New research finds little support for any meaningful relationship between fertility and racial bias.
A 2009 psychology study made headlines around the world by linking a woman’s menstrual cycle with her tendency to exhibit racial bias. The idea was that when white women are more fertile, they’re also more racist, particularly those who have stronger implicit stereotypes about black and white men.
But research by University of Illinois Springfield’s Carlee Beth Hawkins (a former Chicago Booth post-doctoral scholar), University of Virginia’s Cailey E. Fitzgerald, and Brian A. Nosek of the University of Virginia and the Center for Open Science, casts doubt on the purported link. The researchers uncover no evidence for an association between fertility and racial bias.
Hawkins, Fitzgerald, and Nosek attempted to replicate the study, originally conducted by four researchers and published by Psychological Science. Their follow-up study included 2,226 white women ages 18–60, recruited through Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory for investigating “thoughts and feelings outside of conscious awareness and control.” The participants self-reported information about their previous two menstrual cycles as well as their feelings toward different racial groups. The researchers also assessed each participant’s implicit racial bias.
After failing to replicate the original effect in studies one and two, the researchers conducted two further studies, which also had negative results. Finding little support for any meaningful relationship between fertility and racial bias, Hawkins, Fitzgerald, and Nosek caution that their inability to replicate the correlation may be due to an unidentified variable that would distinguish their sample from those in the 2009 study and in follow-up research published in 2011.
The researchers stress that their failure to find evidence for this link isn’t a guarantee that it does not exist. Rather, they say, their work underscores the need to refine the theory, to clarify under what conditions, if any, such a relationship might be observed.
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