Chapter 1: When Demographics Disadvantage: Why I do Research on Gender in the Workplace (and Believe You Should Too)

You probably do not remember the first time you heard someone say that life isn’t fair. Most people whom I know do not (yes, I have asked) and, quite frankly, I don’t either. What I do vividly recall is how much this saying proved to be a recurring theme during my upbringing. As a lawyer and pastor, my father could recount literally tons of stories involving someone being treated unjustly. As a clinical psychologist, my mother knew that raising a Black boy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana would require her to instill a degree of psychological hardiness and resilience by making me aware of racial discrimination and its influence (see Wang, Smith, Miller-Cotto, & Huguley, 2019 for a recent review on this process known as racial socialization). Together with my grandparents, they took great pains to ensure that I realized injustice exists and people are often disadvantaged by the demographics with which they are born. Being Black in the southern United States in the 1970s and 1980s, there were constant reminders that my race mattered to other people in a way that wasn’t entirely clear to me. These experiences facilitated both my equity sensitivity and an extreme passion for improving the plight of demographic underdogs (i.e., those whose social identity group memberships often placed them at a relative disadvantage to others).