Feb. 24, 2012

By Allie Goldstein

Minority professionals have historically been underrepresented in major environmental organizations. A long-term study by SNRE Environmental Justice Professor Dorceta Taylor, published this winter in Environmental Practice, parses apart the stereotype that the field has been slow to diversify because minorities are generally disinterested in environmental careers.

As the study states, "the lack of trust cuts both ways." At the same time that environmental institutions have viewed minorities with suspicion in terms of their willingness to work in the field long-term, minorities in environmental organizations have often suspected that their salaries were lower than their white colleagues'. Are they? Taylor's study interviewed 265 professionals working in mainstream environmental organizations, governmental environmental agencies and environmental justice organizations in 2004-05 and used regression analysis to test the statistical relatedness of race, gender and other personal characteristics to job tenure, starting salary and current salary.

"I really didn't know what I'd find, and I was rather surprised at what I think is one of the main findings," Taylor said. "Not only are minorities staying in these organizations, but they're really loyal to the first organizations that hire them." Fifty-eight percent of minorities interviewed had been in their current job for more than 10 years, compared with 39 percent of whites with more than a decade of tenure.

The analysis also found current salary to be almost completely unrelated to race, with virtually identical percentages of minorities and whites earning $60,000 or more. Perceptions of salary discrimination, however, were not unfounded, since minorities were more likely than whites to have starting salaries under $40,000 (57 percent of minorities compared with 43 percent of whites). Minorities tend to make up for the head start of their white counterparts by staying longer in the same organization.

"Minorities and whites were using two different mechanisms for increasing salaries: white workers were changing organizations whereas minorities were staying in place and gaining seniority," Taylor said.

This finding directly contradicts the prevailing assumption that hiring minorities to environment-related positions is risky since they may not be really interested in the work. To the contrary, training minorities for environmental careers seems to be an excellent investment, since an organization that hires a minority is likely to reap the benefits of that person's professional development. Whether this staying power is due to loyalty or lack of job mobility was beyond the scope of the study, but the implications for hiring minorities are the same.

Another trend that surfaced in the study was a significant gender gap in wages, with women earning significantly less than men. Few women interviewed, however, articulated a perception of salary inequity, perhaps because women were generally hired later than men and worked for shorter periods. Taylor, however, is skeptical of common explanations for women earning less (such as the assumption that they take time off to raise children, and so do not use salary as their primary means of identification) and sees the gender dimension as an important "undertow" to the data that requires further explication. The results complement her 2007 study that found women in academic environmental programs had lower salary expectations than men.

A product of the merger of the biological and social worlds in academia, Taylor has doctorates in both Forestry and Environmental Studies and Sociology. She is the program director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative (MELDI) at SNRE, which seeks to provide resources to students and young professionals in the emerging "green-collar" sector. Taylor sees programs like SNRE as essential to widening the definition of the environmental field and to identifying environmental professionals at a young age.

"I think schools like SNRE play a really critical role in translation," Taylor said. "Translating what is environment to a wide base of people [means] pushing the conversation, pushing the research, questioning the assumptions that some folks hold, facilitating the dialogue. If more minority students come out of SNRE and other schools like this and go into the workforce and become successful, they themselves can work as conduits, recruiting other students."

Though environmental organizations have made strides in diversity in the last 30 years, minority representation in environmental careers remains much lower than minority percentages in the general population. Though environmental justice organizations tend to hire a more multicultural workforce, their numbers in general are small. Mainstream environmental organizations, currently less diverse even than governmental environmental organizations, are the major remaining hurdle.

"The field really could become more diverse," Taylor said. Her study, "Racial and Gender Differences in Job Mobility and Wages of Employees of Environmental Organizations," can be found in the December 2011 issue of Environmental Practice, which has its editorial office at DePaul University and is published by Cambridge University Press. Taylor noted that the relatively small sample size of the study required her to lump "minorities" into a single category—category she'd like to break down further in future research.