Can Heterosexist Music Cause Hiring Discrimination Against Sexual Minority Men? Testing the Effects of Prejudicial Media Messages

Abstract

Workplace heterosexism is a pervasive issue affecting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees. This study investigated the influence of heterosexist media on hiring decisions by exposing 171 heterosexual undergraduate men to heterosexist rap music, nonheterosexist rap music, or no music and measuring their evaluations of a heterosexual and gay male professorial job applicant immediately afterward. As expected, participants exposed to the heterosexist music provided lower evaluations of the gay applicant than those exposed to no music, for two of the eight dimensions measured. Also, participants exposed to heterosexist messages were less willing to recommend and meet one-on-one with a gay candidate than a heterosexual one. Music condition effects remained, even with demographic factors controlled. These findings suggest that media heterosexism may affect hiring decisions for GBT men and may also influence the treatment of these men in a workplace environment.

Access to the labour market for gays and lesbians: Research review

“…In addition, Kricheli-Katz (2013) manipulated subjects' beliefs about the controllability of sexual orientation by a reading comprehension test. To investigate the effect of media on evaluation of résumés, Binder and Ward (2016) exposed subjects during the experiment either to heterosexist/non-heterosexist rap music or no music at all.…”

“…In contrast, Horvath and Ryan (2003) * and Nadler and Kufahl (2014) * failed to detect significant effects of individuals' attitudes. Binder and Ward (2016) * postulate that individuals' assessments of gay applicants could be influenced by media's heterosexism. He found that male students who were subjected to heterosexist music rated gay applicants' qualifications as less suitable (p ࣘ .05) and were less willing to attend his office hours (p ࣘ .1).…”

Sexual orientation information and hiring: Can individualizing information lead to negative stereotyping of sexual minority group members?

“…Respective findings are mixed: There is evidence of discrimination against (white) gay men when compared with heterosexual men in leadership competence, dominance, and masculinity (Wilson et al, 2017). Similarly, discrimination against gay men was found if participants had homonegative attitudes and high prejudice (Morton, 2017; also see Everly et al, 2016), if companies emphasized the importance of stereotypically masculine heterosexual traits in their job posting (Tilcsik, 2011), and if participants were exposed to heterosexist music (Binder & Ward, 2016).…”

Homosexuality's Signalling Function in Job Candidate Screening: Why Gay is (Mostly) Ok

“…Our candidates' sexual orientation was signalled to recruiters through the first two dimensions of the vignettes, namely gender (man, woman) and marital status (married to [male name], married to [female name], married). 2 Compared to earlier experimental manipulations of sexual orientation such as 'involvement in LGBT organisation' (Ahmed, Andersson, & Hammarstedt, 2013;Barron & Hebl, 2013;Binder & Ward, 2016) or 'reference to LGBT scholarship programme' (Barron, 2009;Cunningham, Sartore, & McCullough, 2010), our 2 The (fe)male names used to indicate their marital partner were (Sarah Adams, Ellen Jones) James Bell and Oliver Smith. We randomly added gender names to avoid combinations of vignettes where multiple candidates were married to equally named partners.…”

“…In contrast to prior experiments in a lab context on hiring discrimination against homosexuals, which primarily featured student populations (Baert, 2018a;Binder & Ward, 2016;Pichler, Varma, & Bruce, 2010), our study features a much smaller body of experiments in a lab setting among genuine HR professionals. Compared to the two vignette experiments featuring HR professionals (Barron, 2009;Van Hoye & Lievens, 2003), our experiment is methodologically innovative as we manipulated the candidates' sexual orientation within subjects so that each participant had to evaluate four candidates with a different sexual orientation (see Subsection 2.2).…”