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Even more than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination toward a number of groups in employment settings in the United States, workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in organizations. This chapter provides a comprehensive review and analysis of contemporary theory and evidence on the nature, causes, and consequences of discrimination before synthesizing potential methods for its reduction. We note the strengths and weaknesses of this scholarship and highlight meaningful future directions. In so doing, we hope to both inform and inspire organizational and scholarly efforts to understand and eliminate workplace discrimination.

The purpose of this study is to examine how customer race (Black vs White) influences the extent to which customers attribute an ambiguous service failure (i.e. subtle degradation of service) to discrimination and how perceived discrimination relates to customer anger and on-site coping behaviors (vindictive complaining, problem-solving complaining and avoidance). This study further investigated how customer race affects the strength of relationships among perceived discrimination, anger and these three coping behaviors.

This study used a video-based simulation in which participants watched a subtle service failure from the customer’s viewpoint before completing a survey. A total of 421 participants – 210 Blacks and 211 Whites – were recruited through Qualtrics. Multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was used to test hypotheses.

Compared with White customers, Black customers were more likely to attribute a service failure to discrimination and exhibited a stronger relationship between perceived discrimination and anger. In addition, increasing anger in White customers tended to lead to more active coping strategies (i.e. vindictive complaining, problem-solving complaining). For Black customers, increasing anger tended to lead to vindictive complaining at a similar level to White customers. However, the impact of anger on problem-solving complaining – known to be a more beneficial coping strategy – was stronger among White customers than among Black customers.

This study advances hospitality practitioners’ understanding of how customers respond on-site to a service failure that can be interpreted as discrimination. The varying effects of race on customer-coping behavior are also identified. In addition, this study offers practical advice to develop organizational strategies to dissuade customers from attributing service failure to discrimination and to respond effectively to customer-coping behaviors.

Complementing and extending past research documenting the prevalence and causes of racial discrimination in service settings, the present study advances prior work by developing and testing a comprehensive structural model linking race with coping responses via perceived discrimination and anger, and by exploring how race affects the strength of relationships among perceived discrimination, anger and coping strategies.

This research aims to investigate the contingent influence of service scripts on the links between service employees’ job demands and customers’ perceptions of discrimination.

Drawing on prior conceptual and empirical work, as well as conservation of resources theory, the authors propose a conceptual model comprising job demands (job stress and role ambiguity) and two dimensions of perceived discrimination.

A unique, dyadic data set reveals that the two focal job demands positively affect customers’ perceptions of discrimination. Service scripts enhance those negative relationships, such that they have resource-depleting and job demand-exacerbating effects.

This study offers the first research to link customer perceived discrimination with employee antecedents. These insights, in turn, have several key theoretical and managerial implications, and they offer directions for further work in this arena.

Academia remains a male-dominated occupational realm, even though women have made great gains as actors in higher education. The interconnections of work-related and family-related discrimination experiences and work-related and family-related support are analyzed, drawing on over 100 semi-structured interviews with and written accounts of academic women in 11 Finnish universities from all major disciplinary fields. Finland provides an interesting research context, characterized by relatively high gender equality in both academia and society more generally. Exploring academic women in this setting reveals several paradoxes, namely those of: feminization of academia; family-friendly policies; academic motherhood; and academic endogamy.

This study aims to critically review the research on the phenomenon of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services to identify the key thematic areas, scenarios, antecedents and consequences; to provide theoretical propositions for future research; and to propose practical strategies to reduce discrimination and to improve equality in the field.

This paper adopts the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines to collect relevant academic work on discrimination in hospitality and tourism services from 1985 to 2020 and critically reviews and analyses the studies through bibliometric analysis, content analysis and critical analysis.

The findings show that the main sources of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services include sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, lookism and ego-altruism. Discrimination-related research has temporal and geographical variations. A research map is proposed to present existing knowledge of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services, which indicates that while the impacts (at the individual, organizational and institutional levels) of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services have been thoroughly researched, the nature and characteristics of the phenomenon remain context-based and poorly conceptualized.

An anti-discrimination guideline for hospitality and tourism practitioners is designed to cope with and eliminate discriminatory situations. This evidence-based guideline provides useful coping strategies based on the prevent–monitor–manage principle.

This paper is comprehensive in its scope, methodology and wide coverage of discrimination-related research in hospitality and tourism services. It is the first attempt to review this phenomenon in the existing literature and identifies the research gaps and future research agendas.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the limited body of research that focuses on the efficacy of sexual orientation anti-discrimination legislation in reducing discrimination.

Reviews past research that documents overt and subtle forms of workplace discrimination against gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals and describes how legislation plays an important role in changing social norms and underlying attitudes.

Empirically demonstrates that legislation effectively can reduce discrimination.

Informs legislative debate and promotes the expansion and adoption of national, state, and local legislation on sexual orientation anti-discrimination legislation.

There are two claims made by the web marketing/advertising industry. By collecting, managing, and mining data, companies serve consumer's best interests, and by adopting sophisticated analytics, web marketers avoid discriminations that disserve individuals. Although the paper shares an interest in ending social discrimination, the paper is more circumspect about pronounced individualism and technological fixes. Despite its appeal, or perhaps because of it, the paper should not accept the claim at face value. The paper argues that social discrimination may not disappear under smarter marketing; more overt forms may wane only to be replaced by more subtle forms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The paper compares the two most important techniques of “smarter” marketing – predictive analytics and Facebook's social graph – with current discriminatory practices of weblining and e-scoring. While noting advances against overt discrimination, the paper describes how smarter marketing allows for covert forms.

Innovative strategies to record and mine users' tastes and social connectivity for marketing purposes open the way for covert social discrimination.

The paper provides a critical assessment of two claims made by the web marketing/advertising industry: by monitoring consumer web activity and collecting, managing, and mining data, companies serve consumer's best interests, and by adopting sophisticated analytics, web marketers avoid discriminations that disserve individuals.

The purpose of this paper is to examine alleged perpetrators' reactions to being accused of discrimination.

The paper examines how the mode of confrontation as well as the perpetrator's status relate to the alleged perpetrator's state of anger and the likelihood of providing a justification to the victim. To test the hypotheses, the authors conducted an experimental design using an organizational scenario.

The mode of confrontation predicts the likelihood of providing a justification to the victim. The paper also found that both anger and the likelihood of providing a justification for a charge of discrimination are higher when the mode of confrontation is indirect and the alleged perpetrator is the supervisor.

An organizational scenario limits the realism of the study such that results may not generalize to actual organizational settings (Stone, Hosoda, Lukaszewski and Phillips). In addition, the response rate was low. Nevertheless, a full understanding of issues related to reactions to alleged discrimination will depend upon research conducted in a variety of settings under a variety of conditions.

It is unlikely that direct confrontations will be instrumental in correcting misperceptions of discriminatory behavior. Organizations need to provide training on how to manage confrontation episodes as an opportunity to mitigate perceived mistreatment.

Which mode of confrontation is best? Indirect confrontation is associated with a higher likelihood of the alleged perpetrator providing a justification for a charge of discrimination, particularly when the alleged perpetrator is the supervisor. However, anger is also higher when supervisors are confronted indirectly about allegations of discrimination.

The current report is intended to provide a narrow, brief summery of research presented at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology regarding women in organizations.

The conference, which broadly seeks to inform the science and practice of human well‐being and performance in organizations and draws thousands of participants from academic, consulting, and government agencies, included over 35 symposia, posters, and meetings related to diversity in organizations.

Research presented provided empirical evidence that women continue to face subtle forms of discrimination and that there are consequences for such women and their employing organizations.

More multidisciplinary theory and research is needed to identify and develop effective strategies for the reduction of gender discrimination and the achievement of equal opportunities for men and women.

In summary, the SIOP conference continues serves as an incubator for research and practice regarding diversity in organizations. In particular, this year's meeting contributors provided empirical evidence that subtle discrimination toward women in organizations persists and that perceptions of bias can lead to negative attitudes and behaviors.

The aim of the present study was to contribute to the workplace diversity literature by experimentally manipulating gender expression through the use of makeup among women and men to determine makeup's impact on interpersonal discrimination in a real-world job selection context.

In an experimental field study, we applied either real (i.e. tinted) or placebo (i.e. transparent) cosmetic products to women and men confederate applicants. The women and men engaged in job inquiry and pre-interview conversations with store personnel in 136 retail stores across 3 shopping malls that were randomly assigned to one of 4 conditions in a 2 (confederate gender: women versus men) by 2 (cosmetic usage: real versus placebo) experimental design. The confederate applicants were accompanied by confederate observers and recorded interactions were later analyzed by naïve coders. The applicants, observers, and naïve coders rated interpersonal discrimination from store personnel in each interaction.

As hypothesized, women who enhanced their femininity through the use of makeup experienced significantly less interpersonal discrimination than women who did not. In contrast, there was no significant difference in interpersonal discrimination for men as a function of visual gender expression.

These findings highlight the pervasive gender norm expectations for women at work by examining gender non-conformity of women and men.