We are pleased to support the research of UC Berkeley faculty and PhD students who are examining topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Contact Zena Barakat for more information.
Faculty Grantees
Aruna Ranganathan
Speak Up or Stay Silent: Impact of Remote Work on Worker Voice
Worker voice – the “discretionary communication of ideas, suggestions, concerns, or opinions about work-related issues” (Morrison, 2011: 375) – is important for the protection of rights, well-being, and equality in the workplace. We posit that working remotely will decrease voice; remote workers are more disconnected from their co-workers and thus experience more difficulty identifying common issues and generating ideas for better practices, which we expect will decrease their voice. Women already express less voice in traditional work environments (Thomas-Hunt and Phillips 2011), thus we expect that remote work will also exacerbate gender inequality in voice. We test these expectations with a field experiment in India.
Francesco Trebbi
Reducing the Gender GAP towards a More Representative Democracy
The goal of this project is to study the demand-side factors that affect voting for female candidates in Brazil. Most standard voting models assume that voters evaluate candidates along several dimensions when deciding for whom to vote. These dimensions often include the candidate’s Gender, their perceived Ability, and their Policy positions, (GAP). Based on these three dimensions, we have developed a statistical model to decouple their effects on voting decisions. Importantly, our framework can separately identify the roles of preferences versus beliefs of individual voters in this multidimensional decision. A key empirical contribution of this work will be its ability to disentangle which dimensions matter the most for voters when choosing a candidate and how gender (both of the candidate and of the voter) plays a role in this choice. Campaigns to promote gender representation require a clear understanding of the roots of underrepresentation to be effective. Beyond its academic contributions, the findings from this project will have important policy implications. In collaboration with A Ponte, a local NGO that gives technical support to elected women in Brazil and was co-founded by one of the PI’s of this project, the results of this experiment will be used to inform strategies for female candidates on how to better communicate their attributes to voters, so they can increase their vote share in future elections and reduce the representation GAP.
Sameer Srivastava
A Network-Based Field Experiment to Foster Inclusion and Belonging in the Workplace
We will examine whether and how the formation of new social relationships in the workplace can influence inclusion and belonging in the workplace. We are about to run an intervention in a large non-profit organization. All participants will get access to some learning and development content. Each participant will get assigned one of four modules, which they will be asked to learn and summarize in a way that they can teach it to a peer. In the control condition, participants will be assigned to a peer group and see each other’s summaries but not know the identities of their peers or have an opportunity to interact with them. In the two treatment conditions, participants will be assigned to a peer group and will have a live, facilitated interaction to share learnings within the group. In one treatment group, the peer group will consist of individuals who do not know each other but belong to the same network cluster (as determined by pre-intervention network data). In the other treatment condition, peers will all come from different network clusters. We will then track social network outcomes over the next three months and then administer a belonging and inclusion survey to assess whether there are differences across the three groups.
Sa-Kiera Hudson
Powerful, but Inauthentic: The impact of power and gender on authenticity
Although there are historical power differences between men and women, research in this area often finds that power has similar effect on men and women. However, the fact that both men and women respond to power in similar ways masks the reality that men and women aren’t always able to do so. Women in high status positions are a case of two power hierarchies: gender and organizational role. Due to the interactional nature of status and power, having or lacking power in organizational situations where gender is made salient should affect women to a greater extent than men. The focus of the current research is to begin to understand the effects of having or lacking power on authenticity for men and women in contexts where gender is salient and relevant.
Sydnee Caldwell
Gender Differences in Bargaining and Labor Market Information
This project will produce new evidence on whether and how differences in bargaining contribute to a gender wage gap. For this project the researchers designed and implemented surveys of both firms and workers in Germany, and linked the responses to the universe of Social Security records. Using these data, the researchers will be able to examine whether and how differences in bargained outcomes emerge. They will also be able to examine whether these differences are attributable to differences in the information that male and female workers have about the labor market or differences in the labor markets male and female workers consider.
Jennifer Chatman
Where You Sit Affects What You See: Examining Perspectives On Organizational Culture Across Hierarchical Levels and Demographic Groups
Despite the lack of agreement on a definition of organizational culture, scholars broadly conceptualize it as a set of cognitive constructs—values, norms, beliefs, or artifacts—widely shared among the members of an organization. Organizational members may, however, vary systematically in how they perceive their culture. With this in mind, in this project, we test whether individuals at higher levels of an organizational hierarchy and those in the gender and racial majority (i.e., White men) have more positive perceptions of the organization than those in the lower levels and in the minority. Understanding differences in cultural perceptions will inform us about hierarchies, mobility, and the different ways in which women and people of color experience their organizations and potentially help to advise organizations on how to build cultures that better support equity.
PhD Grantees
Analexis Glaude
Perceptions of Innovation and Creativity
The current research project aims to assess perceptions of creativity and innovation amongst different intersectionalities. We are specifically interested in the racial and gender aspects of perceptions of creativity and innovation and how they can impact hiring and promotions. To examine these perceptions, we focus on out-group perception of creativity. We hope to find in what ways different intersectionalities are seen to be creative or innovative and to what degree they are considered creative or innovative. We also hope to find implications for the workplace; if innovation is more highly valued but is not associated with different intersectionalities, this could be a major issue in the hiring process and the promotion process. The overall goal of this research project is to assess others’ perceptions of intersectionalities which may be excluding them from the hiring and promotion processes, as they may not be seen as having the “right” skillset.
Sylvia Chin
Understanding the #MeToo backlash: How do perceptions of hierarchy legitimacy and stability affect the way people manage their identities
We seek to understand why the feminist movement seems to be met with a backlash. Our project investigates how perceptions of the gender hierarchy affect the ways that men and women subsumed within the gender hierarchy differently react and manage their identities. Hierarchies can be characterized in two ways: how legitimate and stable they are. Legitimacy captures alignment with moral values of justice and fairness; Stability captures how likely it is for the traditional status quo to be restructured or reordered. We posit that the feminist movement’s built-up momentum over the years has reduced perceptions of both hierarchy legitimacy and stability. The backlash may thus be fueled in part by diverging reactions of men and women when faced with an illegitimate and increasingly unstable hierarchy. We finally test how perceptions of legitimacy and stability can be leveraged to minimize retaliation against, and increase support for progress towards gender equity.
Andrew Choi
Similarity and Network Distance Perceptions: Implications for Intergroup Contact and Networking Behavior
We aim to test whether individuals’ biased perceptions of their social networks disadvantage minoritized groups. Our preliminary evidence suggests that people perceive similar others as being nearer in their social networks than dissimilar others. Importantly, we find this to be true even when there is no reasonable basis for this belief (e.g., simply based on whether the target likes Coca-Cola or Pepsi). Given that perceiving someone as farther away in one’s network predicts one’s intention of engaging in networking behaviors with them, this work may provide a novel explanation for why minoritized groups are disadvantaged in professional settings. Majority group members may incorrectly assume that non-majority group members who are dissimilar to them are further away from them than they actually are, and engage with them less.
Derek Brown
Controlling the “Automatic” Nonverbal Expression of Anti-Black Racial Bias
Existing models on the expression of prejudice suggests that bias “leaks” out despite people’s best intentions. Across six experiments, however, we find that when White individuals are motivated and able, they can and do control for the presence of prejudicial nonverbal behaviors when engaged in interracial interactions. The question for the proposed research project is, if White people can control for nonverbal manifestations of bias, are they successful? For the proposed study, we will examine whether Black perceivers accurately infer a White targets’ racial bias–– especially when the White person is behaving in an excessively positive nonverbal manner; in other words, Black people can “see through” White people, but other White people cannot?
Yixiang Xu
Improving Financial Inclusion by Supporting Marginalized Merchants through Personalized ML Decision Support Systems in India
In emerging markets, local mom-n-pop stores in remote areas acting as financial agents are the rails of the ongoing digital finance revolution enabling financial inclusion of the underserved communities. However, these low-cost Fintech touch points suffer from poor retention and dormancy challenges limiting reliable financial access in remote regions. In spite of making a substantial upfront capital investment, many merchants drop out immediately due to poor onboarding support and the lack of access to financial intermediation business insight. Our research attempts to tackle the business insight and capacity gap by a machine learning (ML)-driven decision support system (DSS). The intervention aims to augment merchants’ business decision-making with product recommendation advisory services – by informing merchants of basic product knowledge and business performance via an automated information sharing system. Through a series of field experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of an ML-based decision support system to make small financial merchants thrive.
Javier Feinmann
Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: selection into reporting and labor lawsuits
Recent paper on gender violence in the workplace study the consequences of being sexually assaulted on workers and firm performance. However, it is well known that most of the cases are not reported. We aim to understand the selection into reporting by combining data on labor lawsuit related to sexual harassment in the workplace and our own representative survey in Brazil. We split the selection into victim characteristics and type of sexual harassment. Through text analysis techniques, we aim to be the first to document exactly how the cases reported look like and how they differentiate from the ones reported in representative surveys. Moreover, we also aim to understand how suing may affect firm retaliation against women using network analysis. Finally, we bring descriptive evidence on lawyers and judges involved in cases where the suer wins the case.
Merrick Osborne
Status Considerations in Assignments to Diversity Initiatives
In prior work, we find that people are more likely to assign women to lead gender-diversity (vs. non-gender-diversity) initiatives, even if the woman already has a full workload or lacks the appropriate qualifications. That work shows that people make these assignment decisions because they weight diversity concerns in their decision-making process more strongly than the candidate’s availability or qualifications for the role. We shift our focus however, from examining how the focus of the initiative shapes decision-maker’s task-assignment selections. Instead, we investigate how the decision-maker considers the occupational and reputational outcomes for their assignee when making these decisions. Specifically, we argue that people are more likely to assign women to lead, or participate in, gender-diversity initiatives (compared to other, non-diversity, initiatives) because they underestimate the costs – and overestimate the benefits – to the woman of participating in the initiative.