Race, Self-Selection, and the Job Search Process
Open accessAbstract
While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? Such questions have remained unanswered due to the lack of data available on the positions to which job seekers apply. Drawing on two original data sets with application-specific information, we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job applications. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process.
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Employer discrimination is also cited as a cause of racial differences in labor market occupational distributions.
“Racial differences in labor market occupational distributions are also attributed to employer discrimination (Pager and Pedulla 2015).”
From Beyond the Great Recession: Labor Market Polarization and Ongoing Fertility Decline in the United States (2019) · cites this paper as Pager and Pedulla 2015
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Seltzer, N. (2019) · Demography · doi:10.1007/s13524-019-00790-6 · Cited by 196 · see citing works
“Racial differences in labor market occupational distributions are also attributed to employer discrimination (Pager and Pedulla 2015).”
- Authors
- Pager, D., & Pedulla, D. S.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- ORCID
- Pedulla, David S.
- Venue
- American Journal of Sociology
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2015-01
- Volume
- 120
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1005-1054
- ISSN
- 0002-9602 (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5390
- PMC
- PMC4651212
- OpenAlex
- W2008557200
- Cited by
- 144
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 11 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 18.80
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- American Journal of Sociology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD042849, K01HD053694)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Labour Market and Migration
- Keywords
- job search, self-selection, racial discrimination, African Americans, job applications, search breadth, perceived discrimination, labor market discrimination, job seekers
- MeSH terms
- Black or African American, Humans, Job Application, New Jersey, White People, Racism
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