Biases of managers based on race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation – ScienceDaily

[ad_1]

In a study that examined workplace bias, a University of Florida researcher found that those in management positions display both explicit and implicit bias toward others from marginalized groups and more often express implicit bias than people who are not in management.

The study, published this month in Frontiers in Psychologydrawn from 10 years of publicly available data from a tacit project at Harvard University, is a repository of information from more than 5 million people.

George Cunningham, professor and chair of UF’s Department of Sports Management, and co-author analyzed the responses of people who identified themselves as managers and compared their assessments of racial and gender bias, disability, and sexual orientation to those of people in 22 other professions. appointments.

“Stereotypes and prejudices harm workplace experiences and advancement opportunities for people from secondary and compulsive backgrounds,” said Cunningham, who is also director of the Diversity in Sport Lab. “While people undoubtedly experience abuse from co-workers and clients, our work shows that managers are also likely to express bias, particularly in implicit forms.”

Cunningham explained that while there has been a great deal of research using implicit project data, he hasn’t seen any comparing biases between different occupational groups. Because the web-based test provides occupational codes, it can compare people whose primary role is management, such as the CEO or various types of middle management, with people in other employment positions.

The study authors knew that allegations of racial and gender discrimination and disability were most commonly filed with the EEOC between 1997 and 2021. Because sexual orientation was not a federally protected employment characteristic, they drew data from UCLA’s Williams Institute , which indicates that 45% of those who identify as LGBTQ+ have experienced some form of discrimination at work.

“Once we saw that forms of abuse based on race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation are prevalent in the American workforce, we decided on this quintessential examination of managers’ biases in these areas,” Cunningham said.

Implicit bias happens automatically and unintentionally, Cunningham said, but it affects judgments, decision-making, and behaviors. Research has shown that this unintentional discrimination has implications for many aspects of society, including health care, policing, education, and organizational practices.

With an explicit bias, individuals become aware of their own biases and attitudes towards certain groups.

In Cunningham’s study, implicit biases were assessed using the implicit association test, or IAT.

Explicit attitudes were assessed using a feeling thermometer, in which participants responded to items measuring their attitudes toward different groups.

“In terms of explicit biases, the scores as calculated indicated that people in managerial occupations had a clear bias in favor of people without disabilities, men relative to women working outside the home, and white and heterosexual people,” Cunningham said.

For the implicit bias scores, the researchers used a standard pre-grading criterion, including managers who are neutral, weak, moderate, strong, and moderately favored groups in the majority. The paper goes on to break down the findings by explicit and implicit bias, by different occupations and in relation to each of the four target groups of people.

“Of 176 comparisons, we found significant differences in 58, or about a third of the time,” Cunningham said.

Project implicit survey respondents who identified as managers had similar levels of bias to those found in what the researchers call white-collar jobs, such as doctors and those in business and the financial sector. They had less bias than those employed in physical labor and blue collar jobs, such as food production, transportation, and protection services. In addition, managers showed greater bias than people whose job code included improving the human condition and protecting the environment, such as teachers, artists, and social scientists, according to the study.

“It’s not that managers are more biased than everyone else or that they’re less biased than everyone else, but it’s not about that,” Cunningham said. “Our original question was, do they have biases, and do they differ from others who have different job codes, and would that affect claims made by employees? That tells us, yes, they do, and the type of bias depends not only on the focus but whether it’s implicit or explicit.” .

Their study also showed a disconnect between assessments of managers’ explicit and implicit bias, Cunningham said, particularly when it came to disability. Their responses indicated that they did not explicitly believe they had a bias regarding people with disabilities, while their implicit bias regarding this group was the highest among the others.

The value in studies like these, Cunningham said, is building awareness of our implicit biases.

“The more we are aware of this, the more likely we are to take steps to help reduce the impact,” he said. “Training, stock advisors, checks and balances and other practices should be built into the system — not once-a-year activities.

“But the biggest problem is changing the way our society works,” he said. “Managers can’t do much about how society works, but they can do things about how their organizations operate.”

[ad_2]

Source link

Related Posts

Precaliga