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Genetic ancestry testing is a billion-dollar industry, with more than 26 million tests sold by 2018, which raises concerns over how it might influence test-takers' understandings of race. While social scientists argue that genetic ancestry tests may promote an essentialist view of race as fixed and determining innate abilities, others suggest it could reduce essentialist views by reinforcing a view of race as socially constructed. Essentialist views are a concern because of their association with racism, particularly in its most extreme forms. Here we report the first randomized controlled trial of genetic ancestry testing conducted to examine potential causal relationships between taking the tests and essentialist views of race. Native-born White Americans were randomly assigned to receive Admixture and mtDNA tests or no tests. While we find no significant average effect of genetic ancestry testing on essentialism, secondary analyses reveal that the impact of these tests on racial essentialism varies by type of genetic knowledge. Within the treatment arm, essentialist beliefs significantly declined after testing among individuals with high genetic knowledge, but increased among those with the least genetic knowledge. Additional secondary analysis show that essentialist beliefs do not change based on the specific ancestries reported in test-takers' results. These results indicate that individuals' interpretations of genetic ancestry testing results, and the links between genes and race, may depend on their understanding of genetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explicates a central conflict that can affect science research organizations, the conflict between the anti-bureaucratic stance believed to advance science and concerns for gender equity rooted in the universalist ethos of science. We present a case study of a science research organization, using employment and publication records, a survey of 308 employees, and qualitative interviews with 60 employees. We show how anti-bureaucratic organizational structures perpetuate gender inequities for both female scientists and non-scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A primary justification for collecting U.S. racial statistics is the need to monitor racial discrimination. This article aims to show how analyses of Hispanics-who may officially be of any race-tend to miss discrimination based on racial appearance by relying on data that instead capture racial self-identification, a different aspect of race that often does not correspond. The study analyzes 60 qualitative interviews with Dominican and Puerto Rican migrants in the New York metropolitan area. It employs multiple measures to represent theoretically distinct aspects of the lived experience of race. Respondents interpret the Census race question in different ways corresponding to different aspects of race, which often do not match one another. Although respondents experience discrimination on the basis of phenotype, their racial self-identification is a poor proxy for measuring their racial appearance. Scholars need to develop a language of race that communicates the multiplicity of social processes involved. Social surveys must provide measures of these multiple components, including interviewer observations of racial appearance, to monitor discrimination on the basis of phenotype within Hispanic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]