People judge discrimination against women more harshly than discrimination against men - why statistical fairness discrimination?

Front.Psychol., September 20, 2021| https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.675776

Commentary

Past research has shown that people care less about men than they do about women who are left behind.

This finding will show that it even affects discrimination in the labor market, where people judge discrimination against women to be morally worse than discrimination against men.

This result was true for a representative sample of the U.S. population, not a representative sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) respondents, but a larger sample.

The study was testing whether this gender difference was caused by statistical fairness discrimination.

It is the process by which people use the gender of the victim to make inferences about other characteristics that are important in determining fairness.

To illustrate this hypothesis, we test it in a survey experiment in which information about victims of discrimination is held constant and explicit.

The results provide only mixed support for an explanation of statistical fairness discrimination, with no meaningful or important effects of information processing in a representative sample.

In contrast, in the Mturk sample, we found that providing additional information partially reduced the impact of victim gender on discriminant judgments.

All of this makes it unlikely that this process will be a complete explanation for why discrimination against women is judged to be worse, although people may engage in statistical fairness discrimination.