Shifting Attention, shifting outcomes: using salience nudges to debias access to opportunities within organizations

Affirmative action often triggers resistance by restricting decision-makers' autonomy, risking backlash against the very groups it aims to help. This paper evaluates a gentler alternative—a salience nudge—aimed at reducing biases in access to opportunities within organizations. Through a natural field experiment involving nominations for a prestigious training program in an organization, I test whether reminding gatekeepers not to overlook talented low-status candidates can correct biases without provoking backlash or compromising candidate quality. Nominators were randomly assigned either to a control group emphasizing performance-based nominations or to a treatment group receiving an additional salience nudge highlighting qualified low-status students. The experiment's key findings reveal that the salience nudge eliminated the underrepresentation of low-status nominees, raising their nomination rates from 23% in the control to 31% in the treated group, aligning nominations with their actual presence in the organization. Importantly, this equity improvement did not trigger backlash nor compromise nominee quality, with performance and engagement into the program remaining high. A follow-up experiment further validated salience, rather than debiasing or institutional pressure, as the primary mechanism. These results highlight that cognitive nudges can effectively enhance equity in organizational selection processes without the resistance associated with coercive policies.