November 13th, 2024

Researchers: higher turnover, lower promotion rates for Black women with predominantly white co-workers

Mandile Mpofu

A new study by researchers at the Harvard University Kennedy School, Boston University’s Questrom School of Business and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that Black women who work on predominantly white teams are 51 percent more likely to leave their positions than white women.

“Intersectional Peer Effects at Work: The Effect of White Coworkers on Black Women’s Careers” contributes to the existing body of research that attempts to understand how workplace dynamics affect different employees differently.

In addition to the turnover gap between Black and white women, the study of about 9,000 new hires at an anonymous global professional services firm found that a similar disparity existed between all Black and white employees generally, with Black employees 32 percent more likely to leave within two years.

The study also concluded that Black women were 26 percent less likely to receive a promotion on time than white women. However, Black women were the only demographic whose turnover rate was negatively influenced by working with mostly white colleagues, although the researchers said they could not say whether the turnover was voluntary or not.

Other groups, including Black men and Hispanic and Asian people, were not adversely affected in the same way by working with mostly white coworkers.

“Our findings are consistent with past research on intersectionality but the magnitudes of the effects have surprised many,” said the study’s co-authors Elizabeth Linos, associate professor for public policy and management at Harvard, and Sanaz Mobasseri, assistant professor of management and organizations at BU, in an email to the Bay State Banner. “Our findings help to reframe our understanding of Black women’s career outcomes as originating in a set of early interactions with white coworkers and highlight the role organizational practices play in producing distinct disadvantages.”

Linos and Mobasseri said the most important part of their methodology was that the new hires at the services firm were assigned to early teams, meaning that their initial groups in the office are “as good as random.” This allowed them to determine the “causal impact of white coworkers on new hires’ career trajectories,” they said.

While the reasons why Black women leave or have lower promotion rates are outside of the scope of the study, in considering possible causes of the phenomenon, the researchers hypothesize that Black women who worked with mostly white teams in the early stages of their career at the firm were more likely to be designated as “low performers” and log fewer working hours, both indicators of high turnover rates and lower opportunities for promotion.

Although the firm used in the study is “representative of the industry,” the researchers said further study is necessary to understand how pervasive the findings are in varying professional contexts. Another caveat, they said, was that their findings are applicable to workplaces with demographic breakdowns in which white colleagues are the majority and cannot currently be extrapolated to contexts in which they are minorities.

In the paper, the authors write that research into the existing racial and gender inequalities in workplaces has focused on “pre-hire factors,” that is, looking at circumstances before professionals are hired. Instead, the authors sought to fill a gap in the scholarship by examining practices within the workplace that affect the retention and promotion of minorities, starting with this firm.

The study is also unique in that not many papers have studied professional services firms at this “scale and detail,” Linos and Mobasseri said. Their research is the first of its kind to be published and points to a greater need for more comprehensive quantitative research on the effects of workplaces on employees.

“Retaining and promoting a diverse set of employees in elite firms is just as important as recruiting them. That Black women’s experiences are distinct from other race-gender groups, and that white men and women may play different roles in shaping these experiences, underscores the need for intersectional approaches to identifying barriers to equity and equality at work,” the authors wrote.

The findings can also be beneficial to firms such as the one in the study, the researchers said. Companies invest money in recruiting, so turnover is costly. The study’s results can inform internal practices.

“We hope this study leads to further interest and attention to the differential experiences of different race-gender groups in elite firms,” Linos and Mobasseri said.