Milkman, Akinola and Chugh, "A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations"

Katherine Milkman (Wharton), Modupe Akinola (Columbia Business School) and Dolly Chugh (NYU Stern School of Business) have posted to SSRN their working paper, "What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway into Organizations." Here is the abstract:

Little is known about how bias against women and minorities varies within and between organizations or how it manifests before individuals formally apply to 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. 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. 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 (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese), but messages were otherwise identical. We found that faculty ignored requests from women and minorities at a higher rate than requests from White males, particularly in higher-paying disciplines and private institutions. Counterintuitively, the representation of women and minorities and bias were uncorrelated, suggesting that greater representation cannot be assumed to reduce bias. This research highlights the importance of studying what happens before formal entry points into organizations and reveals that discrimination is not evenly distributed within and between organizations.

The full paper is available for download here.

Inside Higher Ed has coverage here.

Definitely worth a read.

Comments

[Jeff Harrison]

Interesting study and I have no doubt that there is truth in there but it seems flawed to me. It may say as much about class as it does about race. I could have supplied some "white names" that would have exposed a class bias. How about a Wayne or D'Wayne. And, I am not sure the African American names are not similarly biased by class. I am also thinking that white males are hesitant to respond to invitations from women.

[Jeff Harrison]

Some more comments. I cannot tell if the students were identified as American. More than half the time I receive a letter from someone with a Chinese or Indian name, I, perhaps incorrectly, assume that it will mean arranging financial aid, and masses of red tape. I make that assumption based on many experiences in which this turned out to be the case. Now, if I am uncertain, I forward the letter to someone in charge of international students. This is especially true if the letter is as vague as the one used in the experiment. Of course, I do not know if any of the actual respondents react as I do.

I also wonder why the authors did not report and R-squares. We actually do not know what portion of the variation from group to group was explained by the experiment.

Again, I suspect they have uncovered a class bias based on the names but that would not be very jazzy to consider. In fact, just surfing the net, none of the African American names are listed on a long list of most popular. I understand how they selected those names but if they had gone through the same process and asked people to identify names by class, they may have gotten the same line up and then their results would be about discrimination based on perceived class. Without checking that, I am not sure what to make of the effort.