Myers' January study turns heads

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

Assistant Professor of Economics Caitlin Myers and five Middlebury students found surprising results when they traveled to Boston, Mass. last January as part of their Winter Term class, "Deconstructing Discrimination," to conduct a study on discrimination. The class, comprised of Marcus Bellows '08, Hiba Fakhoury '09, Douglas Hale '07, Alexander Hall '08.5 and Kaitlin Ofman '10, chose to look at discrimination against the consumer in small-ticket markets, areas of spending that do not include houses, cars or other big-ticket items. The particular small-ticket market the class chose to observe was that of coffee shops, and the results, along with the ensuing media frenzy, were very unexpected.

The basic plan for the study was to record the amount of time between placing an order and receiving it for different types of people in eight different coffee shops in Boston. Fakhoury said that it involved taking down a lot of data.

"We tried to record as much data about the drinks, about the customers, about the person who took the order and the person who served them their drink to try and come up with a correlation of some sort that indicates a difference in times between consumer groups," Fakhoury said.

The different consumer groups Myers and her students compared were based on race, age, relative attractiveness, as determined by how well-dressed the customers were, and gender. Comparing the amount of time from order to receiving the drink between men and women showed about a 20-second difference in men's favor that did not change when other factors of the orders were accounted for, like relative complexity of the drink. The result surprised Myers and her students.

"We all went into it confident that we wouldn't find something, but then it turned out that you couldn't get rid of the difference in time [for men and women]," Hall said.

In fact, Myers and her class went on their trip to Boston with a completely different study in mind. The original plan was to look at gender and race discrimination within labor markets, by observing whether customers choose the fastest line or based upon the characteristics of the person behind the cashier in fast food restaurants. After encountering problems in finding the right place to conduct their study, the group was forced to select one of the other student-crafted back-up plans. After spending one-and-a-half days on their original study, Myers and the students selected Bellows's plan and ran with it. Myers thought the study would have been a good one even if it had not yielded such interesting results.

"We know almost nothing about discrimination in small-ticket markets, and that's about 80 percent of consumer spending that's in those markets," Myers said. "This was a small study, but there really aren't very many others like it."

Since Myers and the five students published the study, which was written by Myers with input from her students' final papers, it has been picked up by Slate Magazine, MSNBC and "Here and Now" on NPR. Even CBS' "Early Show" sought a brief interview with Myers before canceling at the last minute. The huge public reaction and interest in the study seems to revolve around the false assumption that Myers and her students are saying that there is definite negative discrimination against women in coffee shops, but this is not the case.

"We spent a lot of time talking about what you could conclude and what you couldn't, and being careful not to overreach, being careful not to say, 'We have found the best evidence of all time,' but, you know, I do think it's suggestive," Myers said. "I think that this is very clearly a study that suggests more work should be done."

Fakhoury also thought more work could be done, as it was a small study.

"It would have been better if we had a lot more students or a lot more time - we had to do everything with five students in three days," Fakhoury said.

The fact that the study size was small and the results, while suggestive, were not hard evidence did not seem to stop the public from treating the study as such, or even trying to comment on it without reading the study itself.

"I think that it was written academically and misinterpreted grossly," Hall said. "It's been interesting to look at the comments [on Slate] and observe how few of the people making comments actually read the article."

Whether the public interpreted the study as it was intended or not, the students who carried it out benefited from the experience.

"I think it's one of the benefits of liberal arts colleges that you even get to do research with an actual professor as an undergrad," Hall said. "I thought it was cool because it gives you a really hands-on kind of way of looking at regression."

Fakhoury agreed. "I really, really enjoyed it," Fakhoury said. "I think it really makes you understand. Any time you do a study after that, you will really understand the challenges, and you learn to appreciate good results, like, 'Wow, they did a lot of work to get that.'"