Employment equity groups' experience of inclusion and commitment to the CAF.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are subject to the Employment Equity Act, which requires federally regulated employers to identify and eliminate barriers to the employment of designated groups (women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities (PwD), and racialized members), and establish short-term, numerical goals to address underrepresentation. Addressing employment barriers experienced by these equity seeking groups is one of the CAF's key priorities. The objective of this study is to examine group differences in feelings of inclusion (i.e., relatedness, organizational inclusion, and microaggressions) and retention-related measures (i.e., job satisfaction, affective commitment, and intentions to leave), the contribution of feelings of inclusion to retention measures, and the effect of numerical representation and number of marginalized identities on these concepts. We analyzed data from the 2022 Your Say Matters survey, which was administered to a representative sample of CAF members, with oversampling of under-represented groups. Respondents included 4,483 Regular Force members (30.9% response rate). The groups under study included Indigenous members, persons with disabilities, racialized members, women not part of another group (non-Indigenous, non-racialized, women without disabilities), and everyone else (non-Indigenous, non-racialized, not women, without disabilities). Our hypotheses were supported overall, such that groups with less representation in the CAF scored lower on inclusion measures than groups with more representation. The number of marginalized identities held by military members predicted the inclusion measures, but did not predict retention-related measures. There were some group differences on retention-related measures, such that women not part of another group scored more favorably than other designated groups, and racialized members scored more favorably than PwD and Indigenous members. Inclusion measures predicted job satisfaction, affective commitment, and intentions to leave equally for all groups studied, suggesting that feeling included is important for all.

Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be.

How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by people's desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctification has profound implications for the maintenance of inequality and societal change. Four studies, across a variety of domains, provided supportive evidence. When the motivation to justify the sociopolitical system was experimentally heightened, participants injunctified extant (a) political power (Study 1), (b) public funding policies (Study 2), and (c) unequal gender demographics in the political and business spheres (Studies 3 and 4, respectively). It was also demonstrated that this motivated phenomenon increased derogation of those who act counter to the status quo (Study 4). Theoretical implications for system justification theory, stereotype formation, affirmative action, and the maintenance of inequality are discussed.

Altering category-level beliefs: the impact of level of representation at belief formation and belief disconfirmation.

This research program investigates whether representational level of information underlying initial beliefs (individual vs. category) and disconfirming information (individual vs. category) influence the magnitude of belief and attitude change regarding categories of objects. In 3 experiments, 2 key effects emerged. A main effect of type of disconfirming information indicated that category-level information produced more belief and attitude change than did individual-level information. Also, a significant interaction between type of information at formation and disconfirmation indicated a relative matching effect, with category-level disconfirmation producing substantially more belief and attitude change than individual-level disconfirmation when initial beliefs were based on category-level information but only slightly greater change when initial beliefs were based on individual-level information.