Although laws protect stigmatized groups from overt forms of discrimination, there are no laws to protect against more subtle forms of bias—from the ways customers may negatively perceive companies that publicly advocate for Black Lives Matter to the rudeness an LGBTQ+ customer might experience in a store.
“If we just look at overt discrimination, we are missing a lot of negativity that the targets of discrimination experience,” says Michelle “Mikki” Hebl, PhD, a professor of psychology and management at Rice University. In fact, Hebl argues that in some cases subtle, or interpersonal, discrimination can be more damaging than more overt forms because the recipient may have to exert a great deal of cognitive resources questioning whether they are just imagining it or to whom to attribute it.
In her lab at Rice, Hebl and her colleagues study the causes and consequences of this type of discrimination and develop interventions to help organizations and individuals combat it.
“In the absence of laws, organizations and organizational leaders can adopt policies that prevent both [overt and subtle] discrimination,” Hebl says.
Stigma at work
Hebl credits her undergraduate education at Smith College, a women’s institution, for opening her eyes to inequality. She spent her days there thinking about the battles that women have fought and continue to fight for equal rights. She went on to earn her PhD at Dartmouth College, where she studied discrimination against people who are obese or have a physical disability, and she arrived at Rice University 22 years ago, committed to better understanding different forms of discrimination and how to remediate them.
Much of Hebl’s research focuses on how disadvantaged groups are treated in the workplace and in hiring situations. In one study, she asked people to wear hats with either the phrase “Gay and Proud” or “Texan and Proud” and apply for jobs in Houston, which had a city ordinance prohibiting employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation (Barron, L.G., et al., Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2013opens in new window). Participants did not know which hat they were wearing. Although the two groups reported no differences in overt forms of discrimination, such as being allowed to complete an application, the participants who donned the “Gay and Proud” hats perceived less positivity, had shorter interactions and experienced more rudeness. Their instincts were confirmed by independent coders who listened to audiotapes of the interviews and rated higher levels of subtle discrimination against people wearing the “Gay and Proud” versus the “Texan and Proud” hat.
While this study shows that subtle discrimination persists, other research by Hebl suggests that laws preventing overt discrimination can tamp down subtle discrimination as well. In a related study, individuals wore these same hats in workplaces in Dallas suburbs, where the presence of LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination laws varies. She found that participants experienced less overt and subtle discrimination in jurisdictions with protective laws compared with those that did not. To get at whether antidiscrimination laws caused this decrease, the researchers conducted a follow-up lab study with Houston-area participants trained to conduct job interviews and who were told either that sexual orientation discrimination was legal or illegal. Then they carried out mock interviews of people who had a visible “Gay and Proud” pin on their backpacks and listed involvement in a gay and lesbian organization on their résumés. Interviewers who believed discrimination was illegal spent more time talking with the applicant and showed lesser degrees of interpersonal discrimination compared with interviewers who thought it was legal.
Gender disparities
Hebl has also explored how discrimination affects women in academia. In a series of studies, she and her colleagues at Rice and other U.S. universities explored 624 letters of recommendation that had been submitted on behalf of 174 applicants for assistant professor positions in a psychology department (Madera, J.M., et al., Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2019opens in new window). A team of trained research coders identified so-called doubt raisers in the letters, which could take the form of a negative statement (the applicant does not have much teaching experience), faint praise (the applicant has adequate experience), hedging (the applicant may not be the most outstanding) and irrelevant statements (the applicant is an avid runner).
The letters for female applicants had significantly more doubt raisers than those for male applicants, regardless of whether they had been written by a woman or a man. Among women’s applications, 54% had at least one doubt raiser and 13% had more than one, compared with 51% and 7% for men’s applications. Such bias may not be intentional, Hebl explains, but it is strong and has measurable harmful implications for women.
In a follow-up study, Hebl and her colleagues asked about 300 professors across the United States to look at whether sample recommendation letters with doubt raisers soured their impression of the candidate. The team found that letters with a negative or hedging doubt raiser hurt the evaluation of the applicant, whether they were female or male.
In another study, Hebl and two of her PhD students, Christine Nittrouer and Rachel Trump-Steele, studied gender disparities among psychology, sociology, biology, bioengineering, history and political science faculty invited to give colloquium talks at the top 50 U.S. universities—talks that can be an important career boon by increasing visibility and leading to collaborations and job opportunities. The study found that male faculty overall were more than twice as likely as female faculty to give talks. In a more positive finding, colloquium organizing committees chaired by women resulted in more female speakers than those led by men (PNAS, Vol. 115, No. 1, 2018opens in new window).
Overweight job seekers
Similar to her studies looking at the effects of wearing “Gay and Proud” hats, Hebl’s lab documented the experiences of people applying for jobs while wearing a full-body obesity prosthetic. In these types of studies, the role of the stigmatized individual is often played by graduate students and undergraduate research assistants in Hebl’s lab, of which there are usually 10 to 40 each semester. It’s an “all hands on deck” time, says Abby Corrington, PhD, who earned her PhD while working in the lab and is now an assistant professor of management at Providence College.
For this study, Hebl and her colleagues focused on overweight men because ample research had already documented discrimination against overweight women (Ruggs, E.N., et al., Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 100, No. 5, 2015).opens in new window Hebl and her team found that the seemingly overweight men in their study were not overtly discriminated against when inquiring about job positions in retail stores—they were told that jobs were available and given an application to complete at similar rates as men not wearing prosthetics. However, they experienced more rudeness and other interpersonal forms of discrimination.
Hebl’s research also sheds light on what happens to members of disadvantaged groups once they get a job. In a study of large companies, Hebl and her collaborators at other universities and in industry found that overweight employees were more likely to be reviewed poorly by their supervisors and peers compared with employees who were not overweight (King, E.B., et al., Human Resource Management, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2016opens in new window). To the researchers’ surprise, this relationship held whether the employees were in the company’s top leadership or more middle level, suggesting that power does not protect individuals from weight-based stigma.
Hebl has also been curious about how companies are perceived by consumers when they publicly advocate for Black Lives Matter (BLM). Recently, Hebl, Corrington and colleagues conducted an online survey asking participants to read communications from a large food company voicing their support for BLM and then indicate their approval of the company and desire to work for them (unpublished data).
Effective interventions
In one study, Hebl found that graduate students who wore an obesity prosthetic were less successful at recruiting people on campus for a short survey and were treated more rudely than when they were not wearing the prosthetic (Randall, J.G., et al., European Review of Applied Psychology, Vol. 67, No. 3, 2017opens in new window). The heavy recruiters had more luck, however, when they were also wearing a T-shirt from a recent running event and holding a water bottle, compared with when they had a high-calorie dessert in their hand, suggesting that cues that run counter to overweight stereotypes can reduce discrimination.
Likewise, people with visible disabilities were found to face less discrimination when they claimed their disability or acknowledged it in a positive way (Lyons, B.J., et al., Journal of Management, Vol. 44, No. 5, 2016opens in new window). Hebl and her colleagues conducted an online survey in which the participants were asked to respond to various scenarios involving a co-worker in a wheelchair; participants rated the co-worker as more competent when they claimed their disabilities as opposed to downplaying or ignoring them.
However, Hebl emphasizes that the burden of reducing discrimination should not fall on stigmatized individuals, but on society. “If we only focus on the individual, we won’t get there,” she says.
To that end, she has also spent the last decade looking at ways that legislation, organizations, leaders and allies can stem discrimination. In one study, she found that transgender people who worked at companies that had policies prohibiting anti-transgender discrimination, and had supportive nontransgender co-workers with whom they socialized, were less likely to report feeling discriminated against (Ruggs, E.N., et al., Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2015opens in new window).
In another study of the role of co-workers, Hebl and colleagues asked participants to watch a video in which one employee said it was not appropriate for a gay person to work there and another employee responded by mildly disagreeing, confronting the perpetrator of the homophobic comment in a calm manner or confronting them in a hostile manner (Martinez, L.R., et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 103, Part A, 2017opens in new window). Then they asked the participants to complete an online survey evaluating the two employees. Participants were more likely to give the perpetrator negative ratings if the other employee confronted them. They were also more likely to report that they would confront such a perpetrator if they viewed a calm confrontation. The authors suggested that confrontation could help create “an informal coalition of employees that could in turn shape the organizational climate.”
Hebl hopes that her research will pave the way for legislation against overt discrimination as well as interpersonal discrimination. Although she admits that the idea of prohibiting hostile behavior may seem difficult to imagine, many people used to think that it would not be possible to pass laws against sexual harassment. Yet individuals who feel they are experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace—for example, through unwelcome comments or inappropriate glances—can now file complaints with their employer and take legal action. The same should be true for all types of subtle discrimination in the workplace, Hebl says.
Corrington hopes that the lab’s work to make people aware of their social expectations and reactions can help reduce discrimination. “None of us are immune to biases,” she says, “and having bias doesn’t make you a bad person; it makes you human. But we should be questioning ourselves and questioning our reactions.”
