To investigate whether or not sexism was present in the workplace, 48 male bank supervisors were each given a personnel file and
asked to judge whether the person represented in this file should be recommended for promotion or whether the person's file should be held. The files were identical except that half of the files were labeled Male and the other half Female. The data is summarized below. Promote No promotion Total Male 21 3 24 Female 14 10 24 Total 35 13 48
There is a clear bias. It is important however to not look at how many women got promoted with respect to men but which proportion of each subset got promoted. In the man files, 21/24 got promoted; this is a very high percentage, equal to 87.5%. Nonetheless, regarding women, 14/24 got promoted, 58,3%, barely over half of them. Hence, we conclude that there is a significant bias that favors male workers.
