Bias among managers: Its prevalence across a decade and comparison across occupations

Abstract

Employees from minoritized and subjugated groups have poorer work experiences and fewer opportunities for advancement than do their peers. Biases among decision makers likely contributes to these patterns. The purposes of this study were to (a) examine the explicit biases and implicit biases among people in management occupations (e.g., chief executives, operations managers, advertising and promotions managers, financial managers, and distributions managers, among others) and (b) compare their biases with people in 22 other occupations. The authors analyzed responses from visitors to the Project Implicit website, including assessments of their racial, gender, disability, and sexual orientation biases from 2012 to 2021. Results indicate that managers expressed moderate levels of explicit and implicit bias across all dimensions. Managers differed from people in other occupations in roughly one-third of the comparisons. The biggest differences came in their implicit biases, with managers expressing more bias than people in other occupations. The study’s originality rests in the scope of the work (the authors analyzed data from over 5 million visitors representing 23 broad occupations); comparison of people in management occupations to those in other work settings; and empirically demonstrating the biases that managers have.