The What and Why of Demographic Questions on Job Applications

For the past three months I have been on the hunt for a job and filling out countless online applications — and in the process, also filling out hundreds of demographic questions with companies asking about my race/ethnicity and gender. Most of these questions look very similar, and initially I thought nothing of it; but as the weeks rolled on and applications piled up, I started to ask the question — why is every single company asking for me to disclose my race/ethnicity, gender, veteran status, disability status, and sometimes even sexual orientation? And even more, why when they ask these questions do the answer options often vary so wildly?

I hunted around for the answers, which turned out to be fairly simple.

What do the questions say

First, let’s review. The most commonly asked demographic questions on online job applications are the applicant’s race/ethnicity and gender, followed by veteran status and disability status. Some companies also ask about an applicant’s sexual orientation. The questions are always voluntary — meaning you either have an option to skip the question or to select an answer option stating something like ‘I do not wish to self-identify’ — and always close-ended; meaning that I must select my race/ethnicity from a list of potential options that they provide to me.

And those options, particularly for race/ethnicity and gender questions, varied wildly. Of the companies that I applied to and recorded, all were companies with >100 employees in the US. About 35/62 (~56%) had only three options for gender — Male, Female, Decline to Self-Identify/Decline to Answer, while 27/62 (~44%) had one to three additional options (one had 19 additional options!) for Non-binary or Gender nonconforming applicants.

I also recorded the answer options for race/ethnicity questions from about 44 companies to which I applied. 30/44 (~73%) had some variation of a standard eight options, while 11/44 (~27%) had additional race/ethnicity options. The standard eight options typically included: American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, White, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Two or More Races, I do not wish to answer. Additional options often included South Asian and Middle Eastern or North African.

There was far less variation in the options provided for veteran status and disability status overall, with over 95% of companies to which I applied providing the same or similar number of options. (see screenshots above)

Why do companies ask these questions

According to the the HR consultancy Cangrade, companies ask race and gender questions for three main reasons: (ref)

1. To make sure they are maintaining non-discriminatory, ethical, and legal hiring practices; (i.e. to have data to prevent discriminatory hiring and to protect them against lawsuits alleging discriminatory hiring practices)
2. To measure the validity of their process internally (i.e. create a high-level view of applicant demographics for internal leaders, to inform hiring strategy). A valid process would be one in which, for example, the data shows that one demographic group isn’t being eliminated at a higher rate than others. Demographic data is anonymized and not submitted to hiring managers along with the rest of the application).
3. To send this information to the government. Companies with >=100 employees, and all companies with federal government contracts, are required to submit employee race and gender data to the federal government annually. The data is stored and analyzed by the U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Commission as part of an effort to ensure equitable hiring practices. It is worth noting that your data is only submitted (after being anonymized) to the government if you are hired.

Why do race and gender questions vary so much
Collecting demographic data for both internal process validation and for government reporting creates a small dilemma for companies. This is because while more inclusive companies may want to collect more nuanced data to allow applicants to more accurately and fully represent themselves, the government currently only acknowledges three gender options (Male, Female, Do not wish to self-identify) and eight racial/ethnic categories as part of its EEOO reporting mechanism (Asian, Black or African American, White, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaskan Native, Two or More Races, Do Not Wish to Self-Identify).*

As a result, when any company wishes to offer more than the standard, government-defined options, they face this dilemma: (1) do we provide more options that more accurately represent our applicants and employees, to give more nuance to understand the effectiveness of our hiring practices OR (2) do we restrict the options to only the government-defined options so that data analysis is cleaner and we can better compare our data to national averages. Race/ethnicity and gender options likely vary widely because each company is approaching this dilemma in a different way.

*There is a comment section on the gender data submission form (EEOO-1) that allows recruiters to make note of a non-binary gender identity, but it requires manual data entry that is often extremely cumbersome for recruiters, and therefore often not prioritized. (ref)