Who Does Gender Identification Help? Latina Women’s Response to Ingroup and Outgroup Women Who Claim Sexism

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The current research investigated claims of discrimination in relation to the gender and race of the claimant. Female participants were recruited from CSUSB and randomly assigned to one of four conditions (Diversity and White; No Diversity and White; Diversity and Latino; and No Diversity and Latino). The participants were given an article about either a White or Latina woman claiming discrimination at her workplace. To manipulate diversity, the article reported that the company had been cited as one of the best workplaces for women in the diversity condition but not in the control condition. Participants completed measures assessing their perception of the article presented, and feelings about the company’s diversity training program, the lawsuit, and the claimant of discrimination. Participants then completed self-report measures of meritocracy, gender identification, and racial identification, and were finally thanked for their time and debriefed. The results showed that when White women claimed discrimination, they were evaluated more positively by other women if gender identification was high. However, Latina women were not evaluated positively even when gender identification was high. This result shows a lack of support for Latina women facing discrimination and this study allows for future research investigating this unfortunate phenomenon that may result in practical applications for improving support for Latina women regarding discrimination.