The Black-White Recognition Gap in Award Nominations

There is evidence showing racial bias in firms’ hiring decisions, but less is known about bias in career recognition. We construct a dataset from the second-largest US police department to estimate the Black-white gap in award nominations. Leveraging institutional features, we find that white supervisors are less likely to nominate Black officers conditional on work performance. This appears to be driven by supervisor bias in advocacy decisions rather than statistical discrimination. Given the reliance on subjective evaluations for promotions in many organizations, our findings have important implications for the Black-white promotion gap and the lack of diversity in upper-management positions.