DISCRIMINATION AGAINST various groups in the workplace has been well documented as affecting a range of processes and outcomes, including hiring, compensation, performance evaluations and rewards, as well as everyday interactions. These findings make it clear that certain groups are consistently disadvantaged at work.
While researchers have firmly established the existence of workplace discrimination, individuals often feel uncertain about classifying negative personal experiences as such. They might wonder whether they were denied a particular reward as a result of discrimination or a more benign factor, like task-relevant characteristics.
For example, when a woman is passed up for a promotion in favour of a man, she may wonder whether her colleague’s performance was simply superior. Left to make sense of the incident on her own, she may never fully resolve whether or not it was discriminatory. We refer to such experiences as ‘ambiguous incidents,’ and in this article we will summarize our recent research to uncover their implications.
The High Toll of Ambiguity
Uncertainty in understanding the behaviour of others is a fundamental feature of social life. People often feel unsure about attributing other people’s actions to a particular motive, and this makes it difficult to evaluate whether specific incidents were discriminatory. As a result, while research clearly documents the existence of workplace discrimination, an individual who experiences an incident may struggle to conclusively classify an event or interaction as fuelled by bias.
Uncertainty about gender discrimination may be particularly widespread in today’s workplace. Increasingly, co-workers, supervisors and clients have strong incentives to avoid explicitly sexist language or behaviour, given that obvious discrimination has economic, legal and social repercussions. However, the attendant shift from obvious toward more subtle forms of discrimination makes classifying incidents much more challenging for those who are subjected to negative treatment.
We define an ambiguous incident as ‘an event or interaction that an employee believes might have been motivated by bias.’ These incidents have three key characteristics:
Some ambiguous incidents are motivated by
