The one universal about working life is that we get too many emails. Indeed, whole books have been written explaining how we can better manage our email load. Yet, despite our complaints and the arrival of various other forms of workplace communication, the humble email remains the bedrock of how we engage with each other at work.
Data suggests we send and receive around 120 emails every day, so it’s inevitable that some emails will have rather more priority than others. Unfortunately, new research from Penn State suggests that the race of the sender may play a part in our response times.
Response times
The study, which examined emails from over 250,000 people across the United States, found that we tend to respond to emails slower when we think it was sent from a Black person than we do to emails we think were sent from a white person.
Many of the racial biases we exhibit are unconscious, but their impact can be extremely pervasive. For instance, the Harvard Business Review recently highlighted the “angry Black woman” bias that sees us so often conflate normal conversation for excessive and harmful emotion. The Penn study reminds us that this is an issue even in something as seemingly benign as email communication.
“More blatant types of racism like physical violence and verbal abuse are certainly a problem, but we wanted to look at the subtler, less extreme stuff that has a tendency to build up over time,” the researchers explain. “It’s the microaggressions and indignities that add up over the course of a person’s life. Microaggressions are little things that need to be considered, because we think the little things matter.”
Subtle discrimination
The researchers accepted that there has been considerable research into overt forms of racism, so wanted to instead focus their attention on subtler, yet still extremely common forms of discrimination.
They trawled through the emails of around 250,000 people, with the sample containing Black, Asian American/Pacific Islander, white, and Hispanic/Latino people, with the proportion of each reflecting levels across society generally.
The volunteers were sent an email asking them to participate in a survey about contemporary political issues. The emails were designed to appear as though they were coming from an ostensibly white name or an ostensibly Black name, with the names taken from government records and using previous research to determine names perceived as either Black or white.
The volunteers each received one email from an assumed white sender and one from an assumed Black sender. The emails were sent a few weeks apart, and each contained the invitation to complete the political survey. The researchers tracked how many people opened each email and whether the survey link was clicked or not.
“A lot of prior studies on racial beliefs have been attitudinal, where researchers asked people about their feelings about minority groups,” the authors explain. “But in those types of studies, people will often hide or not be truly honest about their beliefs. Our measure of discrimination is behavioral. We didn’t care about what people said, we cared about what people did.”
Subconscious acts
The results show that there were subtle differences in the response rates to the email, with 1.6% of the volunteers responding to emails presumed to be from white senders versus 1.4% for those presumed to be from a Black sender. This may sound like a small difference, but given the size of the sample, it translates to just 3,620 responses for the Black sender versus 4,007 from the white sender. In other words, the chance of the white sender getting a response was nearly 16% higher than their Black peer.
“Our definition of discrimination had nothing to do with ill intent and everything to do with disproportionate treatment in some kind of way,” the authors say. “And we did find that. Additionally, we still found that result when breaking it down by geographic region. People might assume discrimination may be worse in certain parts of the country, but we didn’t find that.”
The results highlight how subtle and subconscious biases prevail and how difficult they are to overcome. Similar biases have been observed in areas such as response rate to Airbnb hosts and demonstrate the amount of work still required to achieve meaningful equality in society.
