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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29340 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/

The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white

A Daily Wire analysis of the same numbers examined by Bloomberg found that, in reality, the demographics of hiring figures for 2021 were barely different from previous years. The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce.

Though Bloomberg spun the tale as a victory for Black Lives Matter, blacks benefited the least of any racial group from the slight decline in whites, according to the analysis. The percentage of black hires was up from the status quo by 1%, while Asians were up by 2%, and Hispanics were up by 4%. That’s also explained by demographics — decades ago, when baby boomers entered the workforce, the U.S. was mostly white and black; in the decades since, the numbers of Hispanics and Asians in the United States have increased.

Here’s how Bloomberg got the story wrong, and how numbers actually work.

Bloomberg based its analysis on a form companies file to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission listing the racial breakdown of their U.S. employees. The forms are filed annually, but they don’t break out stats for employees hired that year; they just provide the total headcount of all employees by race.

Bloomberg, reaching for a way to isolate recent numbers, focused on the fact that companies increased their cumulative headcount by some 320,000 in 2021. Then they made a flawed leap of logic: They took the increase of minorities across the entire workforce, and divided it by the number of new positions — not the number of actual hires, which overwhelmingly come from replacing people who leave the company. In short, they got the denominator wrong.

“Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms…. Overall, these companies increased their headcount by 323,094 employees in 2021,” the outlet wrote. “Bloomberg then analyzed the racial makeup of those additional workers, finding that 94% of them were people of color.”

But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.

Thanks. I did not know that US statistics make a difference between new positions and replacements. In my country, they are all grouped together.

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