Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations

Abstract

Building on recent work on contemporary forms of bias in meritocratic personnel systems, the author assesses sources of racial disadvantage in an output-based pay-for-performance system for compensating financial advisers in a large financial services firm. Using data from expert reports submitted in racial discrimination litigation, the author shows how racial differences in access to white wealth, limits on African Americans’ full participation in broker teams, racialized approaches to multicultural marketing, and diffuse lines of authority for diversity and nondiscrimination created racial barriers that were sustained and amplified by a cumulative advantage system for allocating productivity-enhancing resources. The author concludes with a discussion of management strategies for minimizing minority vulnerability in privileged professions and the challenges faced when the sources of bias are neither unconscious nor unintended but are instead located at least in part in racially segregated social relations and power differences among professionals who hold formally equivalent positions in a company’s job structure.