of the effect, yet the gap was probably not turned on its head, suggesting that the study actually do document a reduction in discrimination. The authors could also consider comparing the discrimination rates in the two separate waves to the overall discrimination rate against black applicants across time in the cited Quillian et al. study. I believe the readers would be interested in learning whether the baseline results (wave 1) align with what has already been established. Finally, I think the paper would benefit from a table with a description of study characteristics. This information provides a useful overview of the study an makes it more transparent. Reviewer #3: This is an excellent study with important implications and appropriate and thoroughly documented design and analysis. I recommend publication, subject to some minor revisions. 1. It would be helpful to the reader to understand how it is that the authors came to be doing a study that was interrupted by the George Floyd protest. This currently reads almost as if this was by design, but obviously this can’t be the case. What was the larger purpose of the study? 2. Consider how the use of a former police officer as a characteristic of the candidate following the case of police killing limits the generalizability of the study. For example, might it be the case that a former white police officer is particularly punished in this circumstance? The interaction models speak to this, I believe, but the authors should be more explicit about this. 3. The point about the study not generalizing to the entire labor market is true, but probably doesn’t need to be said. Does any audit study generalize to the entire labor market? Congratulations to the authors on this excellent study. ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review?** For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267889.r001
Revision 1
6 Apr 2022 Author Response We thank the reviewers and editor for their many helpful and insightful comments. We gave careful attention to all of the detailed suggestions offered by the reviewers and we believe we have made corresponding revisions in the paper to address them. Below we reproduce reviewer comments (with the exclusion of general summary comments), with our response immediately thereafter (marked by a ). Line numbers referenced below refer to those found in the unmarked version of the revised manuscript. Response to Reviewer #1: Reviewer 1 recommended an acceptance. We appreciate the enthusiasm for our work. Response to Reviewer #2: I definitely think that this paper merits publication. It is an original contribution to a field of research on its way to get “saturated” and the study is carefully executed, including convincing arguments for the choice of names, occupations, and the fictitious applicants’ prior professions. The analyses are also well done and presented in an accessible way. Still, I would recommend a bit more reflection on how some of the authors’ choices may affect their findings, as well as pointing out some alternative interpretations of the results that should be discussed. The authors have made an interesting choice in letting the fictitious applicants have former work experience as police officers, firefighters, or code enforcement officers. In the supporting information document, they argue convincingly that it is not uncommon for individuals with such work experience to seek new career paths. However, the special type of prior professions begs the question of whether one would find the same effects for applicants with completely different qualifications and work experiences, or whether the change in employer behavior would be similar across different backgrounds. In other words: do the authors interpret their findings as a general reduction in hiring discrimination against black or primarily a reduction in discrimination against individuals with prior experience as police officers and fire fighters? Reviewer 2 has hit upon a central question. We do not wish to extrapolate beyond what is sensible with our data, so all we can reasonably say at the moment is that our findings pertain to the front-line public sector employees that are the focus of our study. However, in the Discussion section of the paper, we call for additional research using different qualifications than the ones used in this study (lines 462-470). Nevertheless, group threat theory leads us to expect that there would be a general reduction in employment discrimination in the wake of highly publicized police violence and associated protest activity. Relatedly, the authors point out on p. 15 that the “results may not fully generalize to the population of jobs in a labor market.” This is an understatement. All field experiments suffer from this limitation, but this one most certainly so as the four different categories of service-related jobs that are applied to represent a very small set of available jobs. I would strongly recommend that the authors acknowledge this limitation and offer some more space in reflecting on its implications. We thank the reviewer for the suggestion to consider the implications of our sampling design with respect to generalizability and study limitations. We have added some corresponding discussion to lines 335-346. The authors also point out that the general labor market situation characterizing the two waves was quite different because the first wave was conducted in the midst of the pandemic when the unemployment rates increased dramatically. However, I do not find that they really reflect on this problem besides arguing that a focus on black/white differences in callbacks is the most relevant outcome measure in both waves. Now, I certainly do not think that the reversal of the black/white disparities could be explained by a change in general employment levels, but some previous studies (e.g., the work of Stijn Bart) suggest that minority disadvantage tend to be higher when unemployment rates are high. Indeed, it would be beneficial if the authors added information about the average black/white employment rates in the two periods and in the areas of which the study was conducted. If the black/white difference was reduced, this would probably explain some of the effect, yet the gap was probably not turned on its head, suggesting that the study actually do document a reduction in discrimination. We appreciate the suggestion to reflect on the likely differences in discrimination rates in tight vs. slack labor markets. We now do so on lines 317-334. Given that discrimination tends to be greater in slack labor markets, our findings may actually understate the effect of highly publicized police violence and widespread protest activity, if it had occurred at a time not characterized by high unemployment. The authors could also consider comparing the discrimination rates in the two separate waves to the overall discrimination rate against black applicants across time in the cited Quillian et al. study. I believe the readers would be interested in learning whether the baseline results (wave 1) align with what has already been established. We concur that it is useful to compare baseline rates of discrimination in our study to the trends examined in the Quillian et al. (2017) meta-analysis. Indeed, we find that the ratio of White-to-Black call-backs in our study are highly similar to those reported in the Quillian et al. study (see lines 383-391). Finally, I think the paper would benefit from a table with a description of study characteristics. This information provides a useful overview of the study an makes it more transparent. We have added Table 1 showing study characteristics, namely observations by time period, applicant race, gender, and prior profession. Response to Reviewer #3: 1. It would be helpful to the reader to understand how it is that the authors came to be doing a study that was interrupted by the George Floyd protest. This currently reads almost as if this was by design, but obviously this can’t be the case. What was the larger purpose of the study? Reviewer 3 suggested we provide further detail about the original motivation of our study, which was interrupted by the murder of George Floyd. Our original study was in fact designed to examine reactions to police officers and their potential stigma in the labor market. Of course we could not have anticipated the murder of Mr. Floyd or the reaction to his death. Whereas the attention generated by the murder of Mr. Floyd was a vast order of magnitude greater than many deaths, the reviewer presumably knows that roughly 1,000 to 1,100 individuals are killed by the police each year in the United States (according to a variety of data sources, including the Washington Post police shootings database, Fatal Encounters, and mappingpoliceviolence.org). Hence, while our original intent was to study reactions to the police in the context of what might be called their more typical incidents of violence, the death of Mr. Floyd tragically provided an opportunity to examine our question in the context of widespread protests and media attention. We have sought to clarify these points on lines 170-176. 2. Consider how the use of a former police officer as a characteristic of the candidate following the case of police killing limits the generalizability of the study. For example, might it be the case that a former white police officer is particularly punished in this circumstance? The interaction models speak to this, I believe, but the authors should be more explicit about this. Per the reviewer’s excellent suggestion, we provide a broader discussion of the limitations of our design choices (lines 347-355), including limits on generalizing beyond the professional background characteristics examined in the study. In the Discussion section, we encourage future research that is designed in such a way to provide broader generalizability (lines 462-470). 3. The point about the study not generalizing to the entire labor market is true, but probably doesn’t need to be said. Does any audit study generalize to the entire labor market? While appreciate the reviewers point, but have opted to retain this particular discussion about generalizability in order to address Reviewer 2’s comments. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: ResponsetoReviewers.docx* https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267889.r002
19 Apr 2022 Decision Letter - Jonathan Jackson, Editor Do black lives matter to employers? A combined field and natural experiment of racially disparate hiring practices in the wake of protests against police violence and racial oppression PONE-D-22-02153R1 Dear Dr. Kirk, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Jonathan Jackson, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267889.r003
Formally Accepted
21 Apr 2022 Acceptance Letter - Jonathan Jackson, Editor PONE-D-22-02153R1 Do black lives matter to employers? A combined field and natural experiment of racially disparate hiring practices in the wake of protests against police violence and racial oppression Dear Dr. Kirk: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Jonathan Jackson Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267889.r004

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