Women and People of Color Face Bias Even in Government Jobs: Live Updates

This is what you need to know:.

The pandemic has mostly affected government officials. Of the 9.5 million jobs lost last year, nearly 1.4 million were for state and local workers.

State and local governments account for about 13 percent of jobs in the country, and this sector has traditionally been more welcoming to women and African Americans and has provided access to the middle class.

However, a report by GovernmentJobs.com, a public sector recruitment website, shows that even in this sector, non-white male applicants may be at a disadvantage.

The study, which analyzed more than 16 million job applicants by race, ethnicity and gender in 2018 and 2019, found that among applicants deemed qualified for jobs in a city, county or state, black women were 58 percent less likely to be hired than white men. Overall, qualified women are 27% less likely to be hired than qualified men.

The gap was staggering. In a survey of 2,700 complainants, almost a third said they were more likely to be discriminated against in the private sector than in the public sector. Black Americans, who make up 13 percent of the population, are disproportionately dependent on state and local government services: 28 percent of applicants.

There are measures to reduce prejudice. The study found that significantly more black women were invited for an interview when all personal information was withheld during the interview process – that is, recruiters did not know the candidate’s name, race and gender. The use of a standardized rubric with specific guidelines for each note also significantly increased the number of black women called.

Penisha Richardson is 35 years old and lives in Newport News, Virginia. She works as a technical support person for a printer and copier company. She recalls that when she was looking for work – in government and the private sector – she got a lot more responses if her name was Penny instead of Penisha.

Someone told me to go to Penny because it was easier to pronounce, Richardson said.

The debate over whether the Federal Reserve should extend the bank capital exemption is heated. with credit Stephanie Reynolds for The New York Times….

The Federal Reserve announced Friday that it will allow changes to legislation requiring banks to maintain a capital reserve to be reduced as scheduled on March 31, while opening the door to future adjustments if they are deemed necessary to ensure the proper functioning of key markets.

Last year, the Fed made a change in the law. This allows banks to exclude both their government bonds and their reserves, i.e., deposits at the Fed, from the calculation of a key regulatory measure called the additional leverage ratio.

The aim was to make it easier for financial institutions to raise government bonds and reserves and to continue lending. Otherwise, banks could cease these activities in order to avoid increasing their assets and exceeding the leverage limit, which would require them to raise capital, at great cost to them.

These changes came at a difficult time for the government bond market and were intended to both ease commercial conditions and maintain bank lending. However, it has also lowered the capital requirements for banks, which has led to criticism.

As a result, the debate over whether to extend the exemptions has been heated.

Bank lobbyists and some market analysts argue that the Fed should have maintained the exemption to prevent banks from withdrawing from both lending and their role as major buyers and sellers of bonds. However, lawmakers and researchers who support tighter bank supervision have argued that the withdrawal reduces the protective liquidity buffer that banks built up after the financial crisis, making them less prepared for shocks.

The Fed’s decision was average: This ended the exemption and opened the door to future changes in the calibration of the leverage ratio, which banks have long resisted. The goal is to keep capital levels stable and ensure that the increase in government securities and reserves on banks’ balance sheets – a natural side effect of government spending and the Fed’s own policies – does not cause them to retreat.

Given the recent increase in central bank reserves and Treasury bond issuance, the Governing Council may need to review the current design and calibration of the SLR over time, the Fed said in a press release, adding that the goal would be to prevent the development of tensions that could both stifle economic growth and undermine financial stability.

The Fed has indicated that it will soon seek comment on the leverage ratio adjustment measures. And she said she would ensure that any changes did not affect the overall level of capital requirements for banks.

A group of junior bankers at Goldman Sachs put together a presentation on the bank’s working conditions on Wall Street, which was shared on social media.Credit…Emon Hassan for The New York Times.

A group of 13 disgruntled first-year students at Goldman Sachs caused a stir by staging a professional, corporate-style presentation of their experience at the investment bank. The working conditions survey (a survey of 13 analysts who created the slideshow), shared on social media this week, shows that they work an average of about 100 hours a week and most of them say they feel they are mistreated at work.

Analysts rated their job satisfaction as two out of ten and said they were unlikely to stay at Goldman in six months’ time if working conditions remained the same. In addition to long working hours, analysts cited unrealistic deadlines ignored during meetings and micromanagement as major sources of stress. Analysts have said, among other things, that 80 hours a week should be the limit for working hours.

In their own words, some analysts have described their dissatisfaction in harsh terms:

• There was a time when I didn’t eat, didn’t shower, and did nothing but work from morning to midnight.
• My body hurts all the time and mentally I am in a very dark place.
• I didn’t expect to work 9 to 5, but I also didn’t expect to work 9 to 5 constantly.

According to the newsletter DealBook, this episode raises an important point: When will working hours become a form of exploitation in a well-paid industry? There are two sides to the debate:

The unsympathetic crowd suggests that first-year analysts at Goldman and similar firms have no right to complain about the long hours. They are highly educated and chose investment banking, in part because they make $150,000 or more immediately after college and can earn a seven-figure salary within ten years. A newly graduated analyst, by virtue of age and experience, immediately belongs to the 0.1%. A long wait should come as no surprise: All the recruiting websites, books and Hollywood movies about Wall Street make this part of the job clear. In reality, it is a contract that employees make with employers in exchange for a lot of money.

The betters say Wall Street doesn’t care enough about the mental health of young workers. No one should have to work so hard. Moreover, long working hours are inefficient and unproductive and are simply part of the selfish chicanery ritual of old bankers who suffered the same fate in less enlightened times. Abuse is abuse, no matter how much money someone gets. Banks, they say, distort the workload in the hiring process by talking about improving work-life balance but doing nothing about it.

We recognize that our employees are very busy as activity is strong and volumes have reached historic levels, Goldman said in a statement. A year after the launch of Covid, people are naturally very tense. So we listen to their concerns and take many measures to address them.

Headquarters of the Bank of Japan in Tokyo. Credit…Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters

The Bank of Japan said Friday that it will lower its annual minimum target for equity fund purchases. The move comes as Japanese equity markets have reached levels not seen since the collapse of the country’s economic bubble in the early 1990s.

The decision was announced as part of a three-month review of monetary policy to give the central bank more flexibility in dealing with the economic consequences of the pandemic caused by the coronavirus.

Under the previous policy, the bank planned to invest about $55 billion a year in exchange-traded funds – baskets of stocks that can be bought and sold on the stock market. This was part of a monetary easing policy to stimulate inflation to counteract the price declines that lead to lower corporate profits.

The bank became Japan’s largest individual shareholder when the purchases began in 2010. Stock prices are now at their highest levels in more than three decades. Friday’s decision gives the bank a chance to buy at better prices in the future. It will also help allay fears that the program has disrupted Japanese equity markets.

The bank will continue to invest in stocks that track Japan’s Topix stock index, if necessary, he said. The purchase cap remains at $110 billion. The emergency stimulus is set at $8 billion per year, an amount that had already been established during the pandemic.

The bank also said it would maintain its current interest rate targets but give more leeway to long-term rates by raising the spread from 0.2 percent to 0.25 percent.

Charles Rettig, Commissioner of Revenue, last year. He said the Internal Revenue Service plans to automatically issue refunds to taxpayers who qualify for the new tax credits. in connection with Anna Moneymaker’s credit for The New York Times.

Taxpayers who have already filed their 2020 tax returns do not need to amend them to take advantage of tax breaks created by the new $1.9 trillion pandemic aid law, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig told lawmakers Thursday, saying the IRS will automatically send refunds to those who qualify.

Rettig, speaking at a Congressional hearing, referred to a provision in the law that provides a tax exemption for the first $10,200 of taxable income. The $500,000 in unemployment benefits collected in 2020 from unemployed workers whose households earn less than $150,000 is the largest amount of unemployment benefits ever collected from an unemployed worker in the United States.

We think we can automatically refund the $10,200, Rettig said.

According to the Century Foundation, about 40 million Americans received unemployment insurance last year.

The tax changes in the latest stimulus bill passed earlier this month, along with the tax changes in December’s aid package and the rush to the stimulus, have put significant pressure on the AMT. The agency announced Wednesday that Tax Day would be postponed one month, from the 15th to the 15th. From April to May 17. to give themselves and taxpayers more time to process tax returns and refunds.

The Treasury and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority are also drafting new rules and updating systems to address other aspects of the March bailout legislation.

During a briefing Thursday, Treasury officials said they were working with the Internal Revenue Service to create a new online portal for prepayment of the child tax credit, which would provide up to $3,600 per child under age 6 and up to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17, regardless of whether the family earns enough to pay income taxes.

The portal will allow taxpayers to upload relevant data for mid-year payment adjustments, such as the birth of a child, officials said.

Finance officials also said the ministry is working on additional guidance on how states can use the money included in the aid law. It would also clarify how states should return aid money if they decide to lower taxes after receiving aid.

• Alexi McCammond, who made a name for himself as a political reporter for Washington news site Axios, would take over as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue this Wednesday. Now, after members of the Teen Vogue staff publicly condemned McCamond’s racist and homophobic tweets from a decade ago, she has resigned. Condé Nast, the publisher of Teen Vogue, announced the sudden turnaround Thursday in an internal email sent in response to pressure from the publication’s staff, readers and at least two advertisers just two weeks after the company appointed her to the position.
• This month, China’s internet regulator reprimanded LinkedIn executives for failing to monitor political content, according to three people familiar with the matter. Although it is not clear what material got the company into trouble, the regulator said it found unsavory messages circulating around the annual meeting of Chinese lawmakers at the time, said the people, who requested anonymity because the case is not public. As punishment, officials say they are asking LinkedIn to conduct a self-assessment and submit a report to the country’s internet regulator. The service has also been forced to suspend the registration of new users in China for 30 days, one of the people added, although this period may change depending on the administration’s decision. LinkedIn was the only major US social network allowed to operate in China.

Wall Street fell early Friday following a decline in Europe, as investors regrouped after the previous day’s sharp declines.

The S&P 500 was trading slightly lower in early trading after falling 1.5% a day earlier. The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell 0.4%, with financial and consumer stocks suffering. The CAC 40 fell 0.6% after the government announced that Paris and other parts of France will be shut down again, starting at midnight and lasting for a month, to deal with a wave of viral cases in some French hospitals.

On Wall Street, bank shares fell after the Federal Reserve announced that it would let one of its pandemic bank capital requirement measures expire at the end of the month. The rule change introduced last year was designed to ease trading conditions in the bond market and allow banks to continue lending. But it also reduced the amount of capital banks had to hold to protect against future losses.

Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase fell about 2 percent, while Citigroup lost more than 1 percent. The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds rose to 1.74% after falling earlier following the Fed’s announcement.

Digital art

• Shares of Hong Kong-based Takung Art Co, which operates an online art trading platform, rose more than 10 percent in early U.S. trading. The company’s stock is up more than 600% this week as traders look for opportunities to enter the digital art market. Last week, a JPG by the artist known as Beeple was auctioned for $69.3 million, sparking a boom in the art market for NFTs, or non-transferable tokens.
• Shares of Oriental Culture Holding, another online art marketplace, are up 140% this week, and about 13% in pre-trade.

Elsewhere on markets

• Shares in British pub chain J.D. Wetherspoon fell for the third consecutive day after the company reported a loss of 61 million pounds ($85 million) for the six months to mid-January. In the same period last year, the company made a profit of £42m. Tim Martin, the company’s founder and chairman, has been highly critical of the government’s response to the pandemic, which has slammed the door on the hotel industry. The future of British industry and business depends on a coherent set of sound policies, based on science rather than political expediency, Mr Martin said.

Thursday night, Amazon will offer games on its Amazon Prime Video service…Credit…Jennifer Stewart/Associated Press

According to a report by Ken Belson and Kevin Draper for the New York Times, the NFL has struck new media rights deals with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon totaling about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly double the value of previous contracts.

CBS, Fox and NBC will each pay more than $2 billion to keep their broadcast rights, with NBC paying slightly less than CBS and Fox, according to four people familiar with the deals who requested anonymity because they did not have permission from the NFL to speak publicly about it. ESPN will pay about $2.7 billion a year to continue broadcasting Monday Night Football, but will also be added to the rotation for broadcasting the Super Bowl starting in 2026. His contract with ESPN begins a year earlier, in 2022, as his current contract expires a year earlier than the others.

Each of the broadcasters has made arrangements for their respective streaming platforms, while Amazon will show Thursday night’s games on its Amazon Prime Video service.

For the last five years, we’ve been switching to streaming. Our fans want that option and the league understands that streaming is the future, said Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and chairman of the N.F.L.’s media committee.

The N.F.L. has yet to announce who will air Sunday Ticket, a subscription service that allows fans to watch weekend games that are not broadcast on national television. DirecTV has the rights to the service until 2022.

These contracts also laid the groundwork for the league owners’ plan to expand the regular season to 17 games. This will be the first major expansion season for the NFL in over forty years. Teams will play 16 games, compared to 14 in 1978.

Related Tags:

what are frontline jobs,disproportionate impact of covid-19,mothers essential workers,affirmative action,public sector employment by race,public sector jobs,moss-racusin et al 2012,gender bias in hiring,hiring bias statistics,women in the workplace 2020,women in the workplace history,gender equality in the workplace essay,advantages of being a woman in the workplace,male managers vs. female managers statistics,women’s issues in the workplace articles 2018,an unjust burden,race and crime pdf,over policing in communities of color,employment discrimination cases 2020,employment discrimination cases 2019,employment discrimination court cases,eeoc retaliation cases won,eeoc decisions 2020,eeoc conciliation settlements amounts