A University of Michigan study published earlier this year found white men who experience harassment in their workplace are more likely to recognize and report incidents of racial and gender bias experienced by their colleagues. Erin Cech, author of the study and U-M associate professor of sociology and mechanical engineering, used the study to investigate how people perceive different forms of inequality.
According to the study, meritocratic beliefs, or beliefs that the workplace is a meritocracy where hard work equals success, held by white men typically present obstacles to reducing sexism and racism in the workplace. This can mainly be attributed to the fact that white men don’t experience these biases.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Cech said her research found that white men have higher trust in workplace equality.
“In the United States, there’s a general sentiment that the labor force operates meritocratically, meaning if you have the right training and you put in the hard work, (you) will succeed,” Cech said. “Regardless of your background, most people, particularly white men, tend to believe their organization operates meritocratically.”
Beliefs that place trust in an organization to operate fairly and morally and to improve the status of employees based only on the quality of their work are known as legitimizing beliefs. Cech said legitimizing beliefs can make it difficult to recognize individual harassment incidents as a systemic issue.
“If you believe (legitimizing beliefs) to be the case, it’s more difficult to see those kinds of biases happening because you don’t recognize them as such,” Cech said. “You might think that’s just a one-off event, that it’s not something actually tied to systemic racism or sexism.”
Legitimizing beliefs can change when white men personally experience harassment. Of the 5,000 white men included in the study, drawn from Merit Principles Survey Data, a periodic survey of Federal Agency employees, one-third reported experiencing harassment in the workplace, including violence and physical intimidation. White men who faced harassment were 57.6% more likely to agree racial bias occurred in their workplace and 70.1% more likely to agree gender bias occurred in their workplace than white men who have not experienced harassment.
In an interview with The Daily, Elizabeth Armstrong, Sherry B. Ortner Collegiate professor of sociology, said Cech’s study was an innovative way to examine inequalities in the workplace.
“It’s a very impressive and creative study to look at workplace equality or the challenges to reducing inequality in the workplace,” Armstrong said. “Often people just look at the experiences of people who experienced the discrimination instead of looking at the experiences of those who usually benefit from the way that workplaces are organized.”
The study found white men experiencing harassment were twice as likely to report incidents of workplace inequality to supervisors or other colleagues. Cech said these results may reflect an ‘underdog’ mentality, where people who experience harassment become more sensitive to other forms of harassment occurring around them.
“This work steps back and (asks) what about people’s day-to-day experiences might lead them to be able to increase the sensitivity through kind of an ‘underdog’ process that might lead them to be more sensitive to other kinds of disadvantages, even the ones that they personally might be benefiting from on the societal level,” Cech said.
In an interview with The Daily, LSA freshman Sneha Verma said these findings are important to her because of how they may be used to improve diversity, equity and inclusion training.
“Studying exactly how white men in the workplace can look at their own experiences and recognize bias or other injustices can help implement more strategies for white men to try to recognize what’s going wrong in the workplace,” Verma said. “They also can have easier avenues like reporting it especially since they hold a lot of power.”
Cech said the findings indicated white men in a workplace do not initially recognize all areas of bias, which makes anti-bias training ineffective.
“DEI trainings often tend to bring people in and say this is the state of these kinds of inequalities, and we need to make adjustments to the way our organization operates,” Cech said. “But if people are coming to those trainings believing that the workplace is already operating meritocratically, it’s already a block there.”
Cech said the study showed the importance for people in positions of privilege to consider how their workspace may be experienced by more marginalized groups.
“What this research suggests is there can be a step where people who are intersectionality privileged are asked to reflect on their own personal experiences in the workplace,” Cech said. “(They should) try and raise some skepticism about whether or not that workplace is actually as meritocratic as they might believe it to be.”
Daily Staff Contributor Sophia Jayasekera can be reached at sophiaja@umich.edu.