Consumer Preferences for Diversity: A Field Experiment in Product Design

29 Pages Posted: 13 Dec 2022 Last revised: 3 Jan 2023

See all articles by Jeffrey Flory

Jeffrey Flory

Claremont McKenna College - Robert Day School of Economics and Finance

Andreas Leibbrandt

Monash University

Olga Shurchkov

Wellesley College

Olga Stoddard

Brigham Young University

Alva Taylor

Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business

Date Written: November 1, 2022

Abstract

This paper describes a randomized controlled field experiment designed to measure how individuals respond to racial and gender diversity in representations of certain archetypical occupations. We ask participants in two pools – a tech conferences and online – to evaluate their user experience with an image search engine tool and randomize them to see either diverse or non-diverse images. Subjects in the less diverse treatment view images that are predominantly white men for the high-status occupations (boss and professor) and predominantly women for the low-status occupations (nurse and clerk). In the more diverse treatment, subjects view image sets that contain a more equitable distribution of gender and race. We observe that diverse images result in significantly higher ratings across all participants and find no evidence of in-group bias in this context. However, women are disproportionately more dissatisfied with the lack of diversity in high-status occupations (boss and professor) than men are. For the low-status words (clerk and nurse), we find weaker treatment effects and no heterogeneity in the satisfaction ratings by gender or race. Free response qualitative data provide a potential explanation for the findings: while the extreme underrepresentation of women and minorities in the high-status, low-pay professions is salient, the equivalent underrepresentation of white men in the low-status, low-pay professions is less salient. Correcting the asymmetry in the way we promote diversity in high-status and low-status domains has important policy implications.

Keywords: diversity, gender differences, economic experiments

JEL Classification: C91, C93, D91, J71

Suggested Citation

Flory, Jeffrey and Leibbrandt, Andreas and Shurchkov, Olga and Stoddard, Olga and Taylor, Alva, Consumer Preferences for Diversity: A Field Experiment in Product Design (November 1, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4281634 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4281634

Jeffrey Flory

Claremont McKenna College - Robert Day School of Economics and Finance ( email )

500 E. Ninth St.
Claremont, CA 91711-6420
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/site/jfloryeconomics/

Andreas Leibbrandt

Monash University ( email )

23 Innovation Walk
Wellington Road
Clayton, Victoria 3800
Australia

Olga Shurchkov (Contact Author)

Wellesley College ( email )

106 Central St., PNE 417
Wellesley, MA 02481
United States

Olga Stoddard

Brigham Young University ( email )

984 West 980 North
American Fork, UT 84003
United States

Alva Taylor

Dartmouth College - Tuck School of Business ( email )

Hanover, NH 03755
United States
646-3937 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://oracle-www.dartmouth.edu/dart/groucho/tuck_faculty_and_research.faculty_profile?p_id=QQXQ6A

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
29
Abstract Views
169
PlumX Metrics