During a staff meeting we may look around to take account of who is present—an observation that could consider the race or gender of who is in the room. But would everyone notice a complete absence of women, colleagues of color, or even men, in these settings?
Probably not, shows a new international study by a team of psychology researchers.
A series of surveys and laboratory experiments conducted in the United States and Israel finds participants quite often failed to notice when men, women, and racial minority groups were absent from certain settings, including university campuses, kindergarten classrooms, and academic conferences. This bias was found regardless of political ideology and was evident even among participants from the same minority group.
Moreover, across these studies, participants were more likely to notice when even one woman or member of a racial minority group was present than they were to spot the complete absence of a female, male, or a non-White person—depending on the context. They were also more likely to notice the absence of the majority group than the minority group—for instance, participants were more likely to notice the absence of women among kindergarten teachers, where they compose the majority , than they were the absence of men, who are a minority in the profession.
"These findings suggest that underrepresentation can be hard to see—regardless of who you are," says Rasha Kardosh, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People often notice who stands out, but not who is missing altogether, with these blind spots occurring in everyday settings."
The study included an examination of participants' ability to detect the absence of female neurosurgeons—a STEM profession in which women are less represented relative to men—and the absence of men among kindergarten teachers, who are predominantly female.
"The results reflect a broader feature of human attention: people tend to notice what is in front of them, while absence requires more deliberate attention," adds Ran Hassin, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the paper's authors. "A person might attend a conference, read an article, or move through the workplace without realizing that an entire group is absent."
It's been long established that the human mind is tuned to what is present and is unlikely to notice, consider, or learn from what is not—in other words, from what is absent. However, the circumstances of when and how this phenomenon takes place are less understood.
To address some of these questions, the research team, co-led by NYU's Yaacov Trope, conducted a series of experiments in which American participants were asked about the presence or absence of different groups based on texts they read or on faces they were shown on a computer screen:
In one text experiment, participants read a short article that quoted six expert neurosurgeons. Some participants read a version in which all six experts were men. Others read a version that included five men and one woman. Afterward, participants were asked about the experts. Most failed to notice when no women were quoted at all, but they were much more likely to notice when even one woman was included.
In one visual experiment, female and male American participants viewed blocks of faces that, as a whole, largely mirrored the prevalence of each social group in the US population. The test block varied among the participants: in one condition, White faces were absent and in the other Black faces were absent. Participants were then asked about the group that was absent in their condition. Participants were 14 times more likely to notice when White faces were absent than when Black faces were absent.
In an experiment of classroom settings, participants were shown visuals of teachers and asked if they noticed the absence of male or female teachers. Participants were far less likely to notice the absence of male teachers than they were female teachers.
Across the experiments, participants failed to detect the absence of the minority demographic group in that context. Notably, this finding held across demographic and ideological differences, including among female and Black participants when their demographic was the minority group in a given experiment. In addition, participants were more likely to notice the absence of White faces than they were Black faces. Notably, neither ideology nor social attitudes had an impact on these perceptions. The same held, conversely, for the classroom experiment—two-thirds of the participants did not notice the absence of a male teacher.
"Because this blindness appeared across the political spectrum and even among people who themselves belong to minority groups, it appears that the effect is not about prejudice or political ideology, but about shared expectations regarding who is typically present in different social settings," observes Trope.
The experiments were supplemented by three surveys—with the aim of detecting whether or not respondents recognized the absence of minority groups in real-life professional or educational settings. The researchers surveyed faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students at Hebrew University and attendees at an international academic conference held in New York City.
Overall, the majority of those surveyed in both settings gave responses that were consistent with the experimental outcomes. For instance, 86 percent of the participants reported that they did not attend any talks by a Black speaker throughout the duration of the academic conference. Among these, 52.9 percent reported that they did not notice this absence until they were asked about it by the researchers. Additionally, nearly 90 percent of surveyed employees at Hebrew University reported not noticing the absence of Palestinian colleagues until they were asked. The study's authors add that once the absence was pointed out, a majority of participants in all the surveys expressed support for addressing matters of representation in their professions and at their institutions.
"Our research points to a practical lesson: representation is not always obvious to the eye," concludes Kardosh. "This bias in perception can mask inequality and make our environments appear more diverse than they truly are. Simply prompting people to ask 'Who is missing?' may change how they see a setting and how they think about possible responses."
