ABSTRACT
Age, race, and gender are of importance in a program of research for two reasons. One has the goal of finding differences and studying them to increase scientific understanding. This is the role that Eagly and Wood (1990) have emphasized. It is important to identify areas of differences so that insights may be gained into social phenomena. A second perspective has the objective of minimizing differences so that selection procedures do not exert adverse impact and thus are fair to all. This is the role that guided research on the General Aptitude Test Battery, for instance (Harti-gan and Wigdor, 1989). The source of this approach is more legal than scientific, but nevertheless it has had a major impact on industrial/organizational psychology.
