Gender and Race Discrimination in Retail Car Negotiations

I still don’t understand when these are supposed to be posted, I wrote down Tuesday November 3rd, but if it is late, I am really sorry.

Ayres and Siegelman’s article discussed whether or not salesman at car dealerships discriminated against women and minorities when negotiating prices for cars. This was conducted in 1990 in more than two hundred dealerships. The testers of different gender and race would go in and use specific negotiation strategies with the car salesmen to try and bargain with them. They also had uniform appearance and behavior so that only race and gender played a role in treatment and “class” didn’t. The results were not surprising.

Ayres/Siegelman state, “Dealerships offered white males significantly lower prices than blacks and women. The average prices offered white women were more than $200 higher than the offers to white men, the offers to black women were more than $400 higher than those to white men, and the offers to black men were more than $900 higher.” Obviously, anyone can see that this is sexist and racist. The other point that Ayres and Siegelman make that I really like is when they stat, “A central purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was to guarantee that “a dollar in the hands of a Negro will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man.”

Professor Rudy gave the perfect explanation the other day on why this is; our society is racist. And I can honestly say that I don’t think it will ever change. Although the Civil Rights Act of 1866 has helped our society with some racism, it hasn’t changed it all. I feel that because I am a white woman, I really only experience sexism. So I don’t really have much to deal with when it comes to racism but I see it all around me. And I can definitely say that if I were one of those testers walking into car dealerships and getting charged more for a car because I’m a woman, I would be extremely pissed off! I think this study is very interesting and I do not want to repeat myself a lot (from my last summary), but like I said, our society is racist and sexist. This will never change. I think it’s pathetic and sad that car salesmen are even allowed to do this to women and minorities, but that’s life. It’s unfair. I hope that since this study was done almost 20 years ago, things have changed, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.