Bringing it on Themselves: How Gender, Race, and Class Shape Perceptions of Workers as Discrimination Victims

• In Event: 4437 - Work, Family, and Inequality in the US and Europe

Abstract

Does a worker’s gender, race, and social class affect the extent to which people see them as victims of family responsibilities discrimination (FRD)? We theorize and empirically examine how status beliefs affect the extent to which people blame workers for negative experiences at work and name those negative experiences as discriminatory. We conducted an internet-based survey experiment in which 702 respondents read a transcript of a fictitious supervisor-employee interaction. In the transcript, the supervisor engages in an illegal act of FRD by denying the employee a promotion for having taken parental leave. We experimentally manipulated the gender (male/female), race (white/black), and social class (professional/working class) of the employee in the transcript and observe whether respondents blame the employee for not being promoted and name the supervisor’s treatment as discriminatory. Respondents are more likely to view the supervisor’s negative treatment as deserved when the employee was depicted as a man (compared to a woman), when depicted as black (compared to white), and when described as holding a working-class job (compared to working a professional one). Respondents believe black men are particularly deserving of the supervisor’s promotion denial. Similarly, respondents are less likely to name the supervisor’s actions as discriminatory when the employee is depicted as male, black, and working-class. We argue that men who violate traditional work and family devotion beliefs by taking family leave are more likely to be blamed for a promotion denial stemming from leave, but that race privilege associated with hegemonic masculinity insulate white men more than black from this perception they “brought it on themselves.”

Authors

• Lindsey Trimble O'Connor, California State University-Channel Islands

• Julie A. Kmec, Washington State Univ