What happens before? A field experiment exploring how pay and representation differentially shape bias on the pathway into organizations.
2015/04/13 by Katherine L. Milkman, Modupe Akinola, Dolly Chugh · 36 citations
Social Sciences · #Gender Diversity and Inequality #Diversity and Career in Medicine #Social and Intergroup Psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/apl0000022
Abstract
Little is known about how discrimination manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program. Names of students were randomly assigned to signal gender and race (White, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese), but messages were otherwise identical. We hypothesized that discrimination would appear at the informal "pathway" preceding entry to academia and would vary by discipline and university as a function of faculty representation and pay. We found that when considering requests from prospective students seeking mentoring in the future, faculty were significantly more responsive to White males than to all other categories of students, collectively, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and discrimination were uncorrelated, a finding that suggests greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce discrimination. This research highlights the importance of studying decisions made before formal entry points into organizations and reveals that discrimination is not evenly distributed within and between organizations.
Citations
Cited by
- Who Gets to Belong in College? An Empirical Review of How Institutions Can Assess and Expand Opportunities for Belonging on Campus
- [email protected]: An experimental approach to the discrimination of nonbinary individuals during job applications
- He’s Overqualified, She’s Highly Committed: Qualification Signals and Gendered Assumptions About Job Candidate Commitment
- How early beliefs about brilliance shape gender gaps
- Should I stay or should I return: emigration, return migration motivations and national attachment of temporary and permanent migrants / ¿Me quedo o me voy? Emigración, motivaciones del retorno migratorio y apego nacional de los migrantes temporales y permanentes
- A Cultural Wealth Approach to Understanding Latin@s’ STEM Mentee and Mentor Experiences
- Implicit racism, colour blindness, and narrow definitions of discrimination: Why some White people prefer ‘All Lives Matter’ to ‘Black Lives Matter’
- Discrimination in marketized welfare services: a field experiment on Swedish schools
- A Model for Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions That Decouples the GRE from Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
- Immigration [wikipedia]
- Immigration to the United States [wikipedia]
- A "Scientific Diversity" Intervention to Reduce Gender Bias in a Sample of Life Scientists. [europepmc]
- Women are underrepresented in computational biology: An analysis of the scholarly literature in biology, computer science and computational biology. [europepmc]
- Achieving gender equity in the radiation oncology physician workforce. [europepmc]
- Patterns of authorship in ecology and evolution: First, last, and corresponding authorship vary with gender and geography. [europepmc]
- A Model for Holistic Review in Graduate Admissions That Decouples the GRE from Race, Ethnicity, and Gender. [europepmc]
- The mixed effects of online diversity training. [europepmc]
- Students as ecologists: Strategies for successful mentorship of undergraduate researchers. [europepmc]
- Factors that predict for representation of women in physician graduate medical education. [europepmc]
- Does Gender Bias Still Affect Women in Science? [europepmc]
- Evidence-Based Strategies for Improving Diversity and Inclusion in Undergraduate Research Labs. [europepmc]
- Gender in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics: Issues, Causes, Solutions. [europepmc]
- Strategies to improve equity in faculty hiring. [europepmc]
- Turning Chutes into Ladders for Women Faculty: A Review and Roadmap for Equity in Academia. [europepmc]
- Why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership positions in the United States. [europepmc]
- In some professions, women have become well represented, yet gender bias persists-Perpetuated by those who think it is not happening. [europepmc]
- I Can't Breathe: The Continued Disproportionate Exclusion of Black Physicians in the United States Radiation Oncology Workforce. [europepmc]
- The Future of Women in Psychological Science. [europepmc]
- Pathways for Recruiting and Retaining Women and Underrepresented Minority Clinicians and Physician Scientists Into the Radiation Oncology Workforce: A Summary of the 2019 ASTRO/NCI Diversity Symposium Session at the ASTRO Annual Meeting. [europepmc]
- Mentoring Experiences and Publication Productivity among Early Career Biomedical Investigators and Trainees. [europepmc]
- Sex Differences in Academic Productivity Across Academic Ranks and Specialties in Academic Medicine: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. [europepmc]
- Twenty years of gender equality research: A scoping review based on a new semantic indicator. [europepmc]
- Nevertheless She Persisted? Gender Peer Effects in Doctoral STEM Programs. [europepmc]
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration. [europepmc]
- Comparative analysis of gender disparity in academic positions based on U.S. region and STEM discipline. [europepmc]
- AI-generated faces influence gender stereotypes and racial homogenization. [europepmc]
Related