As an all-girls school, here at St Mary’s Calne we are often unaware of how gender bias presents itself in the real world. As such, I will be touching on concepts of gender discrimination and stereotypes, so that we may learn more about it and how to combat it.
Unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, refers to associations we make that are out of our control and conscious awareness. Unconscious bias affects everyone. It is triggered by our brain automatically making quick judgments and assessments. It can also be a product of our upbringing, the opinions of our parents, and those around us. These opinions become deeply ingrained in us during our formative years or through constant exposure to the point where we don’t even notice them anymore. Most of our actions are reflexes and instincts even if they have no substance behind them. This can lead to other people being directly affected by our actions and being unfairly discriminated against or favoured without us even realising.
The main misconception about unconscious bias is that we have control over it, and we can recognise it in ourselves, when in fact we cannot. Knowing the difference between conscious and unconscious bias is key. The main difference is that conscious bias refers to biased attitudes that you are aware of, while unconscious bias refers to biased attitudes that operate outside your awareness and control. I have fond during my EPQ research on a similar topic to this that most people cannot differentiate the two. It is important that we tackle this as a society, because the two types of biases need to be treated and handled differently.
Unconscious gender bias in the workplace is a very large-scale problem in our society today. Examples include not giving someone a job based on stereotypical assumptions of their gender. For example, not giving a man a public relations job due to his lack of ‘people skills’ or not giving a woman a full-time job due to the possibility of her taking maternity leave. Research published in the European Journal of Finance (2018) has shown that professional financial advisors consider female investors to be less knowledgeable about investments than men, and have less control over their investment portfolios, even though there is little to no evidence to support this.
People are naturally biased towards things that are familiar as we tend to fear the unknown. Even when we intend to be completely fair, our brain has a hard time remaining impartial. We instinctively place people into categories using criteria such as: skin colour; gender; weight; socio-economic status; and many others. This is our brain trying to be helpful and productive by minimising the amount of information it must process so that it can focus on other things. Unfortunately, this process can affect our behaviour in undesirable ways, and prevent us from acting in our own best interests. Categorising people can lead us to make assumptions about them that might not be true, even if we don’t consciously believe in stereotypes, our brain has a natural tendency to rely on them.
So, what can we do to stop gender biases?
Companies that are aware of these biases sometimes carry out tests to find out specifically the type and level of their employee’s biases in order to try to counteract and help them manage these biases. For example, during my EPQ research, I interviewed Sally Baker who works for Alborough consulting; a company that aims to deal with unconscious bias and work past it. She said in an interview that, “gender equality is about equality of opportunity”, because if we never give the same opportunities to women as we do men the bias is never going to change. For example, in World War I when the men went to fight in Europe the women took over their jobs as surgeons, manufacturers and all other kinds of jobs that they weren’t allowed to do before. But when the men came back, the women were told they had to go back to how it was before. I believe that these laws and attitudes towards women in the workplace are the main reason that we see the older generations as leaning towards this bias, as they were brought up around these stereotypes.
Proof that this bias has carried through the generations is that even today fewer women are encouraged to study or pursue careers in science. The results of this mean that 90% of people in engineering jobs are men, showing that these societal norms have not changed that much over time.
In terms of ‘fixing’ these biases, they are about how someone perceives the world and unfortunately that can never change, but they can become more informed. A good example of this is letting someone know how vulnerable they are to other people’s opinions and how they affect their own. This can be done using tests in order to make people aware of how they are affecting others, and how this could affect their decision making processes in the future in order to help prevent their biases.
Our stereotypes vary because they are influenced by the people and the societal norms we grew up with. Social norms are very difficult to change unless we have strong role models who do not play into theses norms. In the workplace, with jobs like engineering, girls who want to follow that career path may not have had someone to look up to, a role model who counteracts the stereotype of male engineers, making them less likely to follow their passion.
We are trained to rationalise decisions that have been made by our subconscious without any logical input. It is crucial to acknowledge and question our existing belief systems in order to overcome the unconscious gender bias. Bias is different for all of us but is often at odds with our conscious beliefs. It is unlikely that men get out of bed in the morning and make a deliberate plan to discriminate against their female work colleagues, or vice versa.
The only effective way to override unconscious gender bias, is to continually question the assumptions we are making about others based on how they look, who they are or how they present themselves. A few common ways to get past discrimination when hiring employees include: getting recruiting managers to make each other aware if they notice stereotyping; holding back some details on job application forms, such as the applicant’s name or sex (this is called ‘blind sifting’), that could affect recruiting managers’ opinions; and where possible and having one of the interviewers on the phone so they do not make decisions based on the physical appearance of the person being interviewed.
In conclusion, it is clear that unconscious bias still affects the workplace. This does happen less than in previous decades, however we must still work as a society to reduce the stereotypes we have set out for ourselves. Then and only then we will be able to move forward.
Merry Christmas!
Sophie K, UVI
Photo Credit: ThisIsEngineering: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-working-in-laboratory-3861457/
