Research (Unconscious Bias)

What are unconscious biases? How can you identify them? How to overcome them in the workplace?

International Labour Organization (ILO): Breaking barriers: Unconscious gender bias in the workplace – Research notes. Unconscious gender bias remains a significant barrier to women’s career advancement and it is also difficult to identify and prevent. This research note provides a review of unconscious gender bias and its role in impeding women’s career advancement before discussing how to mitigate and overcome unconscious gender bias in the workplace.

Even for students with the same skills and qualifications, male students would be more likely to be hired than female students

Researchers at Yale created a fictional student and sent out the student’s application to science professors at top universities in the United States. The professors were asked to evaluate how competent this student was, how likely they would be to hire the student, how much they would pay this student, and how willing they would be to mentor the student. All of the applications sent out were identical, except for the fact that half were for a male applicant, John, and half were for a female applicant, Jennifer. Results showed that, with statistical significance, both male and female faculty were biased towards male students over female students.

People of minority ethnicity are still more disadvantaged than majority-white people

Even in 2018, the British still treat minority ethnic (BAME – Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) people differently from majority-white people. This is partly due to persistent unconscious biases, according to research commissioned by the Guardian, which surveyed 1,000 ethnic minorities and 1,800 majority (white) people in Britain. The survey found that 43% of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18%) who reported the same experience.

In the UK, people called ‘Muhammad’ looking for a flat are less likely to receive a response than ‘David’

As part of the Bias in Britain series, a snapshot survey of the private home-sharing market was carried out, in which expressions of interest were sent from ‘Muhammad’ and ‘David’ to nearly 1,000 online advertisements for rooms in the UK. The Guardian found that for every 10 positive responses David received, Muhammad received only eight positive responses. Muhammad was at a double disadvantage compared to David, as he was more likely not to receive a response (44% of the time compared to 36%) and when he did receive a response, it was more likely to be negative (25% of the time compared to 18%).

Women also earn less than men at stock brokerage firms

It has been revealed that two of the largest stock brokerage firms in the US reportedly pay female employees around 60 percent of what male employees were paid. Stockbrokers received commissions from the securities they sold to their clients, making it easy to conclude that female brokers earned less because they sold fewer shares than their male counterparts. However, the data analysis revealed that female brokers received inferior accounts and sales opportunities, and thus were not on par with their male counterparts. 

The talent management system itself contains gender bias, which puts women at a disadvantage when it comes to promotion and advancement

This report reveals that core components of talent management are linked in ways that disadvantage women, creating a vicious cycle in which men continually dominate executive positions. Based on an assessment of 110 talent management systems representing 19 industries, the data demonstrate that the flow of information from senior leaders to individual contributors perpetuates gender gaps in senior leadership. The data revealed:

    • Senior leaders’ influence on the talent management process can yield new senior leaders who mirror the traits and biases of the senior leadership team that promoted them—a vicious cycle.
    • Gender bias in tools and procedures can inhibit the establishment of inclusive and effective talent management programs.
    • When organizations fail to integrate checks and balances that guard against the introduction of gender bias into talent management systems, they make the process vulnerable to gender stereotyping and hinder opportunities for women’s advancement.

Men and women are equally likely to pursue accounting careers but the proportion of women who stay in the accounting profession is declining among senior and managerial positions in larger firms. What could be the reason for this?

In this study, the researchers performed an instructional exercise on gender bias. Both men and women pursue careers in accounting equally, but the percentage of women that remain in the public accounting profession dwindles among the higher-tier and lead positions of larger firms. While there are many variables that could affect this trend, one factor might be fewer advancement opportunities for women due to implicit bias within the profession. Since decisions about what positions to pursue, who to hire, and who to promote will be important choices in a student’s future accounting career, it would be essential to teach awareness of gender bias in the profession and to prepare students with techniques to recognize and decode implicit gender biases. For this instructional exercise, students participated in a simple experiment, attended a lecture with a discussion on gender bias and occupational stereotypes, and reviewed and discussed the compiled data from their responses. They found that sharing the data comparisons by gender helped to spark lively discussions and create memorable learning experiences. They explored the topics of gender bias and gender-coded words in an activity that was developed to test for bias and to be used to build awareness of potential gender bias in hiring or promotion activities. Highlights:

    • Classroom exercise to demonstrate gender bias in hiring or promotion activities.
    • The exercise generates vigorous discussion about implicit bias in decision-making.
    • Gained students’ attention and became a memorable learning experience.
    • Participants achieved the better end-of-semester recognition of bias than others
    • After engaging, 89% reported being somewhat comfortable discussing issues of bias

In this research, when assessing competencies, men and women received a similar number of descriptive (positive) attributes, but women had more descriptive (negative) attributes than men, and these attributes were predominantly female attributes. Thus, performance appraisals need to take into account gendered language and status attributes. Understanding the relationship between beliefs about gender status and appraisal processes can facilitate changes in workplace culture to be more gender-inclusive through less biased and stereotypical performance appraisals.

In the workplace, women often encounter gender stereotypes and biases that reinforce the existing gender hierarchy, may hinder women’s career aspirations and retention and may limit their ability to be promoted, especially in traditionally male organizations. Long-standing and widely held (although often unconscious) beliefs about gender can reinforce women’s perceived lower status position relative to men’s. Because men are described/prescribed as agentic (often masculine) and women as communal (often feminine), women leaders are often evaluated as being status-incongruent. This research explores the gendered assignment of leader attributes with particular attention to associations of agentic competence (deficiency for women) and agentic dominance (the penalty for women). They examined peer evaluations of 4344 U.S. Naval Academy students who are assigned attributes from a predefined list. Although men and women received similar numbers of descriptive (positive) attributes, women received more proscriptive (negative) attributes than did men and these individual attributes were predominantly feminine. These findings offer evidence that women leaders’ status incongruity may be associated with perceived competence (agentic deficiency). Additionally, this research contributes to our knowledge of the gendered language and status characteristics in performance evaluations and can assist researchers and practitioners with developing interventions. Understanding the association of gender status beliefs with evaluation processes may facilitate changing workplace culture to be more gender-inclusive through less biased and stereotypical performance evaluations.

Smith, D. G., Rosenstein, J. E., Nikolov, M. C., & Chaney, D. A. (2019). The Power of Language: Gender, Status, and Agency in Performance Evaluations. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 80(3–4)159–171.

What happens if school leaders have hidden or explicit racist attitudes or prejudices?

This is a survey conducted among heads of educational institutions in Hungary to investigate the hidden and explicit racist attitudes of heads of educational institutions that can affect the quality of education.  The results were also compared with the attitudes of students.