The central theme of President Obama’s inauguration speech was equal opportunity and its refrain, “Our journey is not complete.”
He never referred directly to equal opportunity in employment, perhaps because his very election testifies to certain progress since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination on the basis of race and sex.
But looking at the United States labor force as a whole, how broad has that progress actually been? Lack of systematic data on workplace segregation over time has long made that question difficult to answer. Recently, however, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made available to researchers a rich legacy of private-sector employer reports known as the EEO-1 survey. ... <Read more>
First published online in The New York Times on Jan. 28, 2013.
