Explore the Data

Workforce Participation & Employment Rates by Race/Ethnicity

Lincoln has high workforce participation and employment rates across groups

Workforce Participation Rate

In 2017 through 2021, the average workforce participation rate¹ of Lincoln residents was 71.1%.

• 63.8% of Black or African American residents participated in Lincoln’s workforce, which is 7.3 percentage points lower than the Lincoln average.
• This difference in workforce participation has changed since 2016, when Black or African American residents had a higher workforce participation rate than Lincoln overall.
• 65.6% of American Indian or Alaska Native residents participated in Lincoln’s workforce, which is 5.5 percentage points lower than the Lincoln average.
• 71.0% of White residents participated in Lincoln’s workforce, which is about the same as the Lincoln average.
• 72.6% of Asian residents participated in Lincoln’s workforce, which is 1.5 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.

• 75.0% of Latino/a or Hispanic residents participated in the workforce, which is 3.9 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.

• 75.7% of residents reporting Two or More Races participated in the workforce, which is 7.5 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.
• 78.6% of residents reporting Some Other Race participated in the workforce, which is 7.5 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.

Employment Rate

In 2017 through 2021, the average employment rate² in Lincoln was 68.5%. However, there are some differences in employment to population ratios by race/ethnicity.

Some groups had the same or higher employment than the overall Lincoln average:

• 68.6% of White residents are employed, which is about the same as the Lincoln average.
• 71.2% of Asian residents are employed, which is 2.7 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.
• 71.5% of Latino/a or Hispanic residents are employed, which is 3.0 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.
• 72.0% of residents reporting Two or More Races are employed, which is 3.5 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.
• 73.4% of residents reporting Some Other Race are employed, which is 4.9 percentage points higher than the Lincoln average.

Some groups had lower employment than the overall Lincoln average:

• 63.2% of American Indian or Alaska Native residents are employed, which is 5.3 percentage points lower than the Lincoln average.
• 58.8% of Black or African American residents are employed, which is 9.7 percentage points lower than the Lincoln average. However, this group has a lower workforce participation rate overall, at 63.8%, and workforce participation is an upper limit on the employment rate.

Research continues to find inequality persists in hiring and employment decisions, especially for African American applicants.³ Unlike during the pre-civil rights era, when hiring discrimination was overt, the effects of discrimination are now harder to measure. Researchers often measure its consequences by looking at disparities in large datasets and through job application experiments that use in-person and résumé correspondence experimental designs. A drawback to analyzing disparities in large data sets is that it can be difficult to account for all factors that can influence hiring decisions.

However, researchers can more confidently measure the effects of racial discrimination using experiments. Experiments allow researchers to carefully manage the application process in which matching pairs of applicants are made to be as similar as possible on all employment-relevant characteristics except race.  An audit of all available experiments analyzing call back rates conducted between 1989 and 2017 found no change in the levels of hiring discrimination against African Americans across that period.⁴ On average, White people received 36% more callbacks than African Americans and 24% more callbacks than Latinos. However, this audit found evidence of possibly declining employment discrimination against Latinos.

note

U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey, ACS 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables, Table S2301, 2021.

footnote

1. The workforce participation rate represents the number of people in the labor force (working or actively looking for work) as a percentage of the working age noninstitutional population. In other words, the participation rate is the percentage of the population aged 16 to 64 who are either working (including serving in the U.S. Armed Forces) or actively looking for work.
2. The employment rate represents the number of people employed as a percentage of the working age noninstitutional population, which the civilian labor force and all members of the U.S. Armed Forces. In other words, the employment rate is the percentage of the population aged 16 to 64 who are working. This rate cannot be higher than the workforce participation rate.
3. Pager, D. & Shepherd, H. (2008). The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets. Annual Review of Sociology, 34(1), 181-209.
4. Quillian, L., Pager, D., Hexel, O., & Midtbøen, A. H. (2017). Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(41), 10870–10875.