An Examination of Whether and How Racial and Gender Biases Influence Customer Satisfaction

We examine whether and how various biases may influence customers’ satisfaction evaluations and produce discriminatory judgments for minorities and female service employees. We argue that customer satisfaction evaluations are biased because they are anonymous judgments by untrained raters that usually lack an evaluation standard. In our laboratory and field samples, we find disturbing evidence generally confirming our arguments and suggesting that the presence of nonwhite and women service employees may produce lower aggregated customer satisfaction evaluations which may ultimately hurt individuals and organizations financially.