by Allison Godfrey, Marcial Nava, Nalini Vineetha, Xiao Chen (Daisy) Ya August, 2020
Despite various governmental programs and legislation, gender inequality in the workplace still persists in the US. Recognizing inequality is an important step to bridge the workplace gender gap, but will people’s statements about gender equality change depending on who asks the question? The methodology of experiments offers one approach to measuring the effect of the apparent gender of the person asking questions on the degree to which someone acknowledges gender inequality in their own workplace and in themselves. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of such experiment and present several findings based on the experimental results: (1) there is no apparent evidence that the gender of the voice giving instructions affects the degree to which a person acknowledges the current state of gender inequality in their workplace or in their own actions; (2) male and female participants acknowledge gender inequality to significantly different degrees. In addition, we discuss the limitations and challenges associated with these findings.