Shiu-Yik Au, Spencer Barnes, Andreanne Tremblay, "Filing While Female: What EEOC Filings Tell us about Workplace Discrimination Severity"
We develop a novel metric of workplace discrimination severity: the gender payout gap in the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) discrimination filings. On average, women receive payouts from discrimination litigation that are about 16% higher than payouts received by men even when controlling for geography, industry, employer, filer, and discrimination characteristics. Women’s cases remain open significantly longer than men’s with similar demographic, case and employer characteristics; we argue that this is due to women’s cases complexity and severity. In addition, we provide extensive statistics about workplace discrimination in U.S. organizations, underscoring the need to account for intersectionality and case complexity when measuring discrimination severity. We also show how our discrimination severity metric can be extended to a race-based or age-based payout gap. Lastly, we document that discrimination severity concentrates in firms with weaker corporate culture, firms with more male independent directors, firms with more men on the board’s subcommittees, less profitable firms and firms with higher financial distress.