"Hidden discrimination" prevents visible minorities and Aboriginal people from gaining equal access to jobs
Dec. 12 2000 - A study released by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation shows
that visible minorities and Aboriginal people miss out on promotions and the best jobs.
Written by Jean Lock Kunz, Anne Milan, and Sylvain Schetagne from the Canadian Council on
Social Development (CCSD) the study - Unequal Access: A Canadian Profile of Racial Differences in
Education, Employment and Income - was based on recent quantitative statistics and focus
group discussions with visible minorities and Aboriginal peoples in cities throughout Canada.
The authors found that:
- Even though visible minorities typically have higher levels of education
than their white compatriots, they have lower levels of both employment and
income.
- The greatest difficulty in finding suitable jobs is experienced by foreign-born
visible minorities. Just half of those with university education have found
high-skill jobs.
- University-educated visible minorities
and Aboriginal people are less likely to be in managerial and
professional jobs than white Canadians. In fact, a half of visible minorities who do
have managerial jobs are self-employed. This compares with a third of white Canadians.
- There is a greater representation of foreign-born visible minorities and Aboriginal
within the bottom 20% of income earners than would be expected from their
numbers in the population. They are also under-represented in the top 20% of income earners.
- Comparing people with the same level of education, white Canadians (both foreign-born
and Canadian-born) are three times as likely as Aboriginal peoples and
about twice as likely as foreign-born visible minorities to be in the
top 20% of income earners. Even when born in Canada, visible minorities contiue to be
less likely than white Canadians to be in the top 20 % of income earners.
- Some 38% of university-educated Canadian-born whites were within the top 20%
of the income scale. This compares with just 29% of Canadian-born visible minorities
and 21% of foreign-born visible minorities.
- On average, foreign-born visible minorities earn 78 cents for every
dollar earned by foreign-born white Canadians.
"Our findings confirm that the higher you go in the workplace, the whiter
it becomes," says Dr. Kunz, senior research associate at the CCSD. "Racial
discrimination is still present in the work place, mostly in covert forms.
Diversity is generally seen at the bottom and middle level of the labour force
pyramid."
While most focus group participants agreed that labour market outcomes
are dependent on the right skill sets, education, and the economic conditions,
they observed that racial discrimination existed in employment. Participants
found that racism is a "hidden thing" in the workplace. Examples of "subtle
discrimination" include being passed over for promotion, being assigned
unpleasant tasks at work, being stereotyped, and being excluded from the
"inner circle" of their workplace.
"This report should be required reading for employers in both the public
and private sectors," says the Honourable Lincoln Alexander, chair of the
Canadian Race Relations Foundation. "The results demonstrate that we need to
make greater efforts to eliminate systemic discrimination in Canada."
Moy Tam, chief operating officer of the Foundation, says that although
employment equity laws can play an important role in reducing employment and
income disparities, a more sophisticated range of solutions is needed.
"Employment equity alone is not a panacea for eliminating racial
discrimination in the workplace," says Tam. "We also need to eliminate the
barriers faced by immigrants in accessing professions and trades and put more
effort into raising public awareness about the existence of systemic
discrimination in the workplace."
The Canadian Race Relations Foundation website is at:
The Canadian Council on Social Development website can be found at:
Canadian Human Resources
