How contact is related to awareness of discrimination against women of color

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women of color report high levels of discrimination in politics, healthcare, and the labor market. Numerous studies have found contact to be a powerful means of lessening prejudice. But a growing consensus argues that broad generalizations about the efficacy of intergroup interaction are untenable and that we need to study separately the effects of different varieties of contact between different racial, social, political, and gender groups. To date, studies have not explored how contact affects the ability of different groups of Americans—whites, people of color, Democrats and Republicans—to empathize with and take the perspective of women of color. The present study fills this gap and examines whether more diverse personal contacts with women of color are linked to how Americans grasp the discrimination that they face. It pools several large, original surveys of Americans and measures whether different levels of contact correlate with awareness of discrimination against women of color. We find that there is indeed a positive association. Consistent with several studies, we present evidence of a strong ceiling effect: people of color and Democrats were less affected by knowing additional women of color, likely because they tend to start from a higher level of empathetic awareness.