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  • Nature Human Behaviour

When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity

By: Erika L. Kirgios, Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang and Katherine L. Milkman
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Abstract

Receiving help can make or break a career, but women and racial/ethnic minorities do not always receive the support they seek. Across two audit experiments—one with politicians and another with students—as well as an online experiment (total n = 5,145), we test whether women and racial/ethnic minorities benefit from explicitly mentioning their demographic identity in requests for help, for example, by including statements like “As a Black woman…” in their communications. We propose that when a help seeker highlights their marginalized identity, it may activate prospective helpers’ motivations to avoid prejudiced reactions and increase their willingness to provide support. Here we show that when women and racial/ethnic minorities explicitly mentioned their demographic identity in help-seeking emails, politicians and students responded 24.4% (7.42 percentage points) and 79.6% (2.73 percentage points) more often, respectively. These findings suggest that deliberately mentioning identity in requests for help can improve outcomes for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

Keywords

Support; Marginalized Communities; Personal Development and Career; Equality and Inequality; Identity; Race; Gender; Communication Intention and Meaning

Citation

Kirgios, Erika L., Aneesh Rai, Edward H. Chang, and Katherine L. Milkman. "When Seeking Help, Women and Racial/Ethnic Minorities Benefit from Explicitly Stating Their Identity." Nature Human Behaviour 6, no. 3 (March 2022): 383–391.
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About The Author

Edward H. Chang

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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More from the Authors
  • A Field Experiment on Subgoal Framing to Boost Volunteering: The Trade-off Between Goal Granularity and Flexibility By: Aneesh Rai, Marissa A. Sharif, Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela L. Duckworth
  • To Drive Efforts...Don't Tiptoe Around Your Legal Risk By: Edward Chang and Bonnie Levine
  • A 680,000-Person Megastudy of Nudges to Encourage Vaccination in Pharmacies By: Katherine L. Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Mitesh S. Patel, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Hung Ho, Joseph S. Kay, Timothy W. Lee, Jake Rothschild, Jonathan E. Bogard, Ilana Brody, Christopher F. Chabris, Edward Chang, Gretchen B. Chapman, Jennifer E. Dannals, Noah J. Goldstein, Amir Goren, Hal Hershfield, Alex Hirsch, Jillian Hmurovic, Samantha Horn, Dean Karlan, Ariella S. Kristal, Cait Lamberton, Michael N. Meyer, Allison H. Oakes, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Maheen Shermohammed, Jaochim H. Talloen, Caleb Warren, Ashley V. Whillans, Kuldeep N. Yadav, Julian J. Zlatev, Ron Berman, Chalanda N. Evans, Rahul Ladhania, Jens Ludwig, Nina Mazar, Sendhil Mullainathan, Christopher K. Snider, Jann Spiess, Eli Tsukayama, Lyle Ungar, Christophe Van den Bulte, Kevin G. Volpp and Angela L. Duckworth
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