Judging Discrimination against Women more Harshly and Statistical Fairness Discrimination

In their study, Feess et al. (2021) asked participants (n = 478) representative of the US population in terms of gender, age (adults), education, and political orientation, to judge discrimination in two scenarios, a) a discrimination-against-the-woman scenario (stating that "[t]aking into account all characteristics of the two applicants (qualifications, experience, personality, etc.), the manager knows that the woman is slightly more qualified and hiring her would bring slightly higher profits for the company. After considering everything, the manager hires the man.")  and b) a discrimination-against-the-man scenario (the man being slightly more qualified and the manager hiring the woman). .

Respondents were asked to judge the manager's decision on a scale ranging from 0 (very morally wrong) to 100 (very morally right). The participants saw the same additional text that pointed out that both the man and the woman would work equally hard to get the job, that they would suffer equally from not getting the job, and that the job is in an industry without gender discrimination.

The authors defined gender discrimination as hiring someone of one gender "despite knowing that an applicant of the opposite gender is more qualified and more productive" and estimated the impact the victim's gender has on the moral evaluation of the discrmination.

38% of the sample were classified as pro-women, 38% as neutral, and 24% as pro-men. Results show that discrimination against women is, on average, judged 5.5 points more morally wrong than discrimination against a man (10.5 points vs 5.0 points). Pro-women respondents judge discrimination against women 22.4 points more morally bad, pro-men respndents judge discrimination against men 12.3 points more morally bad. 

The results of this survey experiment show only mixed support for the statistical fairness discrimination hypothesis. (...) While statistical fairness discrimination may play a role in explaining differences in judgments about discriminated women and men, it is unlikely to be the whole story.

The results relate to other findings such as Block et al.'s paper (2019) showing that people are more concerned about the underrepresentation of women in male-dominated careers than about men in female-dominated careers. Winegard et al. (2018) come to the conclusion that liberals favour disadvantaged groups and that they trust identical scientific studies more if the results are favourable for marginalised groups (women and Blacks) than privileged ones (men and whites). The differences in these judgments are predicted by Equalitarianism, the belief that society should make all groups equal.

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-  Feess, E., Feld, J. & Noy, S. (2021). People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination against Men - Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why? Frontiers in Psychology, 12, link
- photograph by Steven Edson via