Effects of race and gender on hiring
In previous years, UV has run multi-step regressions to try and identify which factors are associated with Recruit success and 1L GPA. Historically, very few factors have been predictive of Recruit success. Last year, the only significant factors correlated with employment success were GPA and being in the JD/MBA program—and the JD/MBA was only significant when converting in-firms to actual offers (for a full discussion, see last year’s Recruit Special).
As the decision was made to eliminate most of the demographics portion of the survey (see the October article, “Preparing for the Recruit Special Edition”, for a full explanation as to why) very few factors could be examined if they correlated with Recruit success. That said, we did ask respondents their gender and if they identified as racialized to examine the possibility of discriminatory hiring practices.
The effect of GPA is discussed more fully in, “So I heard you like reading about other peoples’ grades”, while the gender and race findings are discussed below.
It is important to note that none of these relationships are necessarily causal. Furthermore, these are far from random samples so drawing any strong conclusions is suspect at best.
Gender
The 86 students who gave their gender only identified as either men or women, so the analysis only deals with potential differences as between those two genders.
There was no significant difference between the hiring of men and women at any stage of the Recruit. There was minor variation in the data, although almost certainly explained by chance, not bias in hiring against/towards men/women. Men slightly outperformed women in conversion rates at every stage, although women were slightly more successful in ultimately securing employment.
| Application Conversion Rate(p = 0.84) | Application Conversion Rate (p = 0.84) | OCI Conversion Rate (p = 0.24) | In-Firm Conversion Rate (p = 0.67)Employment Rate(p = 0.79) | Employment Rate (p = 0.79) |
| Women | 64% | 50% | 41% | 81% |
| Men | 66% | 56% | 44% | 79% |
I also looked at the total number of applications to see if there was any difference between the genders. I continued to find no exciting results. There was no significant difference between the number of applications submitted by men and women. On average, women submitted 23 applications, although this value is buoyed by a few outliers on the high end. On average, men submitted 22.
No man submitted more than 45 applications, while 4 women did (with someone writing a staggering 68 applications). The vast majority of people submitted between 15 and 30 applications, although a shout-out to the person who submitted a single application—including non-OCIs—and then got the offer from (presumably) that firm. Talk about knowing what you want and executing.
Race
Slightly fewer students gave race information, with 41 students identifying as racialized, and 41 students not identifying as racialized.
There was no significant difference between the hiring of racialized and non-racialized students at any stage of the Recruit. As with gender, there was minor variation, although almost certainly explained by chance.
| Application Conversion Rate(p = 0.98) | OCI Conversion Rate (p = 0.88) | In-Firm Conversion Rate (p = 0.78) | Employment Rate(p = 0.58 | |
| Racialized | 66% | 54% | 41% | 78% |
| Non-Racialized | 67% | 53% | 43% | 83% |
And as with gender, there was also no difference in the number of applications submitted. There were a few high outliers for racialized students, but, as when breaking the data down by gender, the majority of people submitted between 15 and 30 applications.
Sorry for those of you who read this entire article expecting a thrilling exposé of discrimination in the hiring Recruit. Instead, you got an entire article with not a significant result to be found.
