How do considerations of 'fit' by race and gender influence hiring decisions?

Research on ethnic discrimination highlights the outcome of what employers and hiring managers do, but little is known about the processes that lead to hiring discrimination. When making a hiring decision, employers and hiring managers may face a dilemma when they have the choice between different minority applicants. To understand how they deal with such tensions, a pre-registered online experiment is used where participants in South Africa faced an imagined hiring situation (N=1,255 participants with 12 decisions each; random quotas for representativity), where candidates vary by skin colour (Black, White) and gender (female, male), but at the same time the composition of the existing team was varied along these two dimensions. For each team, the four candidates had to be ranked. The paper will examine how participants choose between candidates depending on the team composition and participant characteristics.