Do Black Employees Face Racial Disparities in Workplace Promotions?
Hegde, Ljungqvist, and Raj (2026) ask whether racial disparities persist in workplace promotions when employees meet objective, formula-based promotion standards. They examine administrative records for 13,721 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office examiners from 2001–2015, including promotion eligibility, job performance, pay, and career progression. They find that promotion-eligible Black examiners were about 20% less likely than comparable White examiners to receive timely promotions. At the highest level, Black examiners were 30.1% less likely to be promoted on time. Overall, they took about 10 months, or 13%, longer to reach the top grade, reducing estimated career earnings by 2.9%.
Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist
Racial disparities in promotion matter broadly because advancement shapes earnings, leadership opportunities, organizational productivity, and access to positions of authority throughout the labor market. The topic is especially timely as employers increasingly rely on standardized performance systems intended to reduce discretion in personnel decisions. This study makes an important contribution by showing that disparities can persist even when promotion criteria are unusually transparent and measurable. The administrative data are exceptionally strong, tracking more than 13,700 employees and directly identifying promotion eligibility and performance. The statistical analysis is rigorous and benefits from institutional features that reduce confounding, although the principal estimates are not based on an RCT. Future research using stronger causal designs across other agencies and private employers would help establish generalizability.
Full Citation and Link to Article
Hegde, D., Ljungqvist, A., & Raj, M. (2026). Racial promotion gaps. American Economic Review. Advance online publication. American Economic Association.
Central Research Question
The study asks whether racial disparities in promotion persist even when advancement is governed by objective, formula-based criteria and employee performance can be observed directly. The authors focus on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), where patent examiners advance through a structured federal career ladder. Employees become eligible for promotion after satisfying explicit requirements related to tenure, production, examination quality, and docket management. Once those conditions are met, promotion is effectively an entitlement, although supervisors retain responsibility for processing the promotion.
This institutional structure allows the researchers to ask a more precise question than is possible in many studies of workplace inequality: among employees who are demonstrably qualified for promotion, are Black examiners promoted as quickly as similarly qualified White examiners? The study also investigates why any racial gap occurs. In particular, the authors distinguish among statistical discrimination based on expectations about future performance, taste-based discrimination arising from racial animus, employee preferences regarding promotion, and belief-based discrimination in which supervisors rely on inaccurate or culturally shared expectations when exercising discretion.
Previous Literature
The research builds on several major traditions in the economics of discrimination. Becker (1957) developed the foundational model of taste-based discrimination, in which employers or other decision makers incur a perceived cost from interacting with members of particular groups. Arrow (1971) and Phelps (1972) instead developed models of statistical discrimination, in which decision makers use group characteristics as proxies for uncertain information about individual productivity.
The study also draws on more recent work emphasizing stereotypes and biased beliefs. Bertrand, Chugh, and Mullainathan (2005) examined implicit discrimination, while Bordalo et al. (2016) modeled stereotypes as distorted beliefs that exaggerate perceived differences between groups. Bohren, Imas, and Rosenberg (2019) developed a dynamic framework in which discrimination can evolve as decision makers update beliefs from experience. Rabin and Schrag (1999) provide an important theoretical basis for asymmetric belief updating, under which decision makers interpret new information in ways that reinforce prior beliefs.
The authors also connect their analysis to Arnold, Dobbie, and Yang (2018), who found racial disparities in bail decisions among both White and Black judges. That study is especially relevant because disparities under same-race decision makers are difficult to reconcile with a simple model of racial animus. Coffman (2014) similarly provides evidence that stereotypes may be internalized within groups. Prior research on promotions has focused much more extensively on gender, including work by Ginther and Hayes, Ginther and Kahn, McDowell, Singell, and Ziliak, and Antecol, Bedard, and Stearns. The authors argue that comparatively little research has directly examined racial disparities in promotions while simultaneously observing whether workers have objectively satisfied promotion requirements.
Data
The researchers assemble detailed administrative records covering 13,721 patent examiners from 2001 through 2015, essentially representing the population of PTO examiners during the period. The data combine personnel records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests with salary information from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, performance information, bonus records, promotion histories, demographic characteristics, and measures of patent-examination output and quality.
A major advantage of the data is the researchers’ ability to identify a subset of employees who unquestionably meet the objective criteria for promotion. PTO promotion rules depend on time in grade and measurable performance standards covering production, quality, docket management, and professional responsibilities. Information on achievement awards and quality-based pay increases allows the authors to identify employees whose observed performance necessarily exceeds the thresholds required for advancement.
The administrative records also identify supervisors and permit examiners to be followed across grades and over time. Because patent applications are generally assigned within specialized units using procedures that approximate random assignment, the authors can make unusually informative performance comparisons among employees completing similar work. The data therefore allow the study to distinguish differences in promotion timing from differences in eligibility, observable productivity, job assignments, and several alternative explanations.
Methods
The analysis begins with descriptive comparisons of timely promotion rates and the number of months required to advance through the PTO career ladder. The principal multivariate analysis uses Cox proportional-hazard models to estimate the probability that an examiner who has become eligible will receive a promotion within a given period. These models account for right-censoring and permit promotion hazards to vary across grades and specialized organizational units.
The models compare Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic examiners while accounting for gender, education, production, docket management, examination-quality measures, calendar time, and organizational context. The authors then focus particularly on employees who demonstrably satisfy the promotion standards, greatly reducing concerns that racial differences reflect unobserved qualifications.
A series of additional tests investigates competing explanations. The authors compare pre- and post-promotion productivity, examine whether employees respond differently to the financial benefits of promotion, analyze part-time work and telework, and estimate competing-risk models allowing for employee exits. They also compare promotion patterns under supervisors of different races. Finally, they examine changes in promotion behavior when managerial discretion becomes more constrained by caseload pressures, staffing losses, budget conditions, or supervisors’ own probationary status.
Findings/Size Effects
The central result is a substantial racial disparity in promotion timing. Among examiners who satisfy the promotion criteria, Black employees are approximately 20% less likely than White employees to receive a timely promotion. The disparity is concentrated primarily in the senior grades. Black examiners are 16.8% less likely to receive timely promotion to GS-12, 28% less likely at GS-13, and 30.1% less likely when advancing to GS-14, the primary-examiner level.
These delays accumulate over a career. A promotion-eligible Black examiner requires an average of 87.3 months to move from GS-5 through GS-14, compared with 77.2 months for an equivalent White examiner. The resulting difference of approximately 10.1 months represents a 13% longer journey through the career ladder. Simulations indicate that these delays reduce cumulative earnings over a 15-year career by approximately 2.9%.
Performance differences do not explain the disparity. Black examiners are at least as productive as White examiners before promotion and frequently more productive at senior levels. After promotion, Black examiners outperform comparable White examiners, with particularly strong performance among those reaching GS-14. These findings undermine an explanation based on accurate expectations of weaker future performance.
The results also provide little support for voluntary promotion delays. Black examiners respond similarly to the monetary incentives associated with promotion and are less likely than White examiners to work part time. Substantial racial gaps remain even among very high-performing employees.
Supervisor race produces one of the study’s most notable findings. Black examiners experience delayed advancement under both White and Black supervisors. Relative to White examiners, Black examiners take approximately 7.1 additional months to reach the highest grade under White supervisors, and delays are even greater under Black supervisors. The estimated promotion gap is 8.1% under White supervisors and 17.8% under Black supervisors. This pattern is difficult to explain through conventional taste-based discrimination.
Additional evidence is consistent with belief-based discrimination. Exposure to a poorly performing Black examiner reduces a White supervisor’s subsequent probability of timely promoting other Black employees by roughly one-third, while exposure to an exceptionally productive Black examiner produces no comparable positive adjustment. Promotion disparities also diminish when managerial discretion becomes more costly. During unusually high caseload periods, Black examiners are 18.3% more likely to receive timely promotion, while White examiners are 6% less likely. During supervisors’ probationary periods, Black examiners are 10.5% more likely to receive timely promotion.
Conclusion
The study concludes that substantial racial disparities can persist even inside an organization with highly structured, transparent, and ostensibly automatic promotion rules. The central mechanism is not that Black examiners fail to satisfy promotion standards. They meet the required criteria and perform at least as well as comparable White employees, yet they advance more slowly and consequently earn less over their careers.
The evidence is also inconsistent with several conventional explanations. Differences in employee preferences, productivity, retention risks, and accurate statistical assessments do not account for the promotion gaps. The persistence—and in some cases enlargement—of disparities under Black supervisors is also difficult to reconcile with a simple model of racial animus.
Instead, the findings most closely fit models in which supervisors form and update subjective beliefs about employee groups. Negative experiences appear to influence subsequent decisions more strongly than positive experiences, while increased accountability and operational pressure reduce disparities. The broader implication is that formal merit-based standards do not necessarily eliminate unequal career outcomes when supervisors retain discretion over the timing or implementation of personnel decisions. Even limited discretion can influence advancement when managers supplement objective performance information with subjective judgments.
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