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60 November/ December 2014 BizEd research TWO RECENT STUDIES highlight the unexpected— and sometimes counterintuitive—obstacles facing women and ethnic minorities in business: ■ One paper confirms that minority entrepreneurs are treated differently than Caucasian entrepreneurs by U.S. lending institutions, even when other factors such as age, attractiveness, clothing, and experience are controlled. Its co-authors include Sterling Bone of Utah State University's Huntsman School of Business in Logan; Glenn Christensen of Brigham Young Univer- sity's Marriott School of Management in Provo, Utah; and Jerome Williams of the Center of Urban Entrepreneur- ship & Economic Development at Rutgers University in New Bruns- wick, New Jersey. The researchers sent three black, three Hispanic, and three white small- business owners to banks in a cultur- ally diverse U.S. metropolitan area to request the same information about loans. All knew basic business and banking terminology, and all were similar in age, body build, attrac- tiveness, and education level. The researchers found that lenders asked black and Hispanic entrepreneurs to provide more information and offered them different levels of information than they did the white entrepreneurs. In another experiment, a group of consumers were asked to apply for loans; each application was rejected. "In general, when minority consum- ers were rejected they saw it as a threat to their self-esteem," Bone says. "Caucasian entrepreneurs shook off the setback and often saw it as evidence of bad judgment on the part of those making the decision." Although entrepreneurial success can be an "uphill battle," he adds, the hill is that much steeper for minorities. "Rejected, Shackled, and Alone: The Impact of Sys- temic Restricted Choice on Minority Consumers' Con- struction of Self" appeared in the August 2014 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. ■ Several studies have found that minority managers can be reluctant to hire and promote other minorities, supporting the belief that minorities who have "made it" view those in the pipeline as unwanted competition. But that conclusion fails to recognize the complex posi- tion minority managers find themselves in, say David R. Hekman, assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship; Maw Der Foo, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship; and doctoral stu- dent Wei Yang of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Hekman, Foo, and Yang analyzed data and peer assessments involving 362 high-level executives reg- istered in a course at a leadership training center. Fourteen percent of the executives were nonwhite, and 31 percent were female. In peer assessments, white males seen as valu- ing diversity received high ratings for warmth and performance. But for women, the same trait correlated to lower ratings in those areas; for nonwhites, it negatively correlated to perceptions of competence. In an experiment, the researchers divided 395 university students into four groups and asked them to view a set of presentations delivered by actors and actresses playing the part of an HR manager advocating for one of four job candidates—either a white male, a white female, a non- white male, or a nonwhite female. In each scenario, presenters noted that all were equally qualified, but that the organization wanted to advance diver- sity. When surveyed afterward, the students penalized the women and nonwhite managers who advocated for minority candidates, but not the white male managers. Because white males seem immune to this penaliza- tion, they could be asked to play larger roles in pro- moting diversity, the authors suggest—this goes against common practice, in which organizations often choose women and nonwhites to direct diversity offices. "Does valuing diversity result in worse performance ratings for minority and female leaders?" was pre- sented at the Academy of Management's August annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Minorities Face Unexpected Hurdles Jerome Williams Glenn Christensen Sterling Bone Maw Der Foo David R. Hekman