ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a picture of the macro-level labour market landscape necessary for understanding the dynamics of managing workforce diversity in the twenty-first century. It outlines the major employment patterns and outcomes across the main equality and diversity dimensions: gender, race/ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation and religion. Our focus is on indicators for the measurement of discrimination and disadvantage as identified by the International Labour Organisation – these include employment/unemployment rates, occupational segregation and pay gaps. We turn our focus to workplace experiences in Chapter 4, although this chapter does touch on issues at organizational level when seeking to explain the disadvantage that some social groups experience. Theoretical perspectives on the structure of the labour market are explored in Chapter 3. It is important to note that more data and information are available on some diversity dimensions than on others; for example there is abundant data on gender and far less on sexual orientation. The data reveal not only different patterns, but also the existence of inequalities of outcome such as pay and status gaps among and within different social groups. For analytical purposes, the chapter examines
the employment patterns and outcomes of six social groups separately. However, we fully acknowledge the reality of discrimination and disadvantage on multiple grounds and that it is therefore impossible to consider any of these groups entirely separately. It is important to bear in mind that individuals can obviously fall into more than one category (e.g. everyone has a gender and a race/ ethnicity); social group membership is not always stable (e.g. religion, disability, sexual orientation are not necessarily fixed over the life course and certainly age is not); social groups themselves are not homogeneous (e.g. women’s employment patterns vary by race/ethnicity and age). The data presented is largely UK and European, but some comparisons are also made with the USA, thereby highlighting the global nature of this discussion.
