The impact of context on intersectional discriminations between age and gender: The case of technology.
When it comes to intersectional discrimination (discrimination considering more than one identity), two hypotheses are described in the literature: Double Jeopardy (people with several subordinate identities suffer more discrimination; Beal, 2006) and Intersectional Invisibility (people with several subordinate identities suffer less discrimination; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach). One potential explanation for the conflicting literature could be that stereotypes depend on context. For this project, we investigate the following question: How does the description made by a company of a technological tool used in the workplace impact the intersectional discrimination for age and gender during team selection?
To answer this question, we employed a between-subjects experimental design based on vignettes with 8 conditions: 2 genders (female vs male candidate) X 2 age groups (younger vs older candidate) X 2 types of workplace technological tools (communication vs hi-tech tool). To understand the impact of incentives on our results, we conducted the design described above in two phases: with and without incentives. Despite no significant differences between the duration and the performance on attention and comprehension checks, we found different effects depending on the use of incentives. When participants were just asked for their honest opinion, we only found a significant effect of candidate age, with older candidates receiving poorer evaluations. When participants were incentivized to find the evaluation given by another sample, we additionally found significant interactions between candidate age/gender and the description of the technological tool used in the workplace. These results support a context-dependent view of stereotypes and suggest potential implications for research and practice.