Diffuse status characteristics, such as race and gender, affect individuals’ professional opportunities and outcomes. Scholars suggest two possible explanations for these status disparities. First, uncertainty in measuring workers’ performances forces employers to rely on status as a heuristic or proxy for quality. Second, a history of racism and sexism in the United States creates a deeper cultural devaluation of low-status individuals that permeates organizational structures such that status advantage would persist even after accounting for observed worker performance. However, researchers struggle to accurately and objectively measure worker performance, making it difficult to adjudicate between these two perspectives. We overcome this problem using the case of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in which detailed player statistics are widely available to the public and decision makers. We analyze whether there is a racial disparity in the odds of exiting the league using discrete-time event history analysis. Using data from 1980–2017, we demonstrate that after accounting for player performance, Black players have 30% higher odds of exiting the league in a given season. We find this disparity is mostly driven by White bench players allowing us to elucidate how Whiteness operates as a credential in the NBA by giving marginal White players benefits such as longer careers than comparable Black players. These findings demonstrate that racial disparities in workplaces may persist even once performance is captured and in cases like the NBA where we might expect racial disparities to be minimized.

中文翻译：

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白人不会跳，但这有关系吗？NBA的退出歧视

分散的身份特征，例如种族和性别，会影响个人的职业机会和成果。学者们对这些地位差异提出了两种可能的解释。首先，衡量工人绩效的不确定性迫使雇主依赖地位作为质量的启发或代表。其次，美国种族主义和性别歧视的历史造成了对低地位个人更深层次的文化贬低，这种贬低渗透到组织结构中，即使考虑到观察到的工人表现，地位优势也会持续存在。然而，研究人员难以准确客观地衡量工人的表现，因此很难在这两种观点之间做出判断。我们使用美国国家篮球协会 (NBA) 的案例解决了这个问题，在该案例中，详细的球员统计数据向公众和决策者广泛提供。我们使用离散时间事件历史分析来分析退出联盟的几率是否存在种族差异。使用 1980-2017 年的数据，我们证明在考虑球员表现后，黑人球员在特定赛季退出联盟的几率高出 30%。我们发现这种差异主要是由白人替补球员推动的，这使我们能够通过给予边缘白人球员比同等黑人球员更长的职业生涯等福利来阐明白人如何在 NBA 中作为一种凭证运作。