Social Psychology Commons^™

The Discriminating Mind: Define It, Prove It, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

Differential group achievements in competitive spheres like business, government, and academia, in conjunction with professed organizational commitments to fairness and equal opportunity, fuel claims that unconscious discrimination operates widely in society today. But attempts to blame disparities by race or sex on inadvertent bias must be approached with caution in the current climate. Many allegations concerning unconscious discrimination do not properly allege category-based treatment at all but rather target the disparate impact, or differential effects, of category-neutral criteria. Such impacts often reflect welldocumented “supply side” disparities between groups in human capital development, qualifications, and behavior. These patterns are not most …