Color, Race, and Employment Discrimination
February 21, 2025
Thursday, 509 O'Brian Hall
Noon Reception; 12:30 Presentation
Option to attend via Zoom, here.

Access the advance paper(s) here.

Speaker: Joni Hersch (Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Economics)

Abstract: There is substantial evidence of discriminatory treatment of persons with darker skin color. Immigrants with darker skin color in particular suffer a substantial earnings penalty that has not diminished over time or with duration in the United States. Legal charges of color discrimination in employment have also increased substantially over time. Color discrimination is likely to become increasingly relevant as the United States continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse through immigration and a growing multiracial and multi-ethnic population. Although Title VII does not prohibit claims of discrimination between parties of the same identifiable race, courts are typically skeptical of intra-racial claims even when color is alleged as the source of discriminatory treatment. In light of the newly-mandated addition of the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) reporting category for US government surveys, color discrimination claims may become more viable as those of MENA ancestry will no longer be automatically categorized as White. Furthermore, the new Federal combined question for collecting racial and ethnicity data highlights the importance of recognizing color as well as race in monitoring enforcement of civil rights laws.

Speaker Bio: Joni Hersch is an economist who works in the areas of employment discrimination and empirical law and economics. Professor Hersch joined Vanderbilt Law School as a professor of law and economics in 2006, with secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and the Owen Graduate School of Management. That same year, she and W. Kip Viscusi co-founded Vanderbilt’s Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics. 

Hersch is a research fellow with IZA Institute for Labor Economics and was co-editor of the peer-reviewed IZA Journal of Labor Economics from summer 2015 through summer 2018. She also serves as associate editor of the Review of Economics of the Household. 

Hersch has published numerous articles in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews. She is the author of Sex Discrimination in the Labor Market (Foundations and Trends in Microeconomics, 2006) and co-editor of Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago, 2004).

Before joining Vanderbilt’s faculty, Hersch was an adjunct law professor at Harvard Law School. She was a professor of economics at the University of Wyoming from 1989 to 1999 and has been a visiting professor of economics at Northwestern, Caltech, Duke, and Harvard.

Hersch’s research focuses on the influence of gender, race, national origin, skin color, and family background on labor market outcomes, higher education and inequality. Her research has received international media attention and has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Vox, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and the L.A. Times.

Speaker Profile.