Exposure to Successful Women and Racial Minorities Who Defy Stereotypes About Their Groups Leads to Inflated Perceptions of Diversity in Organizations

The presence of historically underrepresented minority employees who defy negative stereotypes can have widespread organizational benefits. For example, hiring highly successful women and racial minority employees can reduce stereotypes about their groups, set a precedent for more inclusive norms, and create role models for members of stereotyped groups. Yet, defying stereotypes also makes these employees particularly salient, as their success in organizations conflicts with stereotyped expectations regarding their career outcomes. By integrating insights from the stereotype content model and the process of attribute substitution from dual process theory, the authors argue that the salience of highly successful women and racial minority employees can ironically have negative secondary consequences for the groups from which they hail. Specifically, they propose that exposure to successful women and racial minorities can lead to inflated perceptions of gender and racial diversity, as the salience of such stereotype defiers is used to evaluate their groups’ prevalence. The authors further suggest that such inflated diversity perceptions can significantly hinder organizational efforts to advance the interests of the historically underrepresented minority groups in question. They test our predictions across four complementary studies: three experiments (including stimuli generated with real data for gender diversity in organizations in the United States) and a study that combines real gender diversity and gender pay gap data from organizations in the United Kingdom with experimental data on diversity perceptions.