Do “Soft Skills” Explain the Low Employment Rate for Black Men?

One explanation for the low Black male employment rate that has been put forth by prominent scholars is that Black men are weak in what are called “soft skills.” For example, the distinguished sociologist William Julius Wilson writes in More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, “In the past, men simply had to demonstrate a strong back and muscles to be hired for physical labor in a factory, at a construction site, or on an assembly line; they interacted with peers and foremen, not with consumers.” Wilson argues that the rise of the service sector and the decline of manufacturing has dramatically increased the need for soft skills, which Black males often lack.

He describes soft skills this way:

employers are less likely to hire them [Black males] because they are seen as unable to sustain positive contact with the public. Employers in the study maintained that black males lack the soft skills that their jobs require: the tendency to maintain eye contact, the ability to carry on polite and friendly conversations with consumers, the inclination to smile and be responsive to consumer requests no matter how demanding or unreasonable they may seem. Consequently, black male job seekers face rising rates of rejection.

The Nobel laureate economist James Heckman put forth a somewhat similar argument. In his article, “The American Family in Black & White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality,” he argues that differences in soft skills are now major drivers of Black-White racial inequality.

I challenge these claims in the article, “Are Soft Skills Necessary? Assessing the Importance of Interactional-Soft-Skills Occupations to the Employment of Less-Educated, Young, Black Males,” published in The Review of Black Political Economy. One problem that I note is that “the concept of soft skills is a conceptual muddle in the research literature.” Different scholars mean different things when referring to “soft skills.” A second problem is that people’s racial prejudices and stereotypes can cause them to rate Black men worse in assessments of soft skills. From my review of the scholarly literature, I conclude that “[a]lthough there have been strong assertions” about the importance of soft skills for the Black male employment gap, “there has not been strong evidence to support these claims.”

In my analysis, I focus on what I call interactional soft skills — the ability “to have pleasant interactions with clients or customers and smooth, non-conflictual interactions with coworkers and supervisors.” I also focus on males 16 to 24 years old who are not enrolled in school and who have no more than a high school diploma.

Surprisingly, I find that young men in this demographic are heavily employed in occupations with relatively little need for interactional soft skills. These young men are often employed as “[c]onstruction laborers, freight laborers, grounds maintenance workers, carpenters, agricultural workers, janitors, painters, dishwashers, and many other jobs” where they have “minimal interaction with the public as customers.” Only a minority are employed in jobs that require a high level of interactional soft skills.

Because jobs requiring a high level of soft skills are not a large part of the employment of less-educated young men, it is also not an important part of the story behind the lower rate of Black employment. The occupations that less-educated young Black men have trouble obtaining are occupations with low levels of soft skill requirements — the opposite of what many scholars assumed.

Thus, I argue that the scholars putting forward the soft skills claim are wrong about the cause of the employment gap, and further they are suggesting a harmful “solution.” The jobs that less-educated young men obtain that require high levels of soft skills are lower-paying jobs. Thus, soft-skills scholars are implicitly suggesting that young Black men intensify their attention toward jobs that would help to maintain their lower wages. Pursuing soft skills is therefore a lose-lose option for less-educated young Black men; they are not likely to increase their employment nor their wages.

Although not stated explicitly in the article, I see my findings fitting the idea put forth and developed by Lester Thurow, Stanley Lieberson, Barbara Reskin and Patricia A. Roos that employers have labor preference queues. This excerpt summarizes what that means:

If one understands the labor market as continuing to be structured in a way that advantages White workers, then the findings reported in this study are unsurprising. Less-educated, White, young men are more likely to be employed, and they are more likely to be employed specifically in the higher-wage occupations. These higher-wage occupations are hard-skills occupations. Less-educated, Black, young men are more likely to be jobless and, when they are employed, they are more likely to be employed in the lower-wage occupations, which happen to be soft-skills occupations. Scholars’ soft skills claims about the employment patterns of less-educated, Black males obfuscates the racially discriminatory practices in the labor market.

This first appeared on CEPR.

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