Workplace Prejudice: How Pandemic May Have Impacted East Asian, Hispanic Employees

Reports of discrimination against minorities increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a new study, researchers have found that the pandemic may have also increased prejudice toward East Asian and Hispanic people in workplaces.

For their new study, published Wednesday in PLOS ONE, a team of researchers conducted a survey in the U.S. to see if "health and economic shocks exacerbate prejudice toward racial/ethnic minority groups." The pandemic saw an uptick in discrimination and even hate crimes against minorities, particularly Chinese Americans, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) noted in a news release.

"Workplace discrimination affects not merely the economic opportunities of minorities but also their physical and mental health, productivity, career advancement, economic progress, and integration with the society at large," the researchers wrote. "It can further alienate minorities and sow seeds of distrust that can have long-term impacts spilling across generations."

However, discrimination in the workplace is often "less likely to be reported," according to PLOS.

The survey, conducted in August 2020, included 3,837 working-age (19-64) American adults. The questionnaire had two versions: The first one opened with a short paragraph on the state of the pandemic (as of August 2020). The participants answered questions on how COVID-19 impacted them personally and then completed a vignette experiment wherein, in a hypothetical workplace scenario, they ranked their preferences for working with co-workers from various racial groups.

The other group first completed the hypothetical workplace experiment and the other survey questions. They only answered questions on how the pandemic impacted their lives at the "very end of the survey."

The results showed that those who were primed with the description and questions about the pandemic had "increased prejudice" toward their East Asian and Hispanic colleagues. East Asians also faced a high level of discrimination from those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and those who were from counties with higher COVID-19 infections.

On the other hand, there were fewer prejudicial responses from people living in counties with higher concentrations of Asians. Researchers also didn't find evidence of prejudice against white, Black or South Asian colleagues.

"Our research speaks to the torrent of violence and hate crimes against minority groups, especially East Asians, since the start of the pandemic, and suggests that the increased discrimination generally reported in the social settings has likely spilled over to the economic settings," the researchers wrote.

They said what they studied were attitudes and not actual cases of discrimination. However, the findings, along with the increased reports of hate crimes toward the affected groups, show they are "not random."

While the researchers couldn't speculate on the reasons why Hispanics were also affected, they noted that "rising xenophobia" during the pandemic might have contributed to the anti-Hispanic attitudes.

"These findings highlight a dimension of prejudice, intensified during the pandemic, which has been largely underreported and therefore missing from the current discourse on this important topic," the researchers wrote.