It is easy to take for granted the degree to which today's workplaces are racially integrated, but before the 1960s things were quite a bit different, especially in the South. So were the prevailing standards of job status by gender. As the TV series Mad Men faithfully reflects, the workplace of the 1960s and before was one of male domination, more specifically, white male domination. Much has been written about racial desegregation in the nation's schools. This book documents the lesser known desegregation story—the one that occurred at work, the one that upended gender traditional roles as well as racial ones.

To document this story, sociologists Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey use their considerable statistical skills to make sense of a goldmine of data, a trove of government-mandated reports covering every private sector workplace with at least 100 employees (50 if the firm did work for the government), available for every year from 1966 to 2005. Each report classified employees by gender, the five conventional race-ethnicity groups, and nine occupational classes. Superimposed on these data were the industry, region, and local labor market of each firm. A goldmine indeed!

Employing dozens of tables and figures, the authors organize these numbers to enunciate several broad findings. Here are a few. First, patterns of separation by race and gender tended to erode over time, but change was not uniform. Using the widely used dissimilarity index, the authors show that segregation between race-gender groups generally declined over the nearly four decades covered by their data, but by differing degrees. Between white and black men, for example, the index fell from about 65 percent to just over 50 percent between 1966 and 1980, but since then it has remained about the same. Between white men and women, it fell from about 80 percent to roughly 55 percent.

Second, the American workplace of 1966 was to a remarkable degree the domain of white males. Whereas 27 percent of that group of employees were classified as officials, managers, or professionals, in no other race-gender group was the corresponding share more than 4 percent (p. 52).

Third, as a result of federal intervention, the South shed some but not all of its distinctiveness in the matter of workplace segregation. In1966 the index of segregation between white and black males, for example, ranged from 78 percent in the West South region to 66 percent in New England (p. 56), but segregation declined more rapidly in the South than in other regions (p. 101). By 2005 it was the Pacific region that stands out from the rest in their comparisons by region. Firms in that region could boast the highest rates for blacks and white females of being an officer or manager, relative to white males. Still, the South managed to hold onto a bit of its regional exceptionalism, where race was concerned. In 2005 that region was home to 20 of the 21 labor markets with the most extreme overrepresentation of white men in managerial occupations (relative to their share of all workers). Those states also contained all 21 of the labor markets with the most egregious underrepresentation of black men and 19 of the 21 for black females. By contrast, the South had just 7 of the 21 labor markets with the greatest underrepresentations of white females. Overall, the evidence they present for local labor markets makes a good case that “Southern exceptionalism” is not entirely a thing of the past.

Fourth, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other government intervention dramatically changed the prevailing rules employers faced for hiring, firing, and promoting. The old (white) boy system gradually gave way to a new regime marked by official race-neutrality, attention to documented merit, and legal sanctions for discrimination. After what the authors describe as a period of uncertainty from 1966 to 1972 (employers sensed that things had changed but did not know exactly what practices would be acceptable), there followed a “short regulatory decade,” 1972–1980, marked by great progress for blacks and white women. This was especially so in professional occupations, where positions often require specific educational credentials. But after 1980, the paths for blacks and white women diverged. Progress for the former, the authors argue, screeched to a halt. (This happened, the authors note in passing, at a time when human resources became a white woman's profession.) The stagnation for blacks was really worse than it appears, in that employment figures like the ones they use do not account for the lower rates of employment and labor force participation among black adults, patterns made worse by the extraordinary increase in rates of incarceration in the country.

Through their voluminous empirical presentations, the authors deftly weave both sociological theory and historical narrative. As to the former, they are quick to remind readers that Gordon Allport and other sociologists believed interracial contact could bring about real benefits in the form of racial tolerance, but only if those in contact were of equal status. This notion gives real bite to the authors' attention to occupational classification. Regarding history, their account is bolstered throughout by references to historical context. For example, their explanation for the tenacity of racial discrimination from eastern Virginia to the Mississippi Delta reminds the reader that these were the parts of the South that had depended most on plantations and black slaves. They also note contemporary events paralleling their tables and figures. They note that the federal role in changing the rules facing employers did not stop with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as huge as it was. The federal courts also played an important role. One of the famous cases they cite, for example, was the 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power, in which the Supreme Court ruled that employers could be held responsible for unintended discrimination. Their account also notes shifts in the nation's politics as a backdrop to the momentous changes they document, such as the Republican Party's turn away from its traditional leadership on matters of civil rights in the latter part of the 1970s.

Documenting Desegregation represents a real advancement in our knowledge on a topic that deserves a place on reading lists in American economic history, labor economics, and public policy. At a time of hand-wringing about the effectiveness of government programs and enthusiasm in many quarters for shrinking government's role in the economy, this book presents a narrative that demonstrates how the federal government changed the rules and, however imperfectly, thereby advanced equality.