I recently came across an interesting paper on gender and race discrimination. According to Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola and Dolly Chugh, decisions about distant future events are more likely to generate discrimination against women and minorities than decisions about near future events. In their paper, The Temporal Discrimination Effect: An Audit Study in Academia, the authors propose a “temporal discrimination effect:
… greater temporal distance increases a decision maker’s focus on desirability concerns, and thus, heightens the discrimination against women and minorities. By triggering a more abstract mindset, we anticipate that distant events will focus decision makers on the desirability of the possible event, and thus increase stereotyping and negative judgments of women and minorities… Conversely, we hypothesize that near-future events will dampen racial and gender discrimination by prompting concrete construals and focusing decision makers’ attention on how an event could occur rather than whether it ought to occur.
The authors test this hypothesis by designing an experiment to examine faculty willingness to interact with prospective doctoral students. Email requests were sent from fictional prospective doctoral candidates to 6,548 university faculty members requesting a short meeting. The requests were randomized with respect to timing of the meeting – either today or in one week – and the gender, race and ethnicity of the student.
The experimental results show that Caucasian males were granted access to faculty 26% more often than women or minorities when making requests for next week; they also received more – and faster – responses to their requests. There was essentially no difference by gender or race when looking at requests for same-day meetings.
Based on the results of their experiment, the authors conclude:
Our findings demonstrate that discrimination is pervasive in academia and that it is heightened by temporal distance… Further, we offer suggestive evidence that abstract construal of the distant-future generates the temporal discrimination effect in our study by focusing attention on desirability concerns about “why” access should be granted to a prospective student, as compared to concrete construal of the near-future, which focuses attention on feasibility concerns about “how” to meet.
The authors note that their findings have implications for employment discrimination:
[E]mployment discrimination may be less severe in markets for day labor than in labor markets involving advance hiring decisions. Contracts that require advance negotiation may also be more biased against women and minorities than contracts negotiated on the spot. If at play, these forces could affect the career choices made by women and minorities, such that, for instance, these groups would be overrepresented in certain professions involving spot transactions.
It’s certainly an interesting hypothesis…