It's Not Me, It's Them: Anticipating Discrimination By Others Causes Discrimination

Authors:

Abstract: Beliefs about others’ actions can affect a range of important decisions. However, little is known about how these beliefs affect discrimination. I study the effect of beliefs about other actors’ discrimination on decision makers' own discrimination. I use an online experiment in a stylized labor market with three sets of actors: workers, hiring managers, and clients. I find that hiring managers' beliefs about clients' gender discrimination causally affect their wage offers to female relative to male workers: manipulating these beliefs reduces the gender wage gap by 9%. Overall, hiring managers believe that clients discriminate against female workers, when they actually do not. This creates the conditions for hiring managers to discriminate against women in anticipation of client discrimination as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. However, in this experiment, hiring managers do not fully translate these beliefs into lower wages for women, arresting this self-fulfilling discrimination.

Track: DEI

Keywords: discrimination, beliefs