Mandating change: The impact of court-ordered policy changes on managerial diversity (Hirsh & Cha, 2017)

Affirmative action policies seek to strengthen organizational accountability and responsibility in regard to reducing bias and discrimination in the workplace. Although the authors did not provide details for each individual case that legally required affirmative action or related diversity plans, these policies were summarized as concrete policies to build diversity efforts into the organizational structure of the establishments. Specific policies common to affirmative action and related diversity plans included targeted recruitment efforts, targeted hiring plans, and/or promotion goals. 

The study used a nonexperimental design to estimate the impact of court-ordered affirmative action policies on the representation of white women, black women, and black men employed in managerial positions. Study authors used data from high-profile employment discrimination lawsuits settled from 1996 through 2008 that required the firm to implement affirmative action policies or related diversity plans in the court settlements or verdicts for each subsidiary establishment. The authors measured managerial diversity one year following the lawsuit settlement or verdict. In addition to controlling for unobservable characteristics, the statistical model controlled for several lawsuit and organizational characteristics such monetary awards for plaintiffs, the number of plaintiffs and lawsuits that each firm faced, establishment size, firm size, the percent of white male managers, within-establishment labor supply and local labor market, and the year.