While diversity, equity, and inclusion have seldom been higher on the priority list of organizations, managers still exhibit a wide range of biases in the workplace. That’s the finding of new research from the University of Florida, which shows that managers are actually more likely to show both explicit and implicit bias towards marginalized groups than non-managers.

The study utilized Project Implicit, a resource developed by researchers at Harvard that provides a virtual laboratory for testing implicit biases. The database contains information on over 5 million people. The researchers were particularly interested in the responses of those who identified as managers and how their biases in areas such as race, gender, and sexual orientation compared with professionals from 22 different occupations.

“Stereotypes and prejudices harm workplace experiences and advancement opportunities for people from minoritized and subjugated backgrounds,” the researchers explain. “While people undoubtedly experience mistreatment from coworkers and customers, our work shows that managers are also likely to express bias, particularly in implicit forms.”

Bias at the top

The study showed that there were consistent claims of discrimination across racial, disability, and gender lines made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1997 and 2021. Sexual orientation wasn’t a federally protected employment characteristic during this period so instead, the researchers used data collected fry the Williams Institute at UCLA, which showed that nearly half of those who identified as LGBTQ+ had suffered some kind of discrimination at work.

“Once we saw that race, gender, disability and sexual orientation-based forms of mistreatment are all prevalent in the U.S. workforce, we determined this warranted examination of managers’ biases in these areas,” the researchers explain.

They go on to say that implicit bias is something that usually occurs automatically and unintentionally, but this doesn’t reduce its impact on our decision-making or judgements. Indeed, even unintentional discrimination has wide ranging implications for society across areas such as education, policing, and healthcare.

Put to the test

Implicit bias was measured in the research using the Implicit Association Test, which aims to uncover subconscious associations between various mental representations of objects in our memory. Its use to measure implicit stereotypes is probably its best known application and aims to test for associations between racial categories and the stereotypes about those groups.

Explicit attitudes were also measured using a tool called the Feeling Thermometer, which asks participants to respond to particular items by measuring their attitudes toward different groups.

“With respect to explicit biases, the scores as we calculated them indicated that people working in management occupations had an explicit bias in favor of people without disabilities, men relative to women working outside the home, White people and heterosexual people,” the researchers explain.

The implicit bias scores were plotted against an established benchmark of degrees, which showed that managers tend to hold a moderate preference for those in the majority. Indeed, across the 176 comparisons made across both explicit and implicit biases across various occupations, they found statistically significant differences about a third of the time.

Levels of bias

The results of the Project Implicit survey showed that those who identified as managers had a broadly similar level of bias as their peers in other white-collar occupations, such as people working in finance or business. They scored lower than people working in more traditionally blue-collar jobs, like transportation. Interestingly, however, they scored worse than people whose jobs involved some kind of betterment of the human condition, such as educators and artists.

“It’s not that managers are more biased than everybody else or that they are less biased than everybody else, but it’s clustered,” the researchers explain. “Our original question was, do they have biases, do they vary from others with different occupation codes, and will that impact claims that employees make? This tells us, yes, they do, and the type of bias depends not only on the focus but whether it’s implicit or explicit.”

The results also highlight the disconnect between the explicit and implicit bias ratings among managers, with this gap particularly wide when it came to matters of disability. While managers reported that they didn’t explicitly think that people with disabilities were poorer performers, in the implicit bias test they scored worst of all in this regard.

The researchers hope that their findings shed light on the biases that still exist in our organizations and that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have work still to do to ensure that our workplaces are fairer places.

“The bigger issue, though, is to change the way our society operates,” they conclude “Managers can’t do as much about how society functions, but they can do things about how their organizations function.”