Race and the Workforce: Occupational

Race and the Workforce: Occupational Status, Aspirations, and Stereotyping among African-American Children)

The purpose of the present paper is to provide a critical review of an article written by Rebecca S. Bigler, Cara J. Avenhart and Linn S. Liben, called "Race and the workforce: occupational status, aspirations and stereotyping between African-American children." There has been a lot of interest to discover the manner in which racial prejudice touches people's lives, especially in the case of the categories which are usually worst affected, namely the African-Americans. The purpose of this research article was to see if the perceptions held by African-American children regarding occupational status and their vocational interests were somehow influenced by the racial segregation of the workforce.

The researchers wished to see whether the race of the workers influenced the judgments of the children when it came to jobs. The social and economical background from where the children came were also considered as potential factors of influence. The already existing research suggests that African-Americans can complain about occupational disadvantages caused by prejudice about their skin color. The already existing patterns are likely to impact the future development of the African-American children and adolescents. Since there is scarce research regarding this specific issues, the authors of the present article thought it would be an important contribution in this regard.

The two coordinates that were taken into consideration are the following: understanding whether children were aware about which jobs are more likely to be associated to African-Americans vs. European-Americans and if the African-American children form occupational prejudices themselves, having race as a basic criterion. Already existing research demonstrated that children are more likely to associated good traits with whites and negative ones with blacks. The media in addition is contributing to a picture in which the white occupy important jobs, while blacks are forced to do jobs associated with a lower status.

As far as the methods of the research are concerned, the participants were 92 African children, among which 47 girls and 45 boys with a mean age of seven years and two months. The children were recruited from a racially heterogeneous school in the Midwest. There were four African-American investigators, two men and two women who interviewed the children in two sessions. The dependent measures were the ratings of occupational status, the occupational aspirations and the knowledge of the occupational stereotypes. The second session was meant to assess the individual differences in knowing the racial stereos of occupations, endorsing racial stereotypes of occupations and endorsing of majority -culture trait stereotype of African-Americans.

The conclusion of the article suggests that the familiar occupations were rated according to criteria of status, desirability and stereotyping. In the case of the jobs they were familiar with, children connected their judgments to the information that was familiar to them. "the novel occupations that had been depicted with African-Americans were judged as lower in status than had been depicted with European-Americans, demonstrating a causal influence of worker's race on children's judgments. Children's age and socioeconomic background moderated their occupational judgments." The results were like this: the children rated 27 familiar occupations in relation to the difficulty to learn, difficulty to perform, pay and its importance. Among younger children of both higher and lower status, thee was more interest in high status jobs than in medium or low status ones. The children coming from lower background were more likely to believe that African-Americans are associated with medium or low level jobs.

The results seem to suggest that race "has a consistent and powerful effect on African-American children's perceptions of occupations. Children give higher status to the jobs which have high concentrations of European-Americans and low concentrations of African-Americans. Children also rated occupations that had been depicted with only European-American workers as being higher in status than the identical occupations depicted with only African-American workers. Those occupations which were performed exclusively by African-Americans were considered lower in status. The problem is that "African-American children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, may preferentially seek out low-status jobs in which minorities are well represented and thereby ensure that such jobs remain overpopulated by minorities" allowing for the future generations to grow up with the same stereotypes. In addition, "those medium and high status jobs that do attract an increasing proportion of African-American workers (perhaps from more advantaged households) may across time, be viewed as lower in status simply as a function of the race of the worker and consequently show decreasing levels of pay and prestige."