Source: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Case law says that the proportion of workers in a given place or category ought to be close to the proportion of people in that racial or ethnic group to the population. So if we wish to detect discrimination, we must look at the proportions.

The chart shows employment in nine occupational groups for the Central Indiana region in 2005, broken out by four racial/ethnic groups. These figures come from a survey of large employers performed annually by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The numbers are smaller than in more complete tallies of employment because the EEOC looks only at employers with more than 50 employees.

White workers fill the majority of job spots in every occupational category, simply because of their large numbers. From the most high-skill, high-wage occupations (managers and professionals) to the low-wage end of the spectrum (laborers and service workers), most workers in every category are white.

White people accounted for 77.9 percent of the sample. Do they hold 77.9 percent of the jobs in each category? What about blacks (14.8 percent), Hispanics (5.1 percent) and Asians (1.9 percent)?

  

   
     
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