Fair and Balanced
Understanding Whites’ perceptions of multicultural policies: A (non)zero-sum framework?
Taylor Ballinger & Jennifer Crocker
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Non-Hispanic Whites can perceive multicultural diversity policies as excluding their group and threatening their identity. However, increasing demographic diversity and the proliferation of organizational diversity efforts may have led Whites to view multicultural policies in more nonzero-sum ways. Reanalyzing nationally representative data, Study 1 showed that over the past 10 years, White Americans have become more supportive of diversity policies that explicitly recognize group memberships and have become less likely to view these policies as harmful to their group. Five experiments further showed that a multicultural (vs. colorblind) policy did not increase Whites’ experiences of social identity threat (Studies 2–6) or their perceived exclusion from a company’s diversity efforts (Studies 4–6). While a multicultural policy increased how much Whites believed an organization generally valued diversity and specifically valued the group differences of racial minorities, it did not decrease how much Whites believed their own group differences were valued (Studies 4–5). A multicultural policy only threatened Whites when group differences were narrowly defined to exclude their group (Study 6). An internal meta-analysis (N = 1,998) supported these conclusions and found they did not depend on need to belong, ethnic identification, political ideology, or the imagined presence of an outgroup coworker. These findings indicate that non-Hispanic White Americans generally conceptualize multicultural policies in nonzero-sum terms and suggest that (non)zero-sum beliefs may be key to understanding when diversity efforts are likely to elicit backlash from majority group members.
Those who tan and those who don’t: A natural experiment on colorism
Tamar Kricheli Katz et al.
PloS ONE, July 2020
Abstract:
Are darker-skinned workers discriminated against in the labor market? Studies using survey data have shown that darker skin tone is associated with increased labor market disadvantages. However, it is hard to refute the possibility that other factors correlated with skin tones might affect employment outcomes. To overcome this inherent limitation, we use a natural experiment: we utilize changes in one’s own skin tone, generated by exposure to the sun, to explore the effect of skin tone on the tendency to be employed. We find that those people whose skin tone becomes darker by exposure to the sun (but not others) are less likely to be employed when the UV radiation in the previous three weeks in the area in which they reside is greater. These within-person findings hold even when controlling for the week, the year, the region, demographic characteristics and the occupation and industry one is employed in.
Gender bias in standardized tests: Evidence from a centralized college admissions system
Perihan Saygin
Empirical Economics, August 2020, Pages 1037–1065
Abstract:
This paper aims to analyze the gender gap in educational outcomes from different student assessment methods. I exploit a college application setting in which the centralized admission system allocates students based on a composite score, which is a weighted average of high school grade point average and a standardized test score. Using administrative data, I find that females significantly outperform males in high school grade point average in every subject, and not only on average but also at all quantiles. Yet the situation is reversed when it comes to standardized test scores: males outperform females in all subjects and almost all quantiles, with the largest magnitude of the difference in quantitative subjects and highest quantiles. Based on these findings, I argue that the gender gap is affected by the student assessment method used in a centralized system of college admissions.
The gender wage gap: An analysis of US congressional staff members
Peter Calcagno & Meg Montgomery
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
The gender wage gap has been a concern in the United States since the mid-twentieth century. Congress and some states have enacted and continue to advocate equal pay legislation. We extend the analysis to Congress itself, which is important for two reasons. First, members of Congress are pushing equal pay for men and women in an attempt to produce an outcome in the private economy that they may not be able to achieve. Second, the discussion of the so-called gender pay gap has focused on private sector wage differences, but the incentive structure facing public sector actors is very different, namely the absence of a profit motive and a residual claimant. Political institutions may allow Congress to shirk in closing the wage gap among staffers. The literature on the gender pay gap emphasizes that labor market structures along with differences in gender-based preferences and occupational choices may be more salient in explaining the wage gap. We investigate the gender wage gap in congressional offices using panel data from 2000 to 2016 using a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition. We control for human capital, office characteristics, and individual-level demographics. Regardless of specification, we find that a gender wage gap exists across staffers similar to the gap in the private sector. Our findings suggest that if Congress wants to close the wage gap, it could find ways of allowing labor markets to provide employees greater flexibility including their own saffers.
The Natural Hair Bias in Job Recruitment
Christy Zhou Koval & Ashleigh Shelby Rosette
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Across four studies, we demonstrate a bias against Black women with natural hairstyles in job recruitment. In Study 1, participants evaluated profiles of Black and White female job applicants across a variety of hairstyles. We found that Black women with natural hairstyles were perceived to be less professional, less competent, and less likely to be recommended for a job interview than Black women with straightened hairstyles and White women with either curly or straight hairstyles. We replicated these findings in a controlled experiment in Study 2. In Study 3A and 3B, we found Black women with natural hairstyles received more negative evaluations when they applied for a job in an industry with strong dress norms. Taken together, this article advances the research on biases in the labor market in the age of social media use and highlights the importance of taking an intersectional approach when studying inequity in the workplace.
Age Discrimination across the Business Cycle
Gordon Dahl & Matthew Knepper
NBER Working Paper, July 2020
Abstract:
A key prediction of discrimination models is that competition in the labor market serves as a moderating force on employer discrimination. In the presence of market frictions, however, recessions create excess labor supply and thus generate opportunities to engage in discriminatory behaviors far more cheaply. A natural question arises: does discrimination increase during recessions? We focus on age discrimination and test this hypothesis in two ways. We first use employee discrimination charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), along with an objective measure of the quality of those charges. For each one percentage point increase in a state-industry’s monthly unemployment rate, the volume of age discrimination firing and hiring charges increases by 4.8% and 3.4%, respectively. Even though the incentive to file weaker claims is stronger when unemployment is high, the fraction of meritorious claims also increases significantly when labor market conditions deteriorate. This is a sufficient condition for real (versus merely reported) discrimination to be increasing under mild assumptions. Second, we repurpose data from a correspondence study in which fictitious resumes of women were randomly assigned older versus younger ages and circulated across different cities and time periods during the recovery from the Great Recession. Each one percentage point increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the relative callback rate for older women by 14%.
Perpetuating Inequality: What Salary History Bans Reveal About Wages
James Bessen, Chen Meng & Erich Denk
Boston University Working Paper, June 2020
Abstract:
Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and on the pay of job changers in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers by about 5%, with larger increases for women (8%) and African-Americans (13%). Salary histories appear to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps.
Race, Gender, and Parental College Savings: Assessing Economic and Academic Factors
Natasha Quadlin & Jordan Conwell
Sociology of Education, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article assesses the relationships between race, gender, and parental college savings. Some prior studies have investigated race differences in parental college savings, yet none have taken an intersectional approach, and most of these studies were conducted with cohorts of students who predate key demographic changes among U.S. college goers (e.g., the reversal of the gender gap in college completion). Drawing on theories of parental investment and data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09), we show that both race and gender are associated with whether parents save for college, as well as how much they save. Both black boys and black girls experience savings disadvantages relative to their white peers. However, black girls experience particularly striking disparities: Black girls with the strongest academic credentials receive savings equivalent to black girls with the weakest academic credentials. Results suggest this is due, at least in part, to the fact that high-achieving black girls tend to come from families that are much less well-off than high achievers in other race-gender groups. As a result, parents of black girls frequently rely on funding sources other than their own earnings or savings to pay for their children’s college. These funding sources include private loans that may pose financial challenges for black girls and their families across generations, thus deepening inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class. These findings demonstrate the power of taking an intersectional approach to the study of higher education in general and college funding in particular.
A Diversity Ideology Intervention: Multiculturalism Reduces the Racial Achievement Gap
Hannah Birnbaum et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the United States, underrepresented racial minority (URM) students continue to face psychological barriers that undermine their achievement and fuel disparities in academic outcomes. In the current research, we tested whether a multicultural ideology intervention could improve URM students’ grade point averages (GPAs) during the first 2 years of college and thereby reduce the racial achievement gap. Specifically, first-year college students (N = 407) read a diversity statement that represented the schools’ diversity ideology in terms of either multiculturalism or colorblindness. URM students who read a multicultural diversity statement earned higher GPAs 2 years later compared to those who read a colorblind diversity statement. Furthermore, they earned higher GPAs compared to a nonparticipant campus-wide control group. The current study is the first to demonstrate that multiculturalism can increase the long-term academic outcomes of URM students in college.
Hiring as Exploration
Danielle Li, Lindsey Raymond & Peter Bergman
MIT Working Paper, July 2020
Abstract:
In looking for the best workers over time, firms must balance "exploitation'' (selecting from groups with proven track records) with "exploration'' (selecting from under-represented groups to learn about quality). Yet modern hiring algorithms, based on `"supervised learning" approaches, are designed solely for exploitation. In this paper, we view hiring as a contextual bandit problem and build a resume screening algorithm that values exploration by evaluating candidates according to their statistical upside potential. Using data from professional services recruiting within a Fortune 500 firm, we show that this approach improves the quality (as measured by eventual hiring rates) of candidates selected for an interview, while also increasing demographic diversity, relative to the firm's existing practices. The same is not true for traditional supervised learning based algorithms, which improve hiring rates but select far fewer Black and Hispanic applicants. In an extension, we show that exploration-based algorithms are also able to learn more effectively about simulated changes in applicant quality over time. Together, our results highlight the importance of incorporating exploration in developing decision-making algorithms that are potentially both more efficient and equitable.
The Segregation Premium: How Gender Shapes the Symbolic Valuation Process of Occupational Prestige Judgments
Lauren Valentino
Social Forces, September 2020, Pages 31–58
Abstract:
Symbolic valuation is an important but overlooked aspect of gendered processes of inequality in the occupation structure. Prior work has largely focused on the material valuation of gendered work, such as how much predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations pay. Less research has examined the symbolic valuation of work, such as how prestigious predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations are. What research has examined this question has remained inconclusive at best. Drawing on insights into and techniques from the sociology of culture and cognition, this study examines the role of an occupation’s gender composition in how Americans judge the prestige of jobs, testing key predictions from theories of gender and status. Using 2012 General Social Survey and federal occupation-level data, it finds evidence for a segregation premium: people view gender-segregated occupations as the most symbolically valuable jobs. Both men and women reward gender-segregated occupations with symbolic value, although there is evidence of a gendered in-group bias in which women in particular see women’s work as more prestigious, while men see men’s work as more prestigious.
Women Executives and Off‐the‐Job Misconduct by High‐Profile Employees: A Study of National Football League Team Organizations
Mary Graham, Bhavneet Walia & Chris Robinson
Journal of Organizational Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
The risk of off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees is a serious concern of top management in professional sport organizations, media and entertainment companies, and public‐facing entities in the government and education sectors. Yet there is little research on how to prevent or mitigate this form of misconduct in organizations. Utilizing upper echelons theory and the literature on demographic composition, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of executives of team organizations in a men's professional sport league, and subsequent misconduct by players on those teams. Specifically, we employed multilevel and logistic regression analyses to unique data on U.S. National Football League team organizations, and we found that firms with a critical mass of women executives experienced fewer player arrests. No support was found for executive power as a moderator of this relationship. We discuss the implications of our findings for the demographic composition literature. We also offer guidance for preventing and managing off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees.
Choice or circumstance: When are women penalized for their success?
Yanitsa Toneva, Madeline Heilman & Gaëlle Pierre
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Past research shows that successful women in traditionally masculine roles often experience interpersonal penalties not sustained by similarly successful men. In two studies, we addressed the question of how the perceived motivation of women for counter‐stereotypical positions affects whether such penalties occur. Specifically, we investigated whether women who are successful in male gender‐typed roles are less likely to be penalized when their attainment of the role is due to circumstance than to focused and intentional goal pursuit. In Study 1, we compared reactions to women and men who had been successful in a leadership role on a STEM project and showed that when a woman had been arbitrarily assigned to the leadership role she incurred fewer interpersonal penalties than when she had actively pursued it. In Study 2, we replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating similar effects for a successful woman in a financial position when she had attained her position due to a series of lucky breaks rather than purposeful goal‐directed efforts. The results of these studies support the idea that the perception that women have actively chosen to pursue counter‐normative goals plays an important role in determining whether they are penalized for their success in traditionally male domains. It was not simply being in the role, but how she got there, that determined whether the derogation and dislike shown to be directed at successful women in past research occurred.
Gender, Sense of Power, and Desire to Lead: Why Women Don’t “Lean In” to Apply to Leadership Groups That Are Majority-Male
Rachael Goodwin et al.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigated why women may have lower desires and intentions to apply to become a member of a leadership group (i.e., committee) than men when the majority of its members are men. In four studies, we examined the interaction between gender and gender composition of the leadership group on leader candidates’ sense of power, desire to lead, and intentions to apply to become a member of a leadership group. Informed by research on gender, perceived power, and the model of goal-directed behavior, we found that women, compared to men, expected lower sense of power when considering applying to a majority-male (vs. gender-balanced) online leadership committee (Study 1A, N = 294; Study 1B, N = 278). This pattern observed for women in majority-male leadership committees was not, however, evident for men in majority female leadership committees (Study 2, N = 560). Furthermore, women’s lower sense of power explained why they expressed lower desires to lead and intentions to apply for a majority-male leadership committee compared to men. Finally, we found that increasing women’s sense of power increased their desires and intentions to lead in a majority-male committee (Study 3, N = 460). We contribute to understanding why there still exists a discrepancy in the number of men versus women in leadership groups despite ongoing efforts to reduce it. We hope readers will apply these findings by identifying ways to increase women leader candidates’ sense of power in order to increase women’s representation on leadership committees and groups (e.g., boards).
The influence of tattoo content on perceptions of employment suitability across the generational divide
Michael Tews, Kathryn Stafford & Ethan Kudler
Journal of Personnel Psychology, July 2020, Pages 4–13
Abstract:
The present study extends research on tattoos and employment suitability by examining the extent to which the effects of tattoos on perceived competence and hiring recommendations are contingent upon the generational cohort of hiring managers, tattoo content, and candidate gender. Respondents evaluated hypothetical candidates in a between-subjects design framework. The results demonstrated that candidates with light (more innocent) tattoos were rated lower in perceived competence than candidates with dark (more threatening) tattoos or no tattoos. Regarding hiring recommendations, there were more nuances. Millennial hiring managers viewed candidates with light tattoos more positively than did older managers, and this generational difference was more pronounced for male candidates. Moreover, older hiring managers viewed male candidates with no tattoos more positively than millennials.