Bias against Latina and African American women job applicants: a field experiment

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine bias among White raters against racial minority women seeking employment in fitness organizations. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a 2 (applicant perceived racial identity) × 2 (applicant race) × 2 (hiring directive) factorial design experiment, with participant rater gender serving as the within-subjects variable. Adults in the USA (n=238) who had or were currently working in the fitness industry participated in the study. Findings Results indicate that applicant presumed racial identity and rater gender had direct effects, while applicant presumed racial identity, applicant race and rater gender had interactive effects, as well. Originality/value Results show that perceived racial identity affects raters’ view of job applicants, and the pattern of findings varies among racial groups.

Risks of expressing your authentic self in sport: the influence of stigma covering on perceived job fit and hiring recommendations

“…In the sport industry, research findings have generally aligned with those found in the management literature although the amount of research in this area remains limited and tends to include investigations related to a variety of stigmatized identities. Disclosures of both weight (Melton and Cunningham, 2016) and racial identity (Steward and Cunningham, 2015; Vick and Cunningham, 2018) in application dossiers has been found to be detrimental to academic and professional advancement. With regard to stigmatized sexual identities, sexual minority applicants for a personal training job received poorer evaluations on their characteristics and personality, which equated to more negative hiring recommendations, than their heterosexual counterparts (Cunningham et al , 2010).…”

“…They also highlighted that the degree to which an individual identifies with their marginalized identity can influence how they are evaluated for jobs, such that applicants for a collegiate athletic director position who were classified as being highly identified with their racial identity (Black) were perceived by evaluators to have less fit for the job (Steward and Cunningham, 2015). Thus, outcomes can be different depending upon how much amplification a marginalized individual gives to their stigmatized identity Their work, in addition to studies on the hiring outcomes of LGBTQ fitness trainers (Cunningham et al , 2010), the racial identity of athlete endorsers (Cunningham and Regan, 2012), bias against racial minority women applicants to fitness organizations (Vick and Cunningham, 2018) and discrimination against overweight collegiate golf prospects (Melton and Cunningham, 2016), represents the small amount of literature in the sport management discipline that specifically highlights the implications of stigmatized identity expression within the sport context.…”

Does Leadership on the Field Get You Noticed Off It?: The Value of Varsity Sports to Corporate Recruiters

“…Despite anecdotes of high-profile female business leaders crediting an athletic background -55 percent of females in top management played college sports (Flores, 2013;Goudreau, 2011) -the notion of women's athletics as a codified training ground for leadership and career success has been notably absent from the research literature. A recent field experiment by Vick and Cunningham (2018) examined the white raters' (currently or previously employed in the fitness industry) judgment of employability of presumed Latina and Afri-can American applicants. The researchers found applicants' race and raters' gender influenced recommendations to hire.…”

What generic strategies do private fitness centres implement and what are their impacts on financial performance?

“…In the scope of fitness centres, the studies found in the literature have been more focused on the problems of members and have focused mainly on themes such as: growth determinants, Carvalho et al (2013), consumer satisfaction, quality of service and value creation (Barros and Gonçalves, 2009;Pedragosa and Correia, 2009;Pedragosa et al, 2015;Polyakova and Mirza, 2016;Vieira et al, 2019), segmentation of partners (Teixeira and Correia, 2009), a analysis of the partners' intentions to recommend fitness centres (Gonçalves et al, 2014), human resources (Vick and Cunningham, 2018;Wright and Cunningham, 2017) and abandonment/retention (Rodr ıguez Cañamero, 2019;Rodriguez-Canamero et al, 2018;San Emeterio et al, 2016).…”