Bar Chart Looking Glass: How White Men Make Sense of Evidence Showing Intersectional Inequality in Their Profession

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Addressing long-standing inequalities in professions demands that professionals, especially those with power and privilege, believe that inequalities exist and are motivated to act. What promotes this inequality recognition? Focusing on an illustrative case of white, able-bodied, heterosexual men (WAHM) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, this study asks: How do these intersectionally advantaged professionals make sense of data illustrating inequality in their fields? Do they accept it as evidence of inequality or dismiss its legitimacy? What logics do they employ in their explanations? In interviews, we present a representative sample of 101 WAHM professionals with graphical evidence published in a generalist science journal showing patterns of intersectional inequality in respect and salary within U.S. STEM professions. A third of WAHM dismissed the epistemic legitimacy of one or both of these patterns outright. Even when WAHM acknowledged that group differences exist, only a third explained both respect and salary gaps as outcomes of systemic disadvantage. But seeing the data was transformative for some. We discuss the implications of these findings for equity advancement in STEM and beyond; they reveal that recognizing systemic group differences is not the same as recognizing inequalities in professions and that evidence alone will not convince advantaged professionals that inequalities exist.