MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
First, Nike, then The New York Times. The Trump administration says their hiring practices discriminate against white people. NPR's Andrea Hsu considers whether the NFL may be next.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: What Nike, The New York Times and the NFL have in common is that they've all had policies aimed at getting a diverse set of candidates for open jobs. In fact, many companies embrace what's known as diverse slate policies after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as diversity, equity and inclusion became a corporate catchphrase. But perhaps the most famous of such policies is the NFL's Rooney Rule. It was adopted in 2003 to address the persistently low numbers of Black coaches in a league whose athletes are a majority Black.
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CYRUS MEHRI: What I was looking for is a solution that would be a unifying solution, which was to have an inclusive process as opposed to dictating outcomes.
HSU: That's civil rights attorney Cyrus Mehri, one of the architects of the rule, speaking with NPR in 2022. He said fair competition was his guiding principle.
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MEHRI: You should be able to look at who's the best by getting people in the process.
HSU: A broad range of people. Over the years, the Rooney Rule's effectiveness has been panned, but NFL teams are still required to interview at least two people of color or women for top jobs like head coach and at least one person of color or a woman for other senior roles. Now, civil rights laws generally prohibit employers from taking race or sex into consideration when making employment decisions, but creating a slate of diverse candidates was widely considered legal. Not now. Andrea Lucas, who heads the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says even in the interview selection phase, you can't be weighing a candidate's race or sex.
ANDREA LUCAS: All it has to do is motivate, in whole or in part, your decision-making, and you're into unlawful territory.
HSU: Back in 2024, the conservative group America First Legal sent the EEOC a request for an investigation into the Rooney Rule. The agency didn't respond to a question about what, if anything's, happened with that. But meantime, Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, has raised objections of his own, posting a video to X in March.
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JAMES UTHMEIER: Florida law is clear - hiring decisions cannot be based on race, and the Rooney Rule mandates race-based interviews and incentivizes race-based decisions. That's discrimination.
HSU: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell addressed the matter at a press conference days later. He noted the rule isn't a hiring mandate, but rather something that has helped teams find the best talent.
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ROGER GOODELL: The Rooney Rule - it's been around a long time. We've evolved it. We've changed it. We'll continue to do that as circumstances warrant.
HSU: Pam Coukos, CEO of the consulting firm Working IDEAL, advises companies and nonprofits on how to create fair and inclusive workplaces. She says it's important to remember why employers adopted diverse slate policies in the first place.
PAM COUKOS: Often because there was a history of unequal access.
HSU: Especially to leadership roles for people of color and women. Coukos says diverse slates can help employers identify barriers keeping people out of those jobs. If an employer ends up with only white male candidates in the final rounds of interviews, maybe it's because they're not recruiting broadly or because there's a requirement in the job posting that's not actually needed for the job.
COUKOS: Or just because we assume that somebody who went to a particular school or had a particular prior job is, per se, going to be better than somebody else who has a different background.
HSU: In its lawsuit against The New York Times, the EEOC alleges something else - that the company excluded a white man from a final round of interviews for a deputy editor job because his race or sex didn't match what they were looking for. In a statement, The Times called the allegations politically motivated and said it hired the most qualified candidate, adding, quote, "she is an excellent editor."
Andrea Hsu, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOWSUM'S "COCKTAIL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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