What happens before? A field experiment exploring how pay and representation differentially shape bias on the pathway into organizations.

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 higherpaying 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. Disciplines Finance and Financial Management | Social and Behavioral SciencesThis journal article is available at

Segregation, Stereotypes, and STEM

“…One double-blind audit study demonstrated, for example, that STEM faculty members were less likely to hire female than male candidates for a lab manager position, because women were perceived to be less competent ; see also Goldin and Rouse 2000). Other research has shown that faculty are more likely to respond to email requests for graduate mentoring from persons with male, white-sounding names (Milkman et al 2015) and that scientific papers are judged to be of higher quality when attributed to a male author (Knobloch-Westerwick et al 2013). In this volume, Blair-Loy et al (2017) provide new evidence of unequal treatment in the STEM hiring process in the form of videotaped job talks that show more interruptions of women than men candidates for faculty engineering positions.…”

Subtle Discrimination in the Workplace: A Vicious Cycle

“…As a prime example of how subtle bias emerges in a meaningful way before people formally seek employment, Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh (2015) sent identical e-mails to over 6,000 professors in which the researchers posed as prospective graduate students, varying only the ethnicity (e.g., White, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese) and gender of the sender's name. They found that across all disciplines and institutions, professors (including women and ethnic minority faculty) were more likely to respond to the White male prospective graduate students as compared with female and ethnic minority prospective graduate students.…”

Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter?

“…The empirical evidence has been so far inconclusive and typically based on small samples. Sometimes researchers seem to benefit from the presence of evaluators who share the same gender (Casadevall and Handelsman 2014;, sometimes they seem to obtain relatively better evaluations from opposite-sex evaluators (Broder 1993;Ellemers et al 2004), and in some other cases gender does not seem to play any (statistically) significant role (Abrevaya and Hamermesh 2012;Jayasinghe, Marsh, and Bond 2003;Milkman, Akinola, and Chugh 2015;Moss-Racusin et al 2012;Steinpreis, Anders, and Ritzke 1999;Williams and Ceci 2015). A brief summary of these studies is available in online Appendix A.…”