Cheryl Kaiser’s research is referenced in this article from The Conversation about minorities with strong racial identities getting less pay or chances of being hired
Minority job applicants with ‘strong racial identities’ may encounter less pay and lower odds of getting hired
Race-based discrimination is common in the hiring process.
For example, racial minorities are less likely than whites to receive a callback when they apply for a job. There are also wide earning gaps, with African-Americans and Latinos earning a fraction of what whites and Asians do.
Yet despite laws that aim to reduce employment discrimination and improve attitudes toward diversity, these patterns have not changed for decades.
When analyzing these problems, researchers and others tend to focus on how the experiences of racial minorities compare with those of whites. Often missing is whether there are differences among individuals of the same racial group in terms of how they experience bias.
That is where my new study , which focuses on perceptions of others’ racial identities, comes in.
Perceived identities
People have more than one identity, such as being a mom, a Muslim, an athlete, a scientist and so on.
Just as we commonly think about the importance of each of our identities to who we are – such as being a dad or very religious – we make the same assessments of other people. That is, we evaluate other people’s identities to understand which ones are most fundamental to who they are.
And it turns out, the conclusions we come to about each other’s “perceived identities” can have a big effect on how we interact with them.
As a researcher who has spent the last 19 years examining diversity and inclusion, I was interested in how perceptions of identity affected a racial minority’s prospects as a job applicant. More specifically, I wanted to know if the perception that an applicant has a strong racial identity affected her ability to get a job and how much she’d get paid.
Presumed identity
Past research has shown that our inferences about others’ personal identities can influence how we interact with them.
In some cases, people might talk about how their identity is important to them, or how it reflects a critical part of who they are as a person. In other cases, we make assessments based on cues. For example, we might think someone strongly identifies as Latino when they are members of a Latino student organization. Or, we might infer a weak identity among people who engage in actions that are seemingly contrary to the interests of their group.
For example, psychologists Cheryl Kaiser and Jennifer Pratt-Hyatt found found that whites interact more positively with racial minorities they believe weakly identify with their race – and more negatively with those with stronger racial identifies. Specifically, whites expressed more desire to be their friends and offer favorable ratings of their personality.
Read the entire article here .