Discrimination - Publications - Faculty & Research

21 Feb 2023
Research & Ideas

What's Missing from the Racial Equity Dialogue?

highlight key considerations that aren’t at the forefront of today’s dialogue about racial discrimination and injustice. Here’s what they said: Broderick Turner: Anti-Black racism affects White people We do not connect the dots on how... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost

25 Jan 2017
HBS Case

How Should Advertisers Respond to Consumer Demand for Whiter Skin?

director Nandita Das became its unofficial brand ambassador, speaking out against skin color discrimination (or “colorism”) and refusing to be air brushed or lightened for her film roles. The campaign was designed to get attention, and... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Beauty & Cosmetics

13 Dec 2021
Research & Ideas

The Unlikely Upside of Mergers: More Diverse Management Teams

diversity.” For some post-M&A executives, however, the main motivation for promoting women and people of color is to avoid discrimination lawsuits. As one executive told Zhang: “We do not want to be on the front page of the Wall... View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

08 May 2023
Research & Ideas

How Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Crushed Crowdfunding for Minority Entrepreneurs

William Kerr. In a new paper, Kerr and his collaborators shed light on how discrimination affects fundraising, and ways crowdfunding sites, entrepreneurs, and investors can take action. Minority business founders already typically face a... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis

20 Sep 2022
Research & Ideas

How Partisan Politics Play Out in American Boardrooms

companies, but also for policymakers and society at large,” says Kempf. “For example, should we protect political identity in the workplace? Currently, US federal law and many state laws do not prohibit private employers from View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

Research Summary

Corporate Lobbying Strategy and Foreign MNEs

“U.S. Defense Contracts and the Lobbying Strategies of Foreign MNEs: The Liability of Foreignness and Make-or-Buy Decisions about Political Goods”

Many firms engage in lobbying with the expectation that their lobbying efforts will... View Details

Keywords: Non-market Strategy; Political Strategy; Lobbying; Make V. Buy; Multinational Enterprise; Global Strategy; United States

27 Sep 2021
Research & Ideas

Managers, Your Employees Don’t Want to Be Facebook ‘Friends’

and beliefs online with the wrong colleague may expose employees to career consequences, such as not being hired or promoted and being discriminated against.” Workers are wary of friending bosses Across four studies, the authors examined... View Details

Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka

08 Mar 2022
Research & Ideas

Representation Matters: Building Case Studies That Empower Women Leaders

Association presented their “Guidelines for Avoiding Discrimination against Women in Written Materials” to top HBS administrators, and have been elevating the issue of gender in cases ever since. Although applying a gender lens to case... View Details

Keywords: by Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg

05 Dec 2016
Research & Ideas

How The 2016 Presidential Candidates Misled Us With Truthful Statements

innocent. Though Trump was young (27 years old), he was the company’s president. And though there may have been other firms sued at other times, the Trumps were the only one sued at that particular time. Click to watch.Trump defends himself against housing View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

08 Dec 2020
Research & Ideas

Why Companies Hunt for Talent on Digital Platforms, Not in Resume Piles

field studies, researchers tend to think that workers submit resumes to open positions. In fact, scholars have learned a lot about discrimination in labor markets by sending resumes to job postings to see who gets called back and who... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Employment

04 Mar 2020
Research & Ideas

How Schmoozing with the Boss Helps Men Get Promoted

39 percent of the gender pay gap The social advantage male employees enjoyed with male bosses didn’t occur instantly when they were first paired together, which suggests that knee-jerk discrimination and chauvinism are probably not at... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

19 Sep 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Isn't Business Research More Relevant to Business Practitioners?

successful fights against adware and spyware companies, and coauthored multiple studies that revealed racial discrimination among Airbnb hosts and guests. He also has published numerous articles in top academic journals. That said, he has... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Education

14 Sep 2017
Op-Ed

Op-Ed: Google Engineer Deserved to be Fired by the CEO

pointed out, he justified his assertions by cherry-picking research on gender differences. The real risk of Damore’s generalizations, expressed in a business context, is that they give license to people to behave as if those beliefs are true. This can lead to hidden or... View Details

Keywords: by Bill George

19 Nov 2019
Op-Ed

Gender Bias Complaints against Apple Card Signal a Dark Side to Fintech

to make loan and underwriting decisions, as the Apple Card situation illustrates, the potential for discrimination grows. “When lending relies on algorithms to make loan and underwriting decisions, as the Apple Card situation illustrates,... View Details

Keywords: by Karen G. Mills; Financial Services

30 Apr 2014
Research & Ideas

Venture Investors Prefer Funding Handsome Men

of all, the studies show. The findings are detailed in the paper Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men, published in the March 2014 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our paper provides concrete proof that gender View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Financial Services

19 Feb 2014
Research & Ideas

Racist Umpires and Monetary Ministers

business and economics as a whole. Eyes On The Ball In order to determine the effect of racial discrimination on baseball games, Parsons and colleagues Johan Sulaeman of Southern Methodist University, Michael C. Yates of Auburn... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Sports; Information; Publishing

19 Jun 2018
First Look

New Research and Ideas, June 19, 2018

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=54599 When Gender Discrimination Is Not About Gender By: Coffman, Katherine B., Christine L. Exley, and Muriel Niederle Abstract—We use an experiment to show that employers prefer to hire... View Details

Keywords: Dina Gerdeman

11 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won’t

Call it corporate alchemy. New research finds that multinational companies can spin gender bias into gold by recruiting and hiring well-educated female managers in countries that traditionally discriminate against women. Employing women... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

21 Jun 2004
Research & Ideas

Racial Diversity Pays Off

objective, branch-level productivity measures, Ely said. In general, Ely added, companies such as the one they studied tend to take on one of three perspectives about diversity: 1. Discrimination and fairness perspective. The work groups... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

06 Aug 2007
Research & Ideas

High Hills, Deep Poverty: Explaining Civil War in Nepal

diversity (can people communicate or not?) and caste diversity (how much do some people want to keep away from other people?). About 90 percent of the population in Nepal is Hindu, but within Hindu society there are many castes and a lot of View Details