professor smith is conducting a research study on discrimination

Introduction: The Case for Discrimination Research

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• Rosita Fibbi 4 ,
• Arnfinn H. Midtbøen 5 &
• Patrick Simon 6  

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Increasing migration-related diversity in Europe has fostered dramatic changes since the 1950s, among them the rise of striking ethno-racial inequalities in employment, housing, health, and a range of other social domains. These ethno-racial disadvantages can be understood as evidence of widespread discrimination; however, scholarly debates reflect striking differences in the conceptualization and measurement of discrimination in the social sciences. Indeed, what discrimination is, as well as how and why it operates, are differently understood and studied by the various scholarships and scientific fields. It is the ambition of this book to summarize how we frame, study, theorize, and aim at combatting ethno-racial discrimination in Europe.

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European societies are more ethnically diverse than ever. The increasing migration-related diversity has fostered dramatic changes since the 1950s, among them the rise of striking ethno-racial inequalities in employment, housing, health, and a range of other social domains. The sources of these enduring inequalities have been a subject of controversy for decades. To some scholars, ethno-racial gaps in such outcomes are seen as transitional bumps in the road toward integration, while others view structural racism, ethnic hostility, and subtle forms of outgroup-bias as fundamental causes of persistent ethno-racial inequalities. These ethno-racial disadvantages can be understood as evidence of widespread discrimination; however, scholarly debates reflect striking differences in the conceptualization and measurement of discrimination in the social sciences.

What discrimination is, as well as how and why it operates, are differently understood and studied by the various scholarships and scientific fields. A large body of research has been undertaken over the previous three decades, using a variety of methods – qualitative, quantitative, and experimental. These research efforts have improved our knowledge of the dynamics of discrimination in Europe and beyond. It is the ambition of this book to summarize how we frame, study, theorize, and aim at combatting ethno-racial discrimination in Europe.

1.1 Post-War Immigration and the Ethno-racial Diversity Turn

Even though ethnic and racial diversity has existed to some extent in Europe (through the slave trade, transnational merchants, and colonial troops), the scope of migration-related diversity reached an unprecedented level in the period following World War II. This period coincides with broader processes of decolonization and the beginning of mass migration from non-European countries, be it from former colonies to the former metropoles (from the Caribbean or India and Pakistan to the UK; South-East Asia, North Africa or Sub-Saharan Africa to France) or in the context of labor migration without prior colonial ties (from Turkey to Germany or the Netherlands; Morocco to Belgium or the Netherlands, etc.).

The ethnic and racial diversity in large demographic figures began in the 1960s (Van Mol and de Valk 2016 ). At this time, most labor migrants were coming from other European countries, but figures of non-European migration were beginning to rise: in 1975, 8% of the population in France and the UK had a migration background, half of which originated from a non-European country. By contrast, in 2014, 9.2% of the population of the EU28 had a migration background from outside of Europe (either foreign born or native-born from foreign-born parent(s)), and this share reached almost 16% in Sweden; 14% in the Netherlands, France, and the UK; and between 10 and 13% in Germany, Belgium, and Austria. The intensification of migration, especially from Asia and Africa, has heightened the visibility of ethno-racial diversity in large European metropolises. Almost 50% of inhabitants in Amsterdam and Rotterdam have a “nonwestern allochthon ” background (2014), 40% of Londoners are black or ethnic minorities (2011), while 30% of Berliners (2013) and 43% of Parisians (metropolitan area; 2009) have a migration background. The major facts of this demographic evolution are not only that diversity has reached a point of “super-diversity” (see Vertovec 2007 ; Crul 2016 ) in size and origins, but also that descendants of immigrants (i.e., the second generation) today make up a significant demographic group in most European countries, with the exception of Southern Europe where immigration first boomed in the 2000s.

The coming of age of the second generation has challenged the capacity of different models of integration to fulfill promises of equality, while the socio-cultural cohesion of European societies is changing and has to be revised to include ethnic and racial diversity. Native-born descendants of immigrants are socialized in the country of their parents’ migration and, in most European countries, share the full citizenship of the country where they live and, consequently, the rights attached to it. However, an increasing number of studies show that even the second generation faces disadvantages in education, employment, and housing that cannot be explained by their lack of skills or social capital (Heath and Cheung 2007 ). The transmission of penalties from one generation to the other – and in some cases an even higher level of penalty for the second generation than for the first – cannot be explained solely by the deficiencies in human, social, and cultural capital, as could have been the case for low-skilled labor migrants arriving in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the persistence of ethno-racial disadvantages among citizens who do not differ from others except for their ethnic background, their skin color, or their religious beliefs is a testament to the fact that equality for all is an ambition not yet achieved.

Citizenship status may represent a basis for differential treatment. Undoubtedly, citizenship status is generally considered a legitimate basis for differential treatment, which is therefore not acknowledged as discrimination. Indeed, in many European countries, the divide between nationals and European Union (EU) citizens lost its bearing with the extension of social rights to EU citizens (Koopmans et al. 2012 ). Yet, in other countries, and for non-EU citizens, foreign citizenship status creates barriers to access to social subsidies, health care, specific professions, and pensions or exposure to differential treatment in criminal justice. In most countries, voting rights are conditional to citizenship, and the movement to expand the polity to non-citizens is uneven, at least for elections of representatives at the national parliaments. Notably, in countries with restrictive access to naturalization, citizenship status may provide an effective basis for unequal treatment (Hainmueller and Hangartner 2013 ). The issue of discrimination among nationals, therefore, should not overshadow the enduring citizenship-based inequalities.

The gap between ethnic diversity among the population and scarcity of the representation of this diversity in the economic, political, and cultural elites demonstrate that there are obstacles to minorities entering these positions. This picture varies across countries and social domains. The UK, Belgium, or the Netherlands display a higher proportion of elected politicians with a migration background than France or Germany (Alba and Foner 2015 ). Some would argue that it is only a matter of time before newcomers will take their rank in the queue and access the close ring of power in one or two generations. Others conclude that there is a glass ceiling for ethno-racial minorities, which will prove as efficient as that for women to prevent them from making their way to the top. The exception that proves the rule can be found in sports, where athletes with minority backgrounds are often well represented in high-level competitions. The question is how to narrow the gap in other domains of social life, and what this gap tells us about the structures of inequalities in European societies.

1.2 Talking About Discrimination in Europe

Discrimination is as old as human society. However, the use of the concept in academic research and policy debates in Europe is fairly recent. In the case of differential treatment of ethnic and racial minorities, the concept was typically related to blatant forms of racism and antisemitism, while the more subtle forms of stigmatization, subordination, and exclusion for a long time did not receive much attention as forms of “everyday racism” (Essed 1991 ). The turn from explicit racism to more subtle forms of selection and preference based on ethnicity and race paved the way to current research on discrimination. In European societies, where formal equality is a fundamental principle protected by law, discrimination is rarely observed directly. Contrary to overt racism, which is explicit and easily identified, discrimination is typically a hidden part of decisions, selection processes, and choices that are not explicitly based on ethnic or racial characteristics, even though they produce unfair biases. Discrimination does not have to be intentional and it is often not even a conscious part of human action and interaction. While it is clear that discrimination exists, this form of differential treatment is hard to make visible. The major task of research in the field is thus to provide evidence of the processes and magnitude of discrimination. Beyond the variety of approaches in the different disciplines, however, discrimination researchers tend to agree on the starting point: stereotypes and prejudices are nurturing negative perceptions, more or less explicit, of individuals or groups through processes of ethnicization or racialization, which in turn create biases in decision-making processes and serve as barriers to opportunities for these individuals or groups.

Although the concepts of inequality, discrimination, and racism are sometimes used interchangeably, the concept of discrimination entails specificities in terms of social processes, power relations, and legal frameworks that have opened new perspectives to understand ethnic and racial inequalities. The genealogy of the concept and its diffusion in scientific publications still has to be studied thoroughly, and we searched in major journals to identify broad historical sequences across national contexts. Until the 1980s, the use of the concept of discrimination was not widespread in the media, public opinion, science, or policies. In scientific publications, the dissemination of the concept was already well advanced in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery to describe interracial relations. In Europe, there is a sharp distinction between the UK and continental Europe in this regard. The development of studies referring explicitly to discrimination in the UK has a clear link to the post-colonial migration after World War II and the foundation of ethnic and racial studies in the 1960s. However, the references to discrimination remained quite limited in the scientific literature until the 1990s – even in specialized journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies , New Community and its follower Journal for Ethnic and Migration Studies , and more recently Ethnicities  – when the number of articles containing the term discrimination in their title or keywords increased significantly. In French-speaking journals, references to discrimination were restricted to a small number of feminist journals in the 1970s and became popular in the 1990s and 2000s in mainstream social science journals. The same held true in Germany, with a slight delay in the middle of the 2000s. Since the 2000s, the scientific publications on discrimination have reached new peaks in most European countries.

The year 2000 stands as a turning point in the development of research and public interest in discrimination in continental Europe. This date coincides with the legal recognition of discrimination by the parliament of the EU through a directive “implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin,” more commonly called the “Race Equality Directive.” This directive put ethnic and racial discrimination on the political agenda of EU countries. This political decision contributed to changing the legal framework of EU countries, which incorporated non-discrimination as a major reference and transposed most of the terms of the Race Equality Directive into their national legislation. The implementation of the directive was also a milestone in the advent of the awareness of discrimination in Europe. In order to think in terms of discrimination, there should be a principle of equal treatment applied to everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or race. This principle of equal treatment is not new, but it has remained quite formal for a long time. The Race Equality Directive represented a turning point toward a more effective and proactive approach to achieve equality and accrued sensitivity to counter discrimination wherever it takes place.

The first step to mobilize against discrimination is to launch awareness-raising campaigns to create a new consciousness of the existence of ethno-racial disadvantages. The denial of discrimination is indeed a paradoxical consequence of the extension of formal equality in post-war democratic regimes. Since racism is morally condemned and legally prohibited, it is expected that discrimination should not occur and, thus, that racism is incidental. Incidentally, an opinion survey conducted in 2000 for the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (which was replaced in 2003 by the Fundamental Rights Agency [FRA]), showed that only 31% of respondents in the EU15 at the time agreed that discrimination should be outlawed. However, the second Eurobarometer explicitly dedicated to studying discrimination in 2007 found that ethnic discrimination was perceived as the most widespread (very or fairly) type of discrimination by 64% of EU citizens (European Commission 2007 ). Almost 10 years later, in 2015, the answers were similar for ethnic discrimination but had increased for all other grounds except gender. Yet, there are large discrepancies between countries, with the Netherlands, Sweden, and France showing the highest levels of consciousness of ethnic discrimination (84%, 84%, and 82%, respectively), whereas awareness is much lower in Poland (31%) and Latvia (32%). In Western Europe, Germany (60%) and Austria (58%) stand out with relatively lower marks (European Commission 2015 ).

These Eurobarometer surveys provide useful information about the knowledge of discrimination and the attitudes of Europeans toward policies against it. However, they focus on the representation of different types of discrimination rather than the personal experience of minority members. To gather statistics on the experience of discrimination is difficult for two reasons: (1) minorities are poorly represented in surveys with relatively small samples in the general population and (2) questions about experiences of discrimination are rarely asked in non-specific surveys. Thanks to the growing interest in discrimination, more surveys are providing direct and indirect variables that are useful in studying the personal experiences of ethno-racial disadvantage.

The European Social Survey, for example, has introduced a question on perceived group discrimination (which is not exactly a personal self-reported experience of discrimination, see Chap. 4 ). In 2007 and 2015, the FRA conducted a specialized survey on discrimination in the 28 EU countries, the Minorities and Discrimination (EU-MIDIS) survey, to fill the gap in the knowledge of the experience of discrimination of ethnic and racial minorities. The information collected is wide ranging; however, only two minority groups were surveyed in each EU country, and the survey is not representative of the population.

Of course, European-wide surveys are not the main statistical sources on discrimination. Administrative statistics, censuses, and social surveys at the national and local levels in numerous countries bring new knowledge of discrimination, either with direct measures when this is the main topic of data collection or more indirectly when they provide information on gaps in employment or education faced by disadvantaged groups. The key point is to be able to identify the relevant population category in relation to discrimination, as we know that ethno-racial groups do not experience discrimination to the same extent. Analyses of immigrants or the second generation as a whole might miss the significant differences between – broadly speaking – European and non-European origins. Or, to put it in a different way, between white and non-white or “visible” minorities. Countries where groups with a European background make up most of the migration-related diversity typically show low levels of discrimination, while countries with high proportions of groups with non-European backgrounds, especially Africans (North and Sub-Saharan), Caribbean people, and South Asians, record dramatic levels of discrimination.

1.3 Who Is Discriminated Against? The Problem with Statistics on Ethnicity and Race

Collecting data on discrimination raises the problem of the identification of minority groups. Migration-related diversity has been designed from the beginning of mass migration based on place of birth of the individuals (foreign born) or their citizenship (foreigners). In countries where citizenship acquisition is limited, citizenship or nationality draws the boundary between “us” and “the others” over generations. This is not the case in countries with more open citizenship regimes where native-born children of immigrants acquire by law the nationality of their country of residence and thus cannot be identified by these variables. If most European countries collect data on foreigners and immigrants, a limited number identify the second generation (i.e., the children of immigrants born in the country of immigration). The question is whether the categories of immigrants and the second generation really reflect the population groups exposed to ethno-racial discrimination. As the grounds of discrimination make clear, nationality or country of birth is not the only characteristic generating biases and disadvantages: ethnicity, race, or color are directly involved. However, if it seems straightforward to define country of birth and citizenship, collecting data on ethnicity, race, or color is complex and, in Europe, highly sensitive.

Indeed, the controversial point is defining population groups by using the same characteristics by which they are discriminated against. This raises ethical, political, legal, and methodological issues. Ethical because the choice to re-use the very categories that convey stereotypes and prejudices at the heart of discrimination entails significant consequences. Political because European countries have adopted a color-blind strategy since 1945, meaning that their political philosophies consider that racial terminologies are producing racism by themselves and should be strictly avoided (depending on the countries, ethnicities receive the same blame). Legal because most European countries interpret the provisions of the European directive on data protection and their transposition in national laws as a legal prohibition. Methodological because there is no standardized format to collect personal information on ethnicity or race and there are several methodological pitfalls commented in the scientific literature. Data on ethnicity per se are collected in censuses to describe national minorities in Eastern Europe, the UK, and Ireland, which are the only Western European countries to produce statistics by ethno-racial categories (Simon 2012 ). The information is collected by self-identification either with an open question about one’s ethnicity or by ticking a box (or several in the case of multiple choices) in a list of categories. None of these questions explicitly mention race: for example, the categories in the UK census refer to “White,” “black British,” or “Asian British” among other items, but the question itself is called the “ethnic group question.”

In the rest of Europe, place of birth and nationality of the parents would be used as proxies for ethnicity in a limited number of countries: Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Belgium to name a few. Data on second generations can be found in France, Germany, and Switzerland among others in specialized surveys with limitations in size and scope. Moreover, the succession of generations since the arrival of the first migrants will fade groups into invisibility by the third generation. This process is already well advanced in the oldest immigration countries, such as France, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Asking questions about the grandparents and the previous generations is not an option since it would require hard decisions to classify those with mixed ancestry (how many ancestors are needed to belong to one category?), not to mention the problems in memory to retrieve all valuable information about the grandparents. This is one of the reasons why traditional immigration countries (USA, Canada, Australia) collect data on ethnicity through self-identification questions.

The discrepancies between official categories and those exposed to discrimination have fostered debates between state members and International Human Rights Organizations – such as the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) at the Council of Europe, and the EU FRA – which claim that more data are needed on racism and discrimination categorized by ethnicity. The same applies to academia and antiracist NGOs where debates host advocates and opponents to “ethnic statistics.” There is no easy solution, but the accuracy of data for the measurement of discrimination is a strategic issue for both research and policies.

1.4 Discrimination and Integration: Commonalities and Contradictions

How does research on discrimination relate to the broader field of research on immigrant assimilation or integration? On one hand, assimilation/integration and discrimination are closely related both in theory and in empirical studies. Discrimination hinders full participation in society, and the persistence of ethnic penalties across generations contradicts long-term assimilation prospects. On the other hand, both assimilation and integration theory tend to assume that the role of discrimination in shaping access to opportunities will decrease over time. Assimilation is often defined as “the decline of ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social difference” (Alba and Nee 2003 , 11), a definition that bears an expectation that migrants and their descendants will over time cease to be viewed as different from the “mainstream population,” reach parity in socioeconomic outcomes, and gradually become “one of us.” In the canonical definition, integration departs from assimilation by considering incorporation as a two-way process. Migrants and ethnic minorities are expected to become full members of a society by adopting core values, norms, and basic cultural codes (e.g., language) from mainstream society, while mainstream society is transformed in return by the participation of migrants and ethnic minorities (Alba et al. 2012 ). The main idea is that convergence rather than differentiation should occur to reach social cohesion, and mastering the cultural codes of mainstream society will alleviate the barriers to resource access, such as education, employment, housing, and rights.

Of course, studies of assimilation and integration do not necessarily ignore that migrants and ethnic minorities face penalties in the course of the process of acculturation and incorporation into mainstream society. In the landmark book, Assimilation in American Life , Milton Gordon clearly spelled out that the elimination of prejudice and discrimination is a key parameter for assimilation to occur; or to use his own terms, that “attitude receptional” and “behavioral receptional” dimensions of assimilation are crucial to complete the process (Gordon 1964 , 81). Yet, ethnic penalties are believed to be mainly determined by human capital and class differences and therefore progressively offset as education level rises, elevating the newcomers to conditions of the natives and reducing the social distance between groups. Stressing the importance of generational progress, assimilation theory thus tends to consider discrimination as merely a short-run phenomenon.

The main blind spots in assimilation and integration theories revolve around two issues: the specific inequalities related to the ethnicization or racialization of non-white minorities and the balance between the responsibilities of the structures of mainstream society and the agencies of migrants and ethnic minorities in the process of incorporation. Along these two dimensions, discrimination research offers a different perspective than what is regularly employed in studies of assimilation and integration.

Discrimination research tends to identify the unfavorable and unfair treatment of individuals or groups based on categorical characteristics and often shows these unfair treatments lie in the activation of stereotypes and prejudices by gatekeepers and the lack of neutrality in processes of selection. In this perspective, what has to be transformed and adapted to change the situation are the structures – the institutions, procedures, bureaucratic routines, etc. – of mainstream society, opening it up to ethnic and racial diversity to enable migrants and ethnic minorities to participate on equal footing with other individuals, independent of their identities. By contrast, in studies of assimilation and integration, explanations of disadvantages are often linked to the lack of human capital and social networks among migrants and ethnic minorities, suggesting that they have to transform themselves to be able to take full part in society. To simplify matters, studies of assimilation and integration often explain persistent disadvantages by pointing to characteristics of migrants and ethnic minorities, while discrimination research explains disadvantages by characteristics of the social and political system.

Both assimilation and integration theories have gradually opened up for including processes of ethnicization and racialization and the consequences of such processes on assimilation prospects. Most prominently, segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Rumbaut 2001 ; Portes and Zhou 1993 ) shifts the focus away from migrants’ adaptation efforts and to the forms of interaction between minority groups – and prominently the second and later generations – and the receiving society. In this variant of assimilation theory, societies are viewed as structurally stratified by class, gender, and race, which powerfully influence the resources and opportunities available to immigrants and their descendants and contribute to shaping alternative paths of incorporation. According to segmented assimilation theory, children of immigrants may end up “ascending into the ranks of a prosperous middle class or join in large numbers the ranks of a racialized, permanently impoverished population at the bottom of society” (Portes et al. 2005 , 1004), the latter outcome echoing worries over persistent ethnic and racial disadvantage. Another possible outcome is upward bicultural mobility (selective acculturation) of the children of poorly educated parents, protected by strong community ties.

The major question arising from these related fields of research – the literature on assimilation and integration, on the one hand, and the literature on discrimination, on the other – is whether the gradual diversification of Europe will result in “mainstream expansion,” in which migrants and their descendants over time will ascend the ladders into the middle and upper classes of the societies they live in, or whether we are witnessing the formation of a permanent underclass along ethnic and racial lines. This book will not provide the ultimate answer to this question. However, by introducing the main concepts, theories, and methods in the field of discrimination, as well as pointing out key research findings, policies that are enacted to combat discrimination, and avenues for future research, we hope to provide the reader with an overview of the field.

1.5 The Content of the Book

The literature on discrimination is flourishing, and it involves a wide range of concepts, theories, methods, and findings. Chapter 2 provides the key concepts in the field. The chapter distinguishes between direct and indirect discrimination as legal and sociological concepts, between systemic and institutional discrimination, and between discrimination as intentional actions, subtle biases, and what might be referred to as the cumulative effects of past discrimination on the present. Chapter 3 reviews the main theoretical explanations of discrimination from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Mirroring the historical development of the field, it presents and discusses theories seeking the cause of prejudice and discrimination at the individual, organizational, and structural levels.

Of course, our knowledge of discrimination depends on the methods of measurement, since the phenomenon is mainly visible through its quantification. Hence, Chapter 4 offers an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of available methods of measurement, including statistical analysis of administrative data, surveys among potential victims and perpetrators, qualitative in-depth studies, legal cases, and experimental approaches to the study of discrimination (including survey experiments, lab experiments, and field experiments).

Importantly, discrimination does not occur similarly in all domains of social life, and it takes different forms according to the domain in question (e.g., the labor market, education, housing, health services, and public services). Chapter 5 taps into the large body of empirical work that can be grouped under the heading “discrimination research” in order to provide some key findings, while simultaneously highlighting a distinction between systems of differentiation and systems of equality.

What happens when discrimination occurs? Chapter 6 addresses the consequences of unfair treatment for targeted individuals and groups, as well as their reaction to it. These individual and collective responses to discrimination are seconded by policies designed to tackle discrimination. However, antidiscrimination policies vary greatly across countries, and Chapter 7 provides an overview of the different types of policies against discrimination in Europe and beyond, both public policies and schemes implemented by organizations. The chapter also reflects on some of the key political and societal debates about the implementation and the future of these policies. Chapter 8 concludes on the future of discrimination research in Europe, stressing the main challenges ahead for a burgeoning scientific field.

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Fibbi, R., Midtbøen, A.H., Simon, P. (2021). Introduction: The Case for Discrimination Research. In: Migration and Discrimination. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67281-2_1

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Researchers study the benefits of discussing discrimination

St. Olaf College Assistant Professor of Psychology Jessica Benson’s research has found that when people disclose their emotions about discriminatory events in their life, they have a boost in cognitive performance.

Now, under Benson’s guidance, St. Olaf students are taking this research one step further to examine why.

“Why is it that when someone writes about their emotions, about a horrible negative event that happened to them, they actually have these cognitive benefits?” asks Benson.

Three students worked alongside Benson this summer to study the benefits that can come from discussing personal discriminatory events. Their work is part of St. Olaf’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) program, which p rovides opportunities for St. Olaf students from all academic disciplines to gain an in-depth understanding of a particular subject by working closely with St. Olaf faculty members in a research framework .  This project was additionally supported by St. Olaf’s TRIO McNair program, a graduate school preparatory program funded by the U.S. Department of Education and sponsored by St. Olaf College.

“When people experience discrimination, especially when it’s subtle, they often internalize the experience as something that is either their fault or in their head,” Benson says. “We know from other research that this internalization is not positive, so the more someone can attribute this discrimination to a societal problem, the better their well-being and self-esteem will be — and hopefully the more proactive they will be about educating other people.”

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jessica Benson When people experience discrimination, especially when it’s subtle, they often internalize the experience as something that is either their fault or in their head. We know from other research that this internalization is not positive, so the more someone can attribute this discrimination to a societal problem, the better their well-being and self-esteem will be.

The student researchers — Lori Tran ’21, Laila Rahman ’21, and Megan Hussey ’20 — have been conducting both qualitative and quantitative research in a longitudinal study that is continuing this fall.

“We actually want to see if finding meaning moderates these other effects I found,” Benson says. “So if respondents are able to find meaning and attribute this to discrimination, does this lead to academic achievement? So hopefully in the long run we can test this with adolescents to see if this can lead to more resilience and better academic outcomes.”

Rahman notes that the work is particularly rewarding because of its potential practical applications.

“Once completed, this research will prove that emotional disclosure writing therapy not only works for PTSD patients, but is also an effective self-therapy method and healthy coping mechanism for people who experience discrimination on a daily basis,” she says.

Hussey agrees, noting that the work has had a powerful impact on how she views the world.

“It’s really easy in research studies to forget about the implications, or the ‘so what?’ part of why you are doing this. For me, this project was especially exciting because I never lost sight of the ‘so what?’ behind it all,” she says. “Our society has become more and more prone to discriminate against others, and researching possible coping mechanisms and strategies people can use following an adverse experience with discrimination is so relevant and important in today’s world. I came into work every day knowing exactly how relevant and important the research we were doing was.”

Our society has become more and more prone to discriminate against others, and researching possible coping mechanisms and strategies people can use following an adverse experience with discrimination is so relevant and important in today’s world. Megan Hussey ’20

Tran says that presenting the team’s research at the CURI symposium and talking about its impact made her realize that she wants to continue this type of work.

“I think the value of being part of in-depth undergraduate research is that it can help you realize your passions and what you want to do with your future,” she says.

Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations: Theoretical Starting Points

Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations

ISBN : 978-1-80117-959-1 , eISBN : 978-1-80117-956-0

Publication date: 1 December 2022

This article outlines the theoretical foundations of the research contributions of this edited collection about “Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations.” First, the sociological understanding of the basic concepts of diversity and discrimination is described and the current state of research is introduced. Second, national and organizational contextual conditions and risk factors that shape discrimination experiences and the management of diversity in research teams and organizations are presented. Third, the questions and research approaches of the individual contributions to this edited collection are presented.

• Comparative research
• Implicit bias

Müller, J. , Striebing, C. and Schraudner, M. (2022), "Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations: Theoretical Starting Points", Striebing, C. , Müller, J. and Schraudner, M. (Ed.) Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations , Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-30. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-956-020221001

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Jörg Müller, Clemens Striebing, and Martina Schraudner

Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this work (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Purpose of this Edited Collection

The era of team science has long since dawned ( Wang and Barabási, 2021 ; Pavlidis et al., 2014 ). Diverse teams are considered to have the potential to work particularly efficiently. Creative thinking, diversity of perspectives and the ability to solve complex problems might be pronounced in diverse teams, which has not only been shown for multidisciplinary but also gender-diverse teams (Abdalla et al., 1999; Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Østergaard et al., 2011 ). Such skills are key competencies for research organizations that want to be influential and internationally-recognized sites for cutting-edge research.

However, in order for the individual members of a team to work well, research organizations need to provide a productive and naturally non-discriminatory working environment. The fact that bringing together and integrating researchers and their diverse backgrounds in effective teams is precarious due to the structural conditions of the research system – that is, it does not happen on its own – will be further discussed here. To harness the positive effects of diversity, it must be managed proactively ( Nielsen et al., 2018 ). In this context, the edited collection has the following purposes:

to contribute rare quantitative analyses of the extent of discrimination according to diverse socio-demographic characteristics of individuals in research-performing organizations;

to contribute analyses of the contextual organizational factors that affect the perception of discrimination within research-performing organizations, and

to seek the connection to practice by highlighting options for action.

The publication explores discrimination in research organizations, by which we mean all forms of organizations whose main purpose is to conduct research. The focus is on public research organizations such as universities or non-university research institutions (represented in the edited collection primarily by the German Max Planck Society). Research departments of companies – which in our view operate more according to the rules of the private sector than academia – are not included.

In principle, discrimination can be discussed for all areas of society and is regularly relevant simply due to its strong significance for the working climate and the well-being of individuals and teams. The relevance of research-performing organizations as a research topic seems to be additionally given by the political efforts of advanced (trans-)national innovation systems to combat systemic discrimination and the major role that effective diversity management plays for successful cooperative creative processes. At a political level, as editors and researchers active in national and international projects we experience the European Commission as a particularly proactive actor. With its “Horizon Europe” funding programme for research and innovation, the EC also promotes research projects and practical measures to reduce discrimination and create an inclusive research culture in the research systems of its member states. In doing so, it strives to strengthen international mobility and the competitiveness of a common European research area as part of its mandate laid down in Article 179 of the EU Treaty. 1

Diversity and Discrimination: A Sociological Definition

Conceptual understanding of discrimination.

Research on discrimination in the labor market and work organizations has lost none of its relevance. This continued interest by researchers and practitioners is partly due to the fact that discrimination has become more subtle while still producing adverse effects for disadvantaged social groups. Over the decades, theory as well as empirical research has moved away from understanding discrimination as deliberate and intentional acts of exclusion perpetuated by individuals toward more complex and elusive mechanisms including cognitive “implicit bias” ( Quillian, 2006 ), “microaggressions” ( Sue, 2010 ), unfair and biased organizational processes ( Nelson et al., 2008 ), or the systemic nature of what Barbara Reskin (2012) has called “ über discrimination.”

Nonetheless, while discriminatory practices have become less overt ( Sturm, 2001 ), their effects continue to be felt in a very direct and real way by individuals as well as organizations. Findings presented by Jones et al. (2016) in their meta-analysis show that subtle forms of discrimination are “at least as substantial, if not more substantial” (italics original) than overt forms regarding diminishing the physical and mental health of individuals, job satisfaction, or organizational commitment, to name just three of its effects. The resulting reduced well-being and self-esteem of staff has organizational-level consequences as employees’ work attitudes decline, turnover intentions increase or job performance dwindles, affecting the overall effectiveness of firms (for a review, see Colella et al., 2012 ). Thus, while it has become more difficult to detect discrimination, its negative consequences are as direct and powerful as ever, calling for equally strategic and systemic counter-measures.

Discrimination has a long and substantive research pedigree in the social and behavioral sciences, with contributions spanning several disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, management and law. Although the explanatory models for discrimination differ across these fields of knowledge, there is a certain agreement on its basic definition: discrimination involves the differential treatment of individuals based on functionally irrelevant status cues such as race or gender ( Merton, 1972 ; Altonji and Blank, 1999 ).

Unpacking this definition first implies recognizing that discrimination is based on group membership and as such it never targets a person due to individual reasons. Discrimination happens because individuals are perceived as belonging to a social group delineated by gender, race or national origin, age, health conditions or disability, religion, and/or sexual orientation ( Colella et al., 2012 ; Baumann et al., 2018 ). These categories often do not function as unified, mutually-exclusive entities, but rather they “intersect” and can thereby aggravate experiences of oppression and power ( Collins, 2015 ).

Second, discrimination implies an “unjustified” differential treatment that occurs due to social group membership rather than actual differences in terms of task-relevant qualifications, contributions, or performance. Thus, job opportunities, promotions or rewards (e.g., wages) differ between women and men, even when comparing equally qualified and experienced persons. Consequently, discrimination is considered not only unfair but also illegal in many contexts.

Third, discrimination refers to behavior rather than solely beliefs and attitudes. Although the psychological literature predominately explains discrimination with references to prejudice and stereotypes, this is insufficient to constitute an act of discrimination ( Fiske et al., 2009 ). For discrimination to occur, actions need to be carried out that exclude, disadvantage, harm, harass or deprive the members of a less favored group compared to the members of a more favor group. Although most research conceives discrimination as negative behavior against disadvantaged groups, it can also involve positive behavior, that is, giving advantages to already-privileged groups. In fact, as Nancy DiTomaso (2020, 2013) argues, for the perpetuation of social inequality, the

positive actions taken on behalf of those who are already advantaged may be as consequential or more so than the negative actions that deny opportunity to those who are disadvantaged.

Conceptual Understanding of Diversity

Similar to research on discrimination, research on workplace diversity continues to be a burgeoning academic field. As Faria (2015) suggests, diversity research came into being in the US during the 1980s as a specific reaction against the previous social justice-based Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and Affirmative Action (AA) policies dealing with discrimination. Driven by an increasingly heterogeneous workforce and economic globalization, these justice-based policies were considered to be inefficient and costly, and replaced in favor of an emerging business case for diversity. Whereas discrimination involves a moral component in terms of the “unjustified” differential treatment ( Altman, 2011 ), diversity relinquishes these moral and legal burdens, concentrating instead on a pragmatic strategy to increase the corporate bottom line ( Litvin, 2006 ). Diversity research therefore attenuates regulatory approaches for ameliorating the negative effects of discrimination and instead emphasizes proactive measures to capitalize on heterogeneous resources available in different work settings. For diversity research, the focus on measurable profits implied the establishment of a matrix of quantification where certain clear-cut, easily observable demographic differences could be set in relation to equally quantifiable, dependent outcomes. Backed up by the predominant positivist research tradition in the US, demographic differences according to gender, age, race as well as functional differences such as educational background were thus operationalized and enshrined as measurable, stable markers of identity to be harnessed by Human Resource Departments and Management for improved profitability.

As a result, a major difference between discrimination and diversity approaches in workplace settings concerns the role reserved for markers of social identity such as age, gender, or race. While diversity scholars conceived these differences in terms of a-historical, personal attributes, discrimination scholars are mostly attentive to the ways in which these individual attributes delineate group-based membership, which in turn is tied to historically-grown positions of privilege and power ( Prasad, Pringle, and Konrad, 2006 ).

Today, diversity research has increasingly overcome its initial and overly simplistic conceptions of fixed identity attributes, partly driven by the largely inconsistent findings of its initial research program, which failed to establish any clear-cut linear relationship between diversity attributes and economic benefits ( Haas, 2010 ). While subsequent work has become more aware of the contextual nuances that moderate and mediate the effects of diversity ( van Knippenberg and Schippers, 2007 ; Joshi and Roh, 2007 , 2009 ), other approaches appear to have come full circle in terms of recognizing the importance of power and status processes for working groups ( van Dijk and Van Engen 2013 ; Ravlin and Thomas 2005 ; DiTomaso et al., 2007 ). As van Dijk et al. (2017) rightly emphasize, diversity research needs to take into account that

members of different social groups are likely to be perceived and approached differently because of their membership in a given social category […] and, in part as a consequence, may behave differently (p. 518).

Diversity and Discrimination — Common Ground

Thus, as these recent developments suggest, discrimination and diversity research are becoming more closely aligned. This is especially apparent from the combination of the underlying psychological models in work groups and their organizational context factors. As we argue, social categorization models need to be combined with status-/power-based approaches (e.g., AA and equal opportunities) to work group diversity, prevent discriminating behaviors and enable organizations to take full advantage of their diverse human resources. Studies of discrimination and diversity appear in this sense as two sides of the same coin, suggesting that measures leading to a reduction of discrimination not only reduce adverse effects at the individual level but also hold the potential to create more productive and effective work environments.

Approaches to Studying Discrimination and Diversity

Levels of analysis.

While research on diversity primarily operates at the level of teams and small- to medium-sized work groups ( Roberson, 2019 ; van Knippenberg and Schippers, 2007 ), research on discrimination can target the micro-, meso- and macro-level of society or a combination of these levels of analysis. At the macro-level, the magnitude and persistence of discrimination has been well documented in relation to race and gender in employment, housing, credit markets, schooling and consumer markets ( Pager and Shepherd, 2008 ). For example, concerning housing and credit markets, Pager and Shepherd (2008) summarize that “blacks and Hispanics face higher rejection rates and less favorable terms in securing mortgages than do whites” (p. 189). Although differential treatment varies across countries and even cities, discrimination remains pervasive and an important barrier to residential opportunities. Gender-based discrimination in the labor market – to use a second macro-level example – is just as widespread and structural as race-based inequalities. The wage gap between women and men remains at an estimated 16 percent globally ( International Labour Office, 2018 ). In the EU-28, women in Research & Development earn on average 17 percent less than their male colleagues (European Commission, 2019). Together with the horizontal segregation of women and men in certain labor market segments and vertical segregation restricting women from access to decision-making positions, these macro-level forms of discrimination constitute defining structural fault lines of contemporary labor markets.

While macro-level accounts usually produce evidence regarding the extent of structural disadvantages between social groups, meso- and micro-level accounts have advanced explanatory models of why discrimination occurs at all. The crucial influence of the organizational climate on discrimination constitutes a well-known example at the meso level. Thus, it has been shown that the organizational climate is the single-most important driving factor for sexual harassment to occur (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Willness, Steel, and Lee, 2007 ). On the other hand, micro-level accounts build upon psychology and social psychology to expose the individual-level dimensions of discrimination. Different psychological models exist concerning how prejudice and stereotypes are linked to discriminating actions, such as when implicit attitudes shape the behavior toward others defined by their social group identity ( Greenwald and Krieger, 2006 ). The contributions of this edited collection in their entirety cover the macro-, meso- and micro-level.

Discrimination and Diversity through a National and Organizational Lens

While considerable advances have been achieved to untangle the hidden dynamics of discrimination in organizations, the collection of research articles presented here makes two specific contributions to the existing literature. First, they contribute research on aggregated and individual identity-related experiences of workplace misconduct at the research workplace. The contributions focus on different socio-demographic groups of people and consider research organizations that operate in different national contexts. The contributions reflect the influence of the systemic framework of academia.

Second, the relationship between diversity and discrimination in the context of the academic workplace is especially interesting in relation to one of the most decisive transformations of the academic environment over recent decades, namely the simultaneous intensification of work and diminishing resources/funding. The introduction of a new managerialism and regimes of accountability has obliged academics to do more with fewer resources and less time. As incipient research shows, the effects in terms of discrimination are particularly felt by minorities and those collectives that are already in more precarious and disadvantaged situations. Although research on the “neoliberal university” is abundant, there is a clear lack of more focused approaches to understand its implications for discrimination as well as diversity in work teams.

The contributions gathered in this edited collection are all situated in different national and organizational contexts, from the USA, France, Germany and Nigeria to Vietnam, and the conditions of academic workplaces in non-university and university contexts as well as public or private research organizations at different hierarchical levels and in different disciplines are examined. These national and organizational contextual conditions must be taken into account when considering the transferability of the results to other contexts, as explained below.

The Relevance of National Context

Discrimination is a persistent phenomenon throughout time, but levels of discrimination considerably differ across countries. As Quillian et al. (2019) show in their meta-analysis of job application field experiments, the strength of racial discrimination can considerably vary across the nine countries included in their study. White job applicants receive up to 65–100 percent more callbacks in France and Sweden than non-white minorities. Discrimination of job applications is weaker in Germany, the United States and Norway, where they receive on average 20–40 percent fewer callbacks. Similar findings are available from the large GEMM study carried out in several EU countries, particularly focusing on hiring discrimination based on ethnic background. Discrimination ratios were the highest in Britain – where ethnic minorities need to send out 54 percent more applications to achieve the same callback rate as the majority group – and the lowest in Germany, where minority applicants need to send out 15 percent more applications ( Lancee, 2021 ; Di Stasio and Lancee, 2020 ). Examining religion, the study also finds that in the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, Muslims are “more than 10 percentage points less likely than majority members to receive a callback” ( Di Stasio et al., 2021 , p. 1316).

Comparative studies examining the effects of perceived discrimination equally attest to country-level differences concerning both gender and race. As Triana et al. (2019) show, differences in outcomes in terms of the psychological and physical health of gender discrimination at work can be linked back to differences in national labor policies and gender-egalitarian cultural practices between countries. To the degree that institutional frameworks such as labor market policies, legal regulations or cultural norms differ between countries, levels of discrimination will vary accordingly. Along the same lines, Quillian et al. (2019) see the comparatively high levels of hiring discrimination in France and Sweden as resulting from unconstrained employers’ discretion that is neither monitored nor held in check by discrimination lawsuits such as in the US.

The role of national context factors for diversity are equally not fully understood. Although Joshi and Roh (2007) highlight national culture as one “distal omnibus” element affecting diversity outcomes, results are not particularly abundant. Early insights suggest that important dimensions of teamwork such as hierarchical versus more horizontal peer-based control structures vary across cultures and can invert the outcomes of diversity. Thus, van der Vegt, Van de Vliert, and Huang (2005) show that in cultures where power is more centralized, tenure and functional diversity are negatively associated with innovative climates, whereas in low power distance cultures diversity is positively associated with innovative climates.

As the GLOBE study across 62 societies has amply documented, cultural differences not only exist in terms of “power distance” but also regarding other important features affecting diversity climate in work groups such as risk avoidance, performance orientation, gender egalitarianism, or levels of collectivist versus more individualized values ( House et al., 2004 ). For certain areas of diversity research such as the under-representation of women on corporate boards, cultural differences in terms of gender egalitarianism and/or traditional gender roles have been shown to play a decisive role ( Lewellyn and Muller-Kahle, 2020 ). However, since the primary interest of diversity research lies at the work group level, explorations of macro-scale patterns that are so common for discrimination research are rare. Instead, national differences are frequently operationalized in terms of the diversity of cultural values that individual team members bring to the work group ( Bodla et al., 2018 ).

An important additional perspective for understanding the national context of discrimination concerns a situational perspective. Apart from institutional differences in terms of labor market legislation between countries, discrimination has also been linked to historical legacies of oppression such as slavery. Apart from historical legacies, situational accounts frequently also explain discrimination with reference to current economic and demographic conditions or political events ( Quillian and Midtbøen, 2021 ). Right-wing politics stigmatizing certain ethnic or religious groups – for example in relation to terrorist attacks – can fuel discrimination. In situations of crisis such as the recent Covid-19 outbreak, discrimination can be aggravated. As reported by Pew Research Center (2020) , 40 percent of black and Asian Americans indicate an increase in discriminating behavior toward them by others since the start of the pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic has also clearly shown that under conditions of stress or crisis, minorities and marginalized groups will be even further disadvantaged compared to majority social groups ( Kantamneni, 2020 ). However, while the effects of a public health crisis on discrimination have been extensively explored, this is not necessarily true for the effects of economic crises or recessions. Among the few studies directly examining the link between worsening economic conditions and discrimination, Kingston, McGinnity, and O’Connell (2015) show that non-Irish nationals experienced higher rates of work-based discrimination during the recession in 2010 compared to time of economic growth in 2004. Implicitly, there seems to be an understanding that “under conditions of threat (e.g., recessions, downsizing)” or insecurity, organizations and individuals fall back into “a limited set of well-learned and habituated behavioral scripts” ( Gelfand et al., 2005 , p. 93) to the disadvantage of already-marginalized and excluded social groups.

Overall, it remains unclear how these wider economic situational factors play out in terms of discrimination experiences and possibilities of fostering diverse teams. This holds especially in relation to the transformation of academic life in general. Driven by wider transformations and restructuring of the post-war European welfare states, academic work has experienced dramatic shifts over recent decades. Scientific autonomy has increasingly been replaced with an orientation toward performance measures, a focus on excellence and competition, entrepreneurship, or the emphasis on cost efficiency ( Herschberg and Benschop, 2019 ). How these recent developments play out in terms of discrimination experiences within academic organizations remains to be more fully understood. The work conducted here at the meso and micro level provides promising avenues for discrimination research. As we will argue in the next section, organizational culture and climate are not only influenced by wider national settings but they also modulate and refract some of these broader national trends with important implications for reducing discrimination and fostering team effectiveness. As the organizational level is the primary work environment in which people interact, it is one of the most important arenas to control and diminish discrimination.

The Relevance of the Organization

Organizational factors play an important role for discrimination rates and experiences in work settings. Organizational policies have also been identified as a crucial element for taking advantage of diversity. Formal and informal structures, organizational culture and climate, leadership or human resources, or workplace composition may all contribute to or attenuate discrimination ( Gelfand et al., 2005 ). For example, transparent and formal evaluation criteria at the organizational level – for promotion or recruitment – can reduce discrimination as decision-making is accountable to objective criteria. Similar, holding managers socially accountable for performance ratings is one of three promising and effective strategies in terms of increasing workforce diversity and diminishing discrimination in companies ( Dobbin and Kalev, 2016 ). In addition to encouraging social accountability, two further factors mentioned by Dobbin and Kalev (2016) to reduce discrimination effectively concern the engagement of managers in solving problems and the increase of contact among people from different groups. Both factors can be decisively steered through organizational policies.

Organizational climate – to mention another important organization-level factor – is a key driver of harassment ( Pryor, Giedd, and Williams, 1995 ). Incidents of sexual and other harassment are more likely to occur in working environments where harassment is “tolerated” by a leadership that fails to act on complaints, does not sanction perpetrators or protect complainants from retaliation (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018). This is especially true in settings where men are overrepresented among staff and at the leadership level. For example, a recent study on sexual harassment of undergraduate female physicists in the US – with women being under-represented in physics – revealed that three-quarters of respondents had experienced at least one type of sexual harassment ( Aycock et al., 2019 ). Organizational-level factors such as the overall gender ratios or the wider work climate are therefore considered key elements that can inhibit or encourage discrimination.

Examining organizational context factors of discrimination more broadly, most evidence from the US is largely based upon plaintiff accounts of discrimination lawsuits. Thus, Hirsh and colleagues ( Hirsh, 2014 ; Hirsh and Kornrich, 2008 ) show – for example – how several factors such as the previous vulnerable economic or social status, the workplace culture and the workplace composition affect the perception of discrimination by employees. Similar, Bobbitt-Zeher (2011) exposes how organizational practices and policies combine with workplace composition and gender stereotyping to produce workplace gender discrimination in quite predictable ways. As mentioned, gendered norms of behavior, dress code, or sexualized talk in often male-dominated management and leadership positions create an organizational culture in which discrimination can flourish.

Among the few studies to explore the organizational context via an extensive survey is Stainback, Ratliff, and Roscigno (2011) whose study is based upon a sample of 2,555 respondents to the US National Study of the Changing Workforce in 2002. Corroborating the insights of Hirsh (2014) , and Bobbitt-Zeher (2011) , the results show that the experience of discrimination is reduced for both genders when they are part of the numerical majority in their organization and where a supportive workplace culture is in place. In their survey among 176 employees in the United States, Kartolo and Kwantes (2019) show that behavioral norms related to organizational culture modulates perceived discrimination.

While the majority of research on discrimination operates with a concept of behavior that disadvantages or harms people, diversity research foregrounds measures that foster a climate for inclusion to take full advantage of diverse assets within work groups. Indeed, promoting an organizational climate for inclusion is not only beneficial at the individual level (e.g., higher job satisfaction, better physical and psychological health) but also improves group-level outcomes such as overall team or organizational performance. As Brooke and Tyler (2011) succinctly state,

[…] by creating an environment in which all employees know they are valued and feel safe from discrimination, every employee can feel comfortable as a valued member of the organization (pp. 745–746).

Along these lines, research from Google regarding the perfect team has underlined previous insights from small group research on the importance of psychological safety for diverse teams ( Duhigg, 2016 ; Edmondson and Lei, 2014 ). Risk-taking and making errors – elements that are crucial for innovation – are only possible to the degree that employees feel safe in their team and the wider work environment. Thus, Reinwald, Huettermann, and Bruch (2019) argue – based on a sample of 82 German companies – that diversity climate has positive effects for firm performance, especially where there is a relatively high convergence among employees in their climate perceptions. Similar findings are available from research on military working groups, showing that diversity climate is consistently and positively related to work group performance and that this relationship is mediated by discrimination ( Boehm et al., 2014 ). Already in earlier work, Nishii (2012) has argued for the benefits of a “climate for inclusion” that reduces interpersonal bias and diversity conflict (see also Richard, 2000 ).

While research has established the importance of organizational climate and culture for discrimination and diversity, it is somewhat surprising that one of the major transformations over the recent decades within academic organizations has received relatively scant attention. None of the aforementioned studies thus far takes into account how academic organizations at large are affected by or confronted with decreasing public funding while having to grope with a heightened sense of accountability. The introduction of New Public Management principles aiming to reduce and streamline a supposedly oversized and inefficient public sector has certainly affected public universities and research institutions over recent decades ( Hood, 1991 ; Newman, 2005 ). A new managerialism tied to the introduction of Total Quality Management principles ( Aspinwall and Owlia, 1997 ) – for example – as well as a marketization of the public sector have undermined the autonomy and independence of the academy and provoked considerable resistance among scholars. However, although the discriminatory effects of the so-called neoliberal working conditions in academic contexts is a burgeoning field of research ( Pereira, 2016 ; Berg, Huijbens, and Larsen, 2016 ; Heath and Burdon, 2013 ; Craig, Amernic, and Tourish, 2014 ), there is clearly a dearth of studies addressing how the wider organizational culture associated with competitiveness, performance demands, or audit culture affects the perception of discrimination. As some studies suggest, especially vulnerable minorities are likely to be disproportionately affected by these more demanding, neoliberal work environments ( Anderson, Gatwiri, and Townsend-Cross, 2019 ; Cech and Rothwell, 2020 ).

Risk Factors of Discrimination in Research Organizations

From the perspective of a researcher in the European Union, it should be noted that there is hardly any other sector in which such highly-qualified personnel work under comparably insecure working conditions as in academia. As editors of this collection, we do not believe that scientific and non-scientific employees in research organizations experience discrimination or workplace misconduct more frequently than in other sectors (for a discussion for sector differences in bullying, see Keashly, 2021 ). However, depending on the contextual conditions of the academic sector, very specific patterns of structural discrimination emerge.

From a governance perspective, discrimination can take place especially in situations where effective structures are lacking that may constrain decision-makers to minimize the influence of bias on their decisions ( Williams, 2017 ). This refers to accountability structures as well as checks and balances in decision-making processes and procedures that aim to reduce or dissolve one-sided dependencies between the individual actors in the research system (e.g., staff councils, PhD schools, supervisory committees, equal opportunities officers, representatives for the severely disabled, transparent and binding promotion criteria, etc.). Where such structures are lacking, a high degree of variance in working cultures and leadership styles in the individual teams is possible, with both positive and negative consequences.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) – a US federal agency tasked with ensuring the implementation of the applicable anti-discrimination legislation in the labor market – has formulated concrete organizational risk factors for workplace harassment, which can also be applied to research organizations and academia ( Feldblum and Lipnic, 2016 ). With their understanding of the term harassment, the authors focus on intentional forms of discrimination, as opposed to unreflective discrimination due to cognitive bias or institutionalized structures (such as not counting care periods in the evaluation of performance). In our view, the risk factors named in Table 1 and explained by indicators and anecdotal examples from academia can also be largely applied to systemic discrimination. Table 1 can thus be understood as the summary of the above elaborations on the importance of national and organizational contextual factors.

Chart of Risk Factors for Harassment and Responsive Strategies (for an extended version, see US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2021).

The anecdotal examples in Table 1 convey the notion that it seems inappropriate to place academia under the general suspicion that experiences of discrimination and discriminatory behavior as well as the negation of diversity are more widespread here than in other workplaces. The heterogeneity of the workforce and the prevailing workforce norms vary between different national, regional, and disciplinary contexts. Furthermore, a vertical and horizontal gender segregation as well as a status- and organization-politically elevated position of leadership personnel are not peculiarities of research organizations. However, discrimination processes in academia can be framed in particular by the following distinct characteristics of the research and higher education system:

the “customer service” provided by scientific staff – that is, teaching students – can certainly be considered an important additional stress factor, which is only present in comparable form in other teaching professions;

the important role of international mobility for scientific career development, which is explicitly promoted by national and supranational organizations such as the EU and structurally reflected in cultural and linguistic differences in the workforce;

the shared governance principle of academia (Keashly, 2021), within which the faculty makes the crucial decisions on research strategy and personnel policy. Other staff have a subordinate role. Within shared governance, other university groups are often represented alongside the faculty, and decision-making power is distributed pyramid-like according to seniority: while all of the voices of the few chair holders as “high-value employees” are often heard, early career researchers, non-tenured researchers, administrative staff and the many students are often not represented or they are only represented by a few representatives.

The principle of senior shared governance or “peer principle” is based on a collegial appreciation of the peer’s respective sphere of influence on constructiveness and cooperativeness. For academic leadership staff, shared governance is essentially a peer evaluation system in which each participant is just as powerful as any other. In cases of conflict, this system of mutual tolerance can reach its limits ( Keashly, 2021 ); for example, when the prevailing structures in the academic workplace are questioned, or when a colleague should be confronted due to a biased decision or their misconduct toward groups of people who are not involved in senior shared governance.

In order to make HR processes more professional and rational, the professionalized and clearly more sovereign university administrations in relation to the faculty ( Gerber, 2014 ) today have a variety of different tools at their disposal. As van den Brink and Benschop (2012) argue, these tools like promotion guidelines, gender equality plans, trainings, or participatory decision-making too rarely aim at structural change and take little account of disciplinary specificities (e.g., the pool of female talent strongly differs between computer science and medicine). In particular, the authors highlight that practices aimed at reducing discrimination are closely intertwined with the contextual conditions that gave rise to the discrimination to be combated in the first place. For example, the gender equality officer’s say and the rules set for the appointment of a new chair are sometimes undermined by the preferences and informal power resources of the academic management, whereby ultimately the candidate who had been preferred by the institute’s management from the beginning prevails in most cases. Accountability structures for strengthening diversity usually lack the binding force and sanctioning power to have an immediate effect (ibidem).

At the European level, we observe a growing awareness of the lack of effectiveness of the current gender equality policies and measures in academia, accompanied by the will to strengthen its effectiveness. A particular expression of this attitude is that since 2021 gender equality plans have been declared a mandatory requirement to apply for project funding within the framework of the most important European research framework program, “Horizon European” (European Commission, 2020). Furthermore, within the framework of its Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025, the European Commission attaches importance to an intersectional approach in which discrimination is not restricted to gender but is thought of comprehensively.

Overview of Chapters

The peer principle as an element of research governance essentially ensures the scientific quality of research. Who else should evaluate the excellence of a research project, research design and researcher, if not their peers? However, as explained above, the peer principle does not guarantee modern and bias-free personnel management as required by a number of state equal opportunity acts.

It is research policy and administrative as well as scientific research managers who are decisively entrusted with the standardization and quality assurance of personnel management in the research system and who thus make an essential contribution to ensuring optimal working conditions for academic mid-level and non-scientific staff as well as equal opportunities when filling professorships. With the studies collected in this anthology, we hope to contribute to the informed action of these central actors in research policy to enable researchers and research teams to operate in optimal conditions. The articles can be roughly divided into two categories according to the guiding questions of this edited collection: macro studies surveying the extent of discrimination and harassment in research organizations and micro studies exploring the influence of the specific cultural contextual conditions of the academic workplace on experiences of discrimination and harassment related to the diversity of the workforce.

About the Extent of Discrimination in Research Organizations

Striebing’s “Max Planck studies” belong to the first category of macro analyses. These are three contributions that resulted from a research project commissioned and funded by the Max Planck Society in Germany on the work culture in its institutes and facilities and in particular on the experiences of bullying and sexual discrimination. The project was carried out in 2018 and 2019 and included a series of qualitative interviews and a full survey of the more than 23,600 scientific and non-scientific employees of the Max Planck Society, which is one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive institutions for basic research.

In his first contribution, Striebing explains how the evaluation of the group climate and the leader varies according to the socio-demographic characteristics gender, nationality and responsibility for childcare of the Max Planck researchers. He examines the intersectionality, in terms of interaction effects, of these characteristics, and also considers the context of the respondents’ hierarchical position. Striebing proceeds in a similar way in his second contribution. In addition to the researchers, the non-scientific employees of the Max Planck Society are also examined. The question is pursued concerning how the socio-demographic characteristics of the employees as well as the contextual conditions of hierarchical position, scientific discipline and administrative area affect the extent of bullying experiences. In the third contribution, Striebing examines whether men and women in the academic workplace have a different understanding of bullying and sexual harassment and discrimination. The contribution explores patterns of gender-related differences in the self-reporting of acts of workplace misconduct and self-labeling as having been bullied or experienced sexual discrimination and/or harassment.

Pantelmann and Wälty offer a comprehensive insight into the prevalence of sexual harassment among students. They present data from a survey conducted at a German university and critically reflect the role of the university and the work culture in academia in preventing and managing experiences of sexual harassment on campus. The results presented by the authors come from the “Perspectives and Discourses on Sexual Harassment in International Higher Education Contexts” project in which eight research teams from very different international higher education contexts cooperated.

Sheridan, Dimond, Klumpyan, Daniels, Bernard-Donals, Kutz, and Wendt also conducted a so-called campus study, examining the prevalence of hostile and intimidating behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US and its variance by gender among persons of color, LGBTQ persons and persons with disability at two different measurement points. More importantly, in their article the authors describe the policy package enacted by the university for prevention and conflict resolution and discuss its effectiveness using their longitudinal data as well as survey data from training interventions. The authors thus present a very rare evaluation study in the context of discrimination, which is highly relevant for theory and practice alike.

Nguyen, Tran, and Tran contribute a systemic macro analysis of a lower-investment research and innovation system and a different culture. They analyze data from 756 researchers in the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, examining differences in the scientific achievements of male and female researchers and investigating the factors influencing them.

Cultural Context Conditions of Academia for Diversity and Discrimination

The discourse in research organizations has a particular influence on how diverse teams and cases of discrimination are dealt with, that is, what is said, how it is said and what can be said. This discourse is the result of the respective organizational and team culture and it decisively determines which experiences are perceived and recognized as discrimination in the organization.

In an experimental survey study, Kmec, O’Connor, and Hoffman presented a representative sample of the US population with a vignette describing an incident of sexual harassment between a department director and one of his team members, asking respondents to rate whether it was inappropriate behavior, sexual harassment, or neither. The authors are interested in the question of whether the respondents’ value orientations – in terms of gender essentialism, gender egalitarianism and their belief in meritocracy – significantly influence sensitivity to the perception of sexual harassment.

Of the papers in this edited collection, Vandevelde-Rougale and Guerrero Morales most directly address the implications of the extension of managerialism and New Public Management to discrimination in research organizations. The authors examine managerial discourse, by which they mean a utilitarian, cost-benefit-oriented way of interpreting and organizing the affairs and processes of research teams. Through multiple case studies from Ireland and Chile, they explore what the focus on the pragmatic exploitation of diversity brings to bear on individuals who experience workplace bullying and discrimination, as well as what the managerial approach to conflict solutions can contribute to ensuring a safe and discrimination-free work culture.

The third discourse-related study in this edited collection is provided by Steuer-Dankert, who deals with diversity belief in a complex research organization. Diversity belief is understood as a working group’s belief in its own diversity and the positive benefits of diversity. Steuer-Dankert not only contributes the most comprehensive reflection on diversity management in research organizations among the contributions of this collection, but she also provides answers to another interesting aspect. Previous studies often examine diversity and discrimination in teams under the assumption of a relative constancy of team structures and members, but in a modern innovation system research often takes place in project-wise institutionalized and theme-oriented network structures such as the German Cluster of Excellence examined by Steuer-Dankert. The temporary network forms a further governance level horizontal to the classic university organization and features independent team interactions and ultimately also a specific organizational culture.

While the aforementioned studies describe individual specific aspects of the organizational culture of research organizations, Gewinner reconstructs the experiences of discrimination of a specific group of people based on biographical interviews. Using Russian-speaking female scholars in Germany, she develops a comprehensive and intersectional theory on the vulnerability of foreign researchers to experiences of discrimination and workplace misconduct.

Since a major aim of this edited collection is not only to understand and describe discrimination in research organizations but also to make a small contribution to reducing discrimination, we conclude by formulating a number of implications for practice. In the concluding chapter, we set out several basic features and requirements for an effective system for preventing and managing discrimination in research organizations and summarize what we consider to be the main lessons learned from this edited collection in a simple catalogue of options for action.

About Our Intersectional Approach

The intersectionality approach assumes that an individual belongs to “multiple categories of difference” defined by socially-constructed categories such as gender, age, or ethnicity that result in a specific set of opportunities and oppressions for each individual stemming from their “blended social identity” (Dennissen et al., 2020; Silva, 2020; Ghavami et al., 2016 ; Crenshaw, 1991). These intersections of identity and discrimination result in individual experiences of discrimination based on different group memberships. Accordingly, the concrete discrimination experiences of black women – for example – differ from those of black men and white women. An intersectional approach considers the addition of experiences of discrimination, but furthermore also considers interaction effects (Bowleg, 2008). As a result of the intersectional analysis, it may emerge – for example – that black women experience discrimination less frequently than black men or white women, although they experience discrimination due to their status as women and black people. The task of intersectional research is to identify the structural and situational dynamics of discrimination processes and their specific contextual conditions.

The contributions of the edited collection and their framing explicitly follow an intersectional approach. This means that the single contributions not only discuss differences between persons of different genders but also pursue taking into account intersections between identity categories (and the different systems of oppressions represented by them) in the analysis. We apply a broad understanding of intersectionality. Which categorizations are ultimately taken up in the contributions to the edited collection was open and depended on the authors’ research foci and available data. In principle, it is possible to analyze the manifold interactions of gender with racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, sexual orientation and other categorizations, which can form the starting point for systemic discrimination.

Nevertheless, an intersectional analysis in the strict sense was not always possible. Especially in quantitative studies, large numbers of cases are necessary to make statements with high statistical power and thus not only identify very strong statistical effects. In cases with low statistical power, it was not the interactions of, for example, gender and age that were analyzed, but rather the simple effects of gender and age. In addition, several authors of the edited collection adopt an intersectional perspective when discussing the generalizability of their results. For example, Kmec et al. (in this collection) discuss whether a connection between merit thinking and sexual discrimination could also be proven if the discrimination was not positioned in a heterosexual setting between an old white supervisor and a young white female researcher.

Funding Note

The present contribution is not related to externally funded research.

The text of Article 179 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (2012) paraphrased here is: “The Union shall have the objective of strengthening its scientific and technological bases by achieving a European research area in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely, […].”

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May 19, 2014

Favoritism, not hostility, causes most discrimination, says UW psychology professor

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Most discrimination in the U.S. is not caused by intention to harm people different from us, but by ordinary favoritism directed at helping people similar to us, according to a theoretical review published online in American Psychologist.

“We can produce discrimination without having any intent to discriminate or any dislike for those who end up being disadvantaged by our behavior,” said University of Washington psychologist Tony Greenwald , who co-authored the review with Thomas Pettigrew of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Greenwald and Pettigrew reviewed experiments and survey methods from published scientific research on discrimination from the last five decades. They were surprised to find that the discrimination observed in those studies occurred much more often as helping rather than harming someone. But they also found that most researchers defined discrimination as based on negative attitudes and hostility, only rarely treating favoritism as a component of discrimination.

That makes sense, Greenwald said, because most people think of discrimination as the result of hostility: a white person spouting anti-black rhetoric, or a homophobe yelling slurs at a gay couple. But, he argues, it’s more subtle acts, ones people don’t even recognize as causing disadvantage to anyone, that are likely to be much more significant.

Take this hypothetical scenario: When conducting reviews of two employees, a manager finds they both fall between two performance categories. The manager gives a higher category to the employee whose child is friends with the manager’s child, leading to a promotion and salary raise, while the other employee receives a smaller raise and no promotion.

Was the manager consciously discriminating against the second employee? Or did she simply give a boost to someone to whom she had an “ingroup” connection?

“Your ‘ingroup’ involves people that you feel comfortable with, people you identify with,” Greenwald explained. “We usually think first of demographic characteristics like age, race, sex, religion and ethnicity as establishing an ingroup, but there are also ingroups based on occupation, neighborhood and schools attended, among other things. Outgroups are those with whom you don’t identify.”

Greenwald and Pettigrew propose that unequal treatment in the form of doing favors for those like you, rather than inflicting harm on those unlike you, causes the majority of discrimination in the U.S.

“This is not to say that prejudice and hostility are not related to outgroup discrimination,” Pettigrew said. “But they are not as central to most discrimination as ingroup favoritism.”

Yet, historically, social scientists have emphasized prejudicial hostility as the root of discrimination.

“We looked at how prejudice has been defined in the history of psychology. It has generally been understood as hostility toward outgroups. That’s easy to do, because inter-group conflict is an obvious fact of life,” Greenwald said. “There are international conflicts, wars, gang battles, labor-management conflicts. When such conflicts are going on it’s natural to think of them as rooted in hostility.”

Greenwald hopes researchers will change how they study discrimination, because research results have substantial implications both for how discrimination is identified and how it can be ameliorated in employment, health care, education and daily life.

He said overt acts of discrimination began to decline starting in the 1960s following civil rights laws. But prejudicial attitudes didn’t necessarily change. What changed is that people were no longer legally allowed to act on their prejudices by, for example, denying housing to blacks or jobs to women.

The co-authors say that racial ingroup favoritism can be very subtle. For instance, if you work in an office that is mostly white and you’re asked to recommend someone for a job opening, you’re more likely to recommend someone who is like you and the rest of your ingroup.

This sort of ingroup favoritism happens at all ages and in different situations. Greenwald said it can happen on the playground, where children may exhibit ingroup favoritism based on race, economic class, or the same school or sports team.

“Hostility isn’t integral to the definition of discrimination; you can treat people differently without being hostile to anyone,” Greenwald said. “But it is societally important to understand how discrimination can occur both without hostility and without any intent to discriminate.”

For more information, contact Greenwald at [email protected] or 206-543-7227, or Pettigrew at [email protected] or 831-425-4777.

Note to media: For a PDF of the American Psychologist article, please contact Doree Armstrong, UW News Office, at [email protected] or 206-543-2580.

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Bias against research on gender bias

Aleksandra cislak.

1 Psychology Department, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland

Magdalena Formanowicz

2 Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012 Bern, Switzerland

Tamar Saguy

3 Psychology Department, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Herzliya, Israel

The bias against women in academia is a documented phenomenon that has had detrimental consequences, not only for women, but also for the quality of science. First, gender bias in academia affects female scientists, resulting in their underrepresentation in academic institutions, particularly in higher ranks. The second type of gender bias in science relates to some findings applying only to male participants, which produces biased knowledge. Here, we identify a third potentially powerful source of gender bias in academia: the bias against research on gender bias. In a bibliometric investigation covering a broad range of social sciences, we analyzed published articles on gender bias and race bias and established that articles on gender bias are funded less often and published in journals with a lower Impact Factor than articles on comparable instances of social discrimination. This result suggests the possibility of an underappreciation of the phenomenon of gender bias and related research within the academic community. Addressing this meta-bias is crucial for the further examination of gender inequality, which severely affects many women across the world.

Introduction

Science it would seem is not sexless; she is a man, a father and infected too. (Woolf 1938 /2015, p. 212)

Since Virginia Woolf made this statement, many changes have transpired. Gender bias in academia and science has been acknowledged (European Commission 2016a ; Francisco 2007 ; Ritz et al. 2014 ), and intense measures have been taken to overcome it (for example, the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program aiming to increase the number of female scientists in academic STEM careers). However, despite the gender equality policies implemented in academia and society, the chances of women achieving professorships have hardly improved over the past 20 years (Danell and Hjerm 2013 ). Not surprisingly, women continue to be underrepresented in academic institutions, especially in higher ranks and decision-making bodies (European Commission 2016b ) and in editorial boards (Cho et al. 2014 ). Women are also paid less than men (Shen 2013 ), and their research is less likely to receive funding (Ley and Hamilton 2008 ). Importantly, these differences cannot be attributed to levels of commitment or achievement (Wennerås and Wold 1997 ). In a study comparing promotion patterns, it was established that despite the similar productivity of men and women at the level of associated professor, men were still more likely to get promoted to full professorships (Carter et al. 2017 ). As such, it is likely that the gender gap in academia is due to the perceived lack of fit between scientific roles and being a woman (Eagly 1987 ; Smyth and Nosek 2015 ). Accordingly, it is ten times more common for female authors to be incorrectly cited as males than for male researchers to be misattributed as female (Krawczyk 2017 ). Similarly, studies have shown that when all other factors were held constant, women were less likely to be hired than men for the role of lab manager (Moss-Racusin et al. 2012 ) and that their research was devalued (Larivière et al. 2013 ).

Another type of gender bias in science relates to scientific investigations. As scientific inquiries often disregard the moderating roles of sex or gender, some findings apply mostly to male participants, producing biased knowledge. This can be detrimental, as findings pertinent to men may be irrelevant and, in the worst cases, harmful for women. For example, women’s underrepresentation as subjects in medical research may have grave consequences for women’s health (Correa-de-Araujo 2006 ).

In this research we focus on yet another type of gender bias in science, one that pertains to the very topics of scientific inquires. Particularly, we investigated a bias that is directed toward scientific efforts devoted to exposing and probing the phenomena of gender bias. We aim to verify whether gender bias as a topic of scientific investigation may be a subject of a biased evaluation resulting in fewer and less prestigious publications and fewer funding opportunities. Recent evidence suggests that men, relative to women, judge studies on gender discrimination less favorably (Handley et al. 2015 ). We here extend this evidence in important ways. First, by employing a bibliometric analysis we focus on outcomes that go beyond self-report ratings of valence to reflect consequential outcomes as they naturally occur in the field. Second, we consider the real-life scientific evaluations of research on gender bias in comparison to the analogous evaluations of research on an equivalent instance of social bias (for the two other biases toward female scientists and participants, the point of comparison was their male counterparts). Here, research on race bias constitutes a suitable point of reference. First, both race and gender are the most salient social categories and are both categorized in the early stages of information processing (Ito and Urland 2003 ). Related to this, discrimination based on these two categories forms the most recognizable and identifiable cases of social injustice, and, most likely for that reason, they are both named first in international documents referring to human rights. Finally, these two biases are investigated within the same disciplines, with researchers being trained in the same principles and methods and, by consequence, targeting similar choices for grant and publication outlets. Moreover, as men and women undertake similar research topics within psychology (König et al. 2015 ), it is likely that the gender composition of the team dealing with each topic is balanced.

Considering that no discrimination is less or more important than any other form of discrimination and that both biases are investigated with the same methodology, the bias against the examination of gender bias shall have no objective reason. One potential argument against studying gender discrimination could be bias-driven itself, stereotyping gender topics as “feminine,” and, as such, less valuable (Williams et al. 2010 ) and perceived as relatively incompetent and unscientific (Crawley 2014 ; Eagly 1987 ; Nosek et al. 2009 ). As competence is especially important for the evaluation of scientific merit (Madera et al. 2009 ), women-oriented research can seem less persuasive.

Another possible reason for disregarding gender over race in social science could be related to the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman 1974 ). When looking at the conference halls or the departmental staff of many universities (not taking rank into account), at least half of the crowd are women (National Science Foundation 2015 ). Moreover, everybody can provide an example of a woman who has succeeded in her career or an example of real or perceived gender equality from their own house, neighborhood, or office. With this anchor, it appears that gender equality has already been achieved, and this might be sufficient to refute the phenomenon of gender bias or, at least, limit its potential impact. Race bias, however, provides many fewer viable examples. In science and in politics, there are still large discrepancies between the numbers of black and white scholars (National Center for Education Statistics 2014 ; Hopkins et al. 2013 ), and inter-racial contacts are far less frequent than inter-gender ones (Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin 1999 ). Following the logic of the availability heuristic, this might lead to conclusions of stronger (or more real) discrimination.

Drawing on these ideas, we propose that studying gender bias may meet with lower appreciation within the scientific community in comparison to studying race bias. We predict that this manifests in relatively lower appreciation in peer-review outcomes, reflected in less grant funding and fewer publications in prestigious journals for research on gender bias. Our goal in the current research was to provide the first evidence for this hypothesis by means of a bibliometric analysis. We compared articles that refer to gender bias to articles published on racial bias in terms of two types of peer-review outcomes: their Impact Factor and having grant support.

Sample of articles

Using the EBSCO search engine, we retrieved all the peer-reviewed articles that used the keywords gender bias ; gender discrimination , gender prejudice and sexism versus race/racial bias ; race/racial discrimination , and race/racial prejudice and racism in their titles and that were listed in PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES databases covering 2534 journals. The timeframe of publication was set to 2008–2015. This timeframe choice was dictated by the availability of Impact Factor indexes through the library services accessible to the authors. Yet, this timeframe choice allowed the identification of more than half of all the articles that were ever published and matched the search criteria (prior to 2008, N  = 1445; in years 2008–2015, N  = 1485). As the shares of gender- and race-related issues were virtually the same in both periods of time (31.65% of articles published prior to 2008 and 31.71% of articles published between 2008 and 2015 referred to gender bias), we consider the chosen sample a representative sample of articles on race and gender bias/prejudice/discrimination. We identified 1485 articles published in 520 journals. Each article was assigned a numerical value based on the type of bias it referred to (race = 0; gender = 1). The full dataset with all the identified articles can be found in the Supplemental Online Materials ( https://osf.io/y9tfv/ ).

Duplicates that were not automatically removed were manually removed (43 duplicates and 5 reprints). Additionally, we removed articles loading in two categories (52 articles had both gender and race terms in their titles), 1 non-English article, 9 errata, and 1 retracted article and its retraction note. Abstracts were inspected, and 39 articles regarding instances of non-social discrimination or bias (such as articles regarding own-gender or own-race bias in facial discrimination) were excluded.

Moreover, given the focus of the investigation on research on gender bias, we included in the database empirical articles using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Articles were identified as empirical or not through the PsycINFO meta-information. On rare occasions in which the PsycINFO meta-information was missing, the two first authors listed for this paper reached a decision by consensus. In total 282 articles were identified as non-empirical, such as commentaries, interviews, letters, literature reviews (but not meta-analyses), editorials, and book reviews. Given that such articles do not report on original research, often follow a different review process, and are seldom the basis of a grant application, we did not include them in the final sample. The information for four articles was missing, so they were also not included in the final sample.

Impact factor and funding

We chose two peer-review criteria. The first was Impact Factor. Despite debates on whether Impact Factor values reflect the quality of science published in journals (Garfield 1996 ), it is still commonly recognized as reflecting the prestige of the journals, scientific impact, and broader public outreach (Perneger 2010 ). Each article was assigned a five-year Impact Factor value obtained for the respective journal from the Web of Science. In 185 cases, the Impact Factor indicators were unavailable for the year the selected articles were published. The five-year Impact Factor values ranged from .23 to 31.05 ( M  = 2.47; SD  = 2.14). The preliminary analyses showed that the distribution of the five-year Impact Factor values was strongly skewed, and we identified two outliers with z-scores equal to 13.38. These outliers were articles published in Science . As this journal clearly belonged to a different population of top journals (which are unusually highly cited and in which acceptance decisions are made using different criteria than in other general journals), these observations were excluded from the analysis. Both of the excluded papers referred to race bias. The second indicator of peer review was information on whether the selected article was supported by funding (0 = no; 1 = yes). This information was available from the PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES databases.

Journals and methods

We acknowledge that articles on gender/race bias might be sent not only to general interest journals but also to journals devoted to examining either gender or race inequalities. In general interest journals, articles on gender/race bias compete with all the other articles. Notably, research probing gender phenomena is published by journals with lower impact factors when it is explicitly labeled as “gender studies,” thus seemingly narrowing the scope of the article (Madison et al. 2016 ; see also Lundgren et al. 2015 ). In specialized journals, the publication of an article with merit that is aligned with a journal’s scope might be relatively easier. To control for that possibility, we included an additional coding that indicated whether the article was published in a general interest or specialized journal. One hundred fifteen papers on gender bias were published in 15 specialized journals dedicated to gender issues, such as Gender & Society , Sex Roles , or Psychology of Women Quarterly . One hundred fourteen papers on race bias were published in 25 specialized journals, of which 13 were dedicated to race issues, such as Ethnic and Racial Studies , Journal of Black Psychology , Journal of Black Studies , or Race and Social Problems , and 12 to gender issues, such as European Journal of Women’s Studies or Women’s Studies International Forum . The general summary of articles published on gender and race is presented in Table  1 .

Table 1

General descriptive statistics for articles on gender and race bias

Furthermore, for all the empirical papers, the methodologies employed in the studies either qualitative or quantitative were recorded. The latter classification was based on the possibility that research on gender bias might be done using qualitative methods due to a feminist tradition that questions the objectivity of quantitative methods (Eagly and Riger 2014 ). As most of the journals cited within the scope of this bibliometric analysis predominantly publish papers using quantitative methodology (Eagly and Riger 2014 ), and given that qualitative research may be less funded than quantitative research (Carey and Swanson 2003 ; Morse 1999 ), controlling for the method used in the studies is crucial in establishing whether or not bias against research on gender bias is an artifact of the type of methodology possibly preferred in gender bias research. The summary of the empirical articles published on gender and race for papers using either qualitative or quantitative methods is presented in Table  2 .

Table 2

Descriptive statistics for empirical articles on gender and race bias presented for papers employing either qualitative or quantitative methods

Authorships

In order to account for bias against female authors, we also considered the gender composition of the research teams. To that end, we first determined each author’s gender by the first name’s gender stereotypicality or through a web search of departmental or private webpages, pictures, or other on-line records. In the case of twelve articles we could not assign gender of the authors due to lack of sufficient records.

As the rules regarding the relationship between the order of authors’ names and their relative input vary across disciplines (in some disciplines, the norm is to arrange authors’ names in an alphabetical order; in other disciplines, the most prestigious authorship position can be first or last), we decided to use the authorship gender indicator that would not be directly affected by a discipline’s rules in our analysis. Following Naldi and Parenti ( 2002 ; see also Kretschmer et al. 2012 ), we computed the Contribution bibliometric indicator—the percentage of women in each author team.

In order to examine the existence of bias against gender bias as a scientific topic, we conducted a regression analysis with two indicators of peer review as dependent variables. As predictors, we used the type of bias studied and the percentage of women in the research teams. All the correlation coefficients are listed in Table  3 .

Table 3

Correlation coefficients for the variables used in the study

^ p  = .10; * p  < .05; ** p  < .01; *** p  < .001

It is important to note that the cases were non-independent because some papers were published by the same journals, and this implies similar editorial policies and contingent five-year Impact Factor values. Therefore, in the final analyses, conducted using the MPlus program (Muthén and Muthén 2012 ), we nested papers in journals to obtain a robust standard error estimation.

As illustrated in Fig.  1 , research on gender bias was funded less often ( B  = − .20; SE  = .09; p  = .02) and published in lower Impact Factor journals ( B  = − .67; SE  = .20; p  = .001). Importantly, including the percentage of females in the research teams as a covariate in the model showed that this percentage was not significantly related to financial support ( p  = .76) or to the prestige of the journal ( p  = .35). When those two nonsignificant parameters were constrained to 0, the final model fitted the data very well, χ 2 (2) = 1.81; p  = .40.

The tested model involving grant funding and Impact Factors as dependent variables and type of bias, percentage of female authors, and method as predictors. The first number represent an unstandardized coefficient, followed by its standard error. Dotted lines represent non-significant paths

In an additional analysis, we have added the type of journal (general versus specialized) as a covariate. Yet, the inclusion of a covariate did not affect the predicted results pattern. The type of bias remained a significant predictor of both funding and Impact Factor. When we used the gender of the first author instead of the percentage of female authors as a predictor, interestingly, papers with women as first authors had a higher likelihood of being funded ( B  = .19; SE  = .08; p  = .02). Yet, the pattern of the role of methodology and, more importantly, the topic of investigation remained unchallenged.

Articles on gender discrimination were funded less often and published in less prestigious journals than papers on racial discrimination. Considering that the percentage of women in the author pool had a virtually null effect on both grant acquisition and the Impact Factor, this effect cannot be explained in terms of the gender of the researchers. So, what are the possible causes of this effect? Although we controlled for the type of methods used in the studies in the analysis, we cannot rule out the possibility that the articles on gender bias were of a different quality than the articles on race bias. This is, however, unlikely for the following reasons. First, as mentioned before, both gender and race bias are investigated within the same fields using similar methods and paradigms. It is rather unlikely that researchers who deal with gender research are less experienced or were trained in worse schools than researchers on race bias. Even less likely is that they used flawed methodology on purpose. Moreover, all the analyzed articles passed peer-review screening, which is considered a quality watchdog within the scientific community. Finally, the Impact Factor index is not a measure of the quality of individual research articles. As indicated in the San Francisco Declaration of Assessment of Research, it shall not be used as such, nor to assess individual scientists’ contributions or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. The Impact Factor was introduced to help librarians make decisions about popular journals within the field (Garfield 1996 ). All of the above suggest that bias against research on gender bias is not merit based but a reflection of a topic’s lower prestige and appreciation due to a generalized gender bias (as outlined in the introduction).

Another potential alternative explanation for the observed differences in grant funding for racial and gender bias research is the relative difference in the availability of participant samples. Recruiting racially diverse samples may be more difficult, time-consuming, and costly, while recruiting gender-diverse samples may be less of a problem, thereby necessitating less funding for recruitment. Future research should probe whether researchers studying gender bias are less eager to apply for funding or the gender bias applications are less likely to be funded, mirroring the effect of a female grant authorship (Ley and Hamilton 2008 ). It seems less plausible, though, that the availability of participant samples may affect the teams’ decisions regarding the outlet for their work. Admittedly, the current bibliometric analysis does not allow for the determination of whether the research programs on gender bias are submitted to (and, as a consequence, also published by) less prestigious journals or are rejected by more prestigious journals. If the first explanation is correct, it either implies that researchers are aware of the existence of bias against gender bias research among academic community or that they consider their own work less suitable for more prestigious journals, thus perpetuating the existing arrangements. The second mechanism—the rejection by more prestigious journals—would be in line with previous research on the existence of subtle bias in the perceived quality of studies evidencing gender discrimination (Handley et al. 2015 ). Given that abstracts on gender bias research were evaluated less positively by male reviewers (Handley, et al. 2015 ), one possible explanation for the obtained result is that the research on gender bias is more often reviewed by male researchers than research on race bias. With the available dataset, we cannot rule out that possibility. However, considering that the pool of reviewers, due to common editorial strategies, is likely to be similar to the author pool (for gender research, comprising 66% women, and for race research, 56% women) this seems rather unlikely. Nevertheless, future research could examine whether the type of discrimination (gender versus race) is sent to reviewers of different genders and whether this relationship varies by the journal’s prestige.

Implications

The reported bias is a potentially powerful phenomenon because it might be invisible to the scientific community and, as such, overlooked (Blair et al. 2004 ; Carnes et al. 2012 ; Devine et al. 2017 ) and not taken care of (in contrast to the first and second types of bias mentioned in the introduction, for which corrective measures have been applied). By raising the awareness of the existence of bias against research on gender bias among male researchers (Handley et al. 2015 ) and in general as a topic of scientific inquiry, as in our study, we hope to contribute to the discussion about the fairness of journal policies. This discussion is primarily important in order for gender bias to be properly acknowledged within the scientific community and to pursue further examination of this powerful source of inequality that severely affects many women in the world (UN Women 2015 ). Gender bias intersects with social standing, resulting in a feminization of poverty (Starrels et al. 1994 ). In addition, it intersects with race bias in academic communities (Gutiérrez y Muhs et al. 2012 ; Hopkins et al. 2013 ) and elsewhere (Livingston et al. 2012 ; United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women [DAW], Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], United Nations Development Fund for Women [UNIFEM] 2000). Finally, addressing this meta-bias within academia will strengthen the scientific community and its ability to expose and overcome bias and to maintain its powerful ability to inform organizational, national-level, and international policies and decision-making processes.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Alice Eagly on her suggestion about including qualitative versus quantitative distinction in the analysis and Ilan Roziner for his helpful statistical advice. We would like to help also the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the previous versions of this article.

Aleksandra Cislak and Magdalena Formanowicz have contributed equally to the manuscript.

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Cover Story

Five principles for research ethics

Cover your bases with these ethical strategies

By DEBORAH SMITH

Monitor Staff

January 2003, Vol 34, No. 1

Print version: page 56

13 min read

• Conducting Research

Not that long ago, academicians were often cautious about airing the ethical dilemmas they faced in their research and academic work, but that environment is changing today. Psychologists in academe are more likely to seek out the advice of their colleagues on issues ranging from supervising graduate students to how to handle sensitive research data , says George Mason University psychologist June Tangney, PhD.

"There has been a real change in the last 10 years in people talking more frequently and more openly about ethical dilemmas of all sorts," she explains.

Indeed, researchers face an array of ethical requirements: They must meet professional, institutional and federal standards for conducting research with human participants, often supervise students they also teach and have to sort out authorship issues, just to name a few.

Here are five recommendations APA's Science Directorate gives to help researchers steer clear of ethical quandaries:

1. Discuss intellectual property frankly

Academe's competitive "publish-or-perish" mindset can be a recipe for trouble when it comes to who gets credit for authorship . The best way to avoid disagreements about who should get credit and in what order is to talk about these issues at the beginning of a working relationship, even though many people often feel uncomfortable about such topics.

"It's almost like talking about money," explains Tangney. "People don't want to appear to be greedy or presumptuous."

APA's Ethics Code offers some guidance: It specifies that "faculty advisors discuss publication credit with students as early as feasible and throughout the research and publication process as appropriate." When researchers and students put such understandings in writing, they have a helpful tool to continually discuss and evaluate contributions as the research progresses.

However, even the best plans can result in disputes, which often occur because people look at the same situation differently. "While authorship should reflect the contribution," says APA Ethics Office Director Stephen Behnke, JD, PhD, "we know from social science research that people often overvalue their contributions to a project. We frequently see that in authorship-type situations. In many instances, both parties genuinely believe they're right." APA's Ethics Code stipulates that psychologists take credit only for work they have actually performed or to which they have substantially contributed and that publication credit should accurately reflect the relative contributions: "Mere possession of an institutional position, such as department chair, does not justify authorship credit," says the code. "Minor contributions to the research or to the writing for publications are acknowledged appropriately, such as in footnotes or in an introductory statement."

The same rules apply to students. If they contribute substantively to the conceptualization, design, execution, analysis or interpretation of the research reported, they should be listed as authors. Contributions that are primarily technical don't warrant authorship. In the same vein, advisers should not expect ex-officio authorship on their students' work.

Matthew McGue, PhD, of the University of Minnesota, says his psychology department has instituted a procedure to avoid murky authorship issues. "We actually have a formal process here where students make proposals for anything they do on the project," he explains. The process allows students and faculty to more easily talk about research responsibility, distribution and authorship.

Psychologists should also be cognizant of situations where they have access to confidential ideas or research, such as reviewing journal manuscripts or research grants, or hearing new ideas during a presentation or informal conversation. While it's unlikely reviewers can purge all of the information in an interesting manuscript from their thinking, it's still unethical to take those ideas without giving credit to the originator.

"If you are a grant reviewer or a journal manuscript reviewer [who] sees someone's research [that] hasn't been published yet, you owe that person a duty of confidentiality and anonymity," says Gerald P. Koocher, PhD, editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior and co-author of "Ethics in Psychology: Professional Standards and Cases" (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Researchers also need to meet their ethical obligations once their research is published: If authors learn of errors that change the interpretation of research findings, they are ethically obligated to promptly correct the errors in a correction, retraction, erratum or by other means.

To be able to answer questions about study authenticity and allow others to reanalyze the results, authors should archive primary data and accompanying records for at least five years, advises University of Minnesota psychologist and researcher Matthew McGue, PhD. "Store all your data. Don't destroy it," he says. "Because if someone charges that you did something wrong, you can go back."

"It seems simple, but this can be a tricky area," says Susan Knapp, APA's deputy publisher. "The APA Publication Manual Section 8.05 has some general advice on what to retain and suggestions about things to consider in sharing data."

The APA Ethics Code requires psychologists to release their data to others who want to verify their conclusions, provided that participants' confidentiality can be protected and as long as legal rights concerning proprietary data don't preclude their release. However, the code also notes that psychologists who request data in these circumstances can only use the shared data for reanalysis; for any other use, they must obtain a prior written agreement.

2. Be conscious of multiple roles

APA's Ethics Code says psychologists should avoid relationships that could reasonably impair their professional performance or could exploit or harm others. But it also notes that many kinds of multiple relationships aren't unethical--as long as they're not reasonably expected to have adverse effects.

That notwithstanding, psychologists should think carefully before entering into multiple relationships with any person or group, such as recruiting students or clients as participants in research studies or investigating the effectiveness of a product of a company whose stock they own.

For example, when recruiting students from your Psychology 101 course to participate in an experiment, be sure to make clear that participation is voluntary. If participation is a course requirement, be sure to note that in the class syllabus, and ensure that participation has educative value by, for instance, providing a thorough debriefing to enhance students' understanding of the study. The 2002 Ethics Code also mandates in Standard 8.04b that students be given equitable alternatives to participating in research.

Perhaps one of the most common multiple roles for researchers is being both a mentor and lab supervisor to students they also teach in class. Psychologists need to be especially cautious that they don't abuse the power differential between themselves and students, say experts. They shouldn't, for example, use their clout as professors to coerce students into taking on additional research duties.

By outlining the nature and structure of the supervisory relationship before supervision or mentoring begins, both parties can avoid misunderstandings, says George Mason University's Tangney. It's helpful to create a written agreement that includes both parties' responsibilities as well as authorship considerations, intensity of the supervision and other key aspects of the job.

"While that's the ideal situation, in practice we do a lot less of that than we ought to," she notes. "Part of it is not having foresight up front of how a project or research study is going to unfold."

That's why experts also recommend that supervisors set up timely and specific methods to give students feedback and keep a record of the supervision, including meeting times, issues discussed and duties assigned.

If psychologists do find that they are in potentially harmful multiple relationships, they are ethically mandated to take steps to resolve them in the best interest of the person or group while complying with the Ethics Code.

3. Follow informed-consent rules

When done properly, the consent process ensures that individuals are voluntarily participating in the research with full knowledge of relevant risks and benefits.

"The federal standard is that the person must have all of the information that might reasonably influence their willingness to participate in a form that they can understand and comprehend," says Koocher, dean of Simmons College's School for Health Studies.

APA's Ethics Code mandates that psychologists who conduct research should inform participants about:

The purpose of the research, expected duration and procedures.

Participants' rights to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research once it has started, as well as the anticipated consequences of doing so.

Reasonably foreseeable factors that may influence their willingness to participate, such as potential risks, discomfort or adverse effects.

Any prospective research benefits.

Limits of confidentiality, such as data coding, disposal, sharing and archiving, and when confidentiality must be broken.

Incentives for participation.

Who participants can contact with questions.

Experts also suggest covering the likelihood, magnitude and duration of harm or benefit of participation, emphasizing that their involvement is voluntary and discussing treatment alternatives, if relevant to the research.

Keep in mind that the Ethics Code includes specific mandates for researchers who conduct experimental treatment research. Specifically, they must inform individuals about the experimental nature of the treatment, services that will or will not be available to the control groups, how participants will be assigned to treatments and control groups, available treatment alternatives and compensation or monetary costs of participation.

If research participants or clients are not competent to evaluate the risks and benefits of participation themselves--for example, minors or people with cognitive disabilities--then the person who's giving permission must have access to that same information, says Koocher.

Remember that a signed consent form doesn't mean the informing process can be glossed over, say ethics experts. In fact, the APA Ethics Code says psychologists can skip informed consent in two instances only: When permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations, or when the research would not reasonably be expected to distress or harm participants and involves one of the following:

The study of normal educational practices, curricula or classroom management methods conducted in educational settings.

Anonymous questionnaires, naturalistic observations or archival research for which disclosure of responses would not place participants at risk of criminal or civil liability or damage their financial standing, employability or reputation, and for which confidentiality is protected.

The study of factors related to job or organization effectiveness conducted in organizational settings for which there is no risk to participants' employability, and confidentiality is protected.

If psychologists are precluded from obtaining full consent at the beginning--for example, if the protocol includes deception, recording spontaneous behavior or the use of a confederate--they should be sure to offer a full debriefing after data collection and provide people with an opportunity to reiterate their consent, advise experts.

The code also says psychologists should make reasonable efforts to avoid offering "excessive or inappropriate financial or other inducements for research participation when such inducements are likely to coerce participation."

4. Respect confidentiality and privacy

Upholding individuals' rights to confidentiality and privacy is a central tenet of every psychologist's work. However, many privacy issues are idiosyncratic to the research population, writes Susan Folkman, PhD, in " Ethics in Research with Human Participants " (APA, 2000). For instance, researchers need to devise ways to ask whether participants are willing to talk about sensitive topics without putting them in awkward situations, say experts. That could mean they provide a set of increasingly detailed interview questions so that participants can stop if they feel uncomfortable.

And because research participants have the freedom to choose how much information about themselves they will reveal and under what circumstances, psychologists should be careful when recruiting participants for a study, says Sangeeta Panicker, PhD, director of the APA Science Directorate's Research Ethics Office. For example, it's inappropriate to obtain contact information of members of a support group to solicit their participation in research. However, you could give your colleague who facilitates the group a letter to distribute that explains your research study and provides a way for individuals to contact you, if they're interested.

Other steps researchers should take include:

Discuss the limits of confidentiality. Give participants information about how their data will be used, what will be done with case materials, photos and audio and video recordings, and secure their consent.

Know federal and state law. Know the ins and outs of state and federal law that might apply to your research. For instance, the Goals 2000: Education Act of 1994 prohibits asking children about religion, sex or family life without parental permission.

Another example is that, while most states only require licensed psychologists to comply with mandatory reporting laws, some laws also require researchers to report abuse and neglect. That's why it's important for researchers to plan for situations in which they may learn of such reportable offenses. Generally, research psychologists can consult with a clinician or their institution's legal department to decide the best course of action.

Take practical security measures. Be sure confidential records are stored in a secure area with limited access, and consider stripping them of identifying information, if feasible. Also, be aware of situations where confidentiality could inadvertently be breached, such as having confidential conversations in a room that's not soundproof or putting participants' names on bills paid by accounting departments.

Think about data sharing before research begins. If researchers plan to share their data with others, they should note that in the consent process, specifying how they will be shared and whether data will be anonymous. For example, researchers could have difficulty sharing sensitive data they've collected in a study of adults with serious mental illnesses because they failed to ask participants for permission to share the data. Or developmental data collected on videotape may be a valuable resource for sharing, but unless a researcher asked permission back then to share videotapes, it would be unethical to do so. When sharing, psychologists should use established techniques when possible to protect confidentiality, such as coding data to hide identities. "But be aware that it may be almost impossible to entirely cloak identity, especially if your data include video or audio recordings or can be linked to larger databases," says Merry Bullock, PhD, associate executive director in APA's Science Directorate.

Understand the limits of the Internet. Since Web technology is constantly evolving, psychologists need to be technologically savvy to conduct research online and cautious when exchanging confidential information electronically. If you're not a Internet whiz, get the help of someone who is. Otherwise, it may be possible for others to tap into data that you thought was properly protected.

5. Tap into ethics resources

One of the best ways researchers can avoid and resolve ethical dilemmas is to know both what their ethical obligations are and what resources are available to them.

"Researchers can help themselves make ethical issues salient by reminding themselves of the basic underpinnings of research and professional ethics," says Bullock. Those basics include:

The Belmont Report. Released by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in 1979, the report provided the ethical framework for ensuing human participant research regulations and still serves as the basis for human participant protection legislation (see Further Reading).

APA's Ethics Code , which offers general principles and specific guidance for research activities.

Moreover, despite the sometimes tense relationship researchers can have with their institutional review boards (IRBs), these groups can often help researchers think about how to address potential dilemmas before projects begin, says Panicker. But psychologists must first give their IRBs the information they need to properly understand a research proposal.

"Be sure to provide the IRB with detailed and comprehensive information about the study, such as the consent process, how participants will be recruited and how confidential information will be protected," says Bullock. "The more information you give your IRB, the better educated its members will become about behavioral research, and the easier it will be for them to facilitate your research."

As cliché as it may be, says Panicker, thinking positively about your interactions with an IRB can help smooth the process for both researchers and the IRBs reviewing their work.

Further reading

American Psychological Association. (2002). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. American Psychologist, 57 (12).

Sales, B.D., & Folkman, S. (Eds.). (2000). Ethics in research with human participants . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

APA's Research Ethics Office in the Science Directorate; e-mail ; Web site: APA Science .

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) offers educational materials on human subjects .

NIH Bioethics Resources Web site .

The Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Office of Research Integrity Web site .

DHHS Office of Human Research Protections Web site .

The 1979 Belmont Report on protecting human subjects .

Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs Web site: www.aahrpp.org .

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A) deception B) informed consent C) an intuitional review board D) a debriefing

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• Consider the titration of 100.0 mL of 0.10 M H2A (Ka1 = 1.50 104; Ka2 = 7.82 107) with 0.20 M ...
• A __________ is an argument whose conclusion is supported by two premises.
• Chester is visiting the bank to deposit some money. As he completes the deposit slip, the ink in the ...
• A football player kicks two consecutive field goals from approximately the same distance. Each field ...
• Four identical particles (mass of each = 0.40 kg) are placed at the vertices of a rectangle (2.0 m ...
• Which of the following is an anxiety disorder in which individuals experience constant worry and ...
• There is no need for a company to use an outside vendor when implementing a crowdsourcing project ...
• Use the rules of validity to determine whether "All nuclear weapons are dangerous weapons. Some ...
• Exhibit 9-1Two birds of prey hurtling after the same mouse collide in mid-air and grab each other ...
• Two agronomists analyzed the same data, testing the same null hypothesis about the proportion of ...
• Link data from another Access database when you want to use the structure of the source database.
• In which of the following does the student physically write some of the content? a. shared ...
• The syllogism's form in "Since no two-story house is a skyscraper and all skyscrapers are elevator ...
• Ms. Lanyan is in the midst of an inquiry project about insects with her 1st grade class. In her ...
• By including a comfortable guest chair, candy dish and cheery artwork in her office, Josie is using ...
• Consider "Some novels are not prize winning books. Thus, some non-prize winning books are not ...
• How many years behind in reading development is the following student? Independent Level 2 ...
• What would you review or teach a student who reads the word token as TAHKEN? a. closed syllables ...
• Wilma has a hearing loss that occurred in the outer or middle ear. This situation prevented sound ...
• Dr. Newman spent three years in Botswana, participating in the daily life of a community there. She ...
• Ingrid Samuelson was a participant in Solomon Asch's line-judging experiment. When later asked why ...
• A 5.0-kg mass sits on the floor of an elevator that has a downward acceleration of 1.0 m/s2. On top ...
• In a contest, two tractors pull two identical blocks of stone the same distance over identical ...
• Monsoon refers to: A) heavy tropical precipitation. B) the climatic pattern in which heavy ...