Unconscious Bias
Unconscious bias is an inborn part of the ways people think.
In 2015, University of Wisconsin Professor, Patricia G. Devine, wanted to find out if there was anything we could do to lessen the impact of unconscious bias. Specifically, she looked at whether unconscious bias could be mitigated when it came to hiring in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.
Her own school’s STEM department only hired women at about a thirty-two percent rate. Even though about forty percent of stem doctorates are awarded to women.
Dr. Devine suspected unconscious bias led to some of this disparity. So she trained half of the STEM departments at University of Wisconsin on evaluating and interrupting unconscious bias.
After two years, the departments that got the training, were hiring women at the rate of 47 percent. Making people aware of what bias looks like and how it affects people, led the departments to change the way they hire.
Hello, my name is Fidel Andrada. Unconscious bias is an inborn part of the ways people think.
But with work, you can interrupt it and change it.
Unconscious bias isn’t’ set in stone. You can change it.
Unconscious bias is a feature of your brain, caused by its tendency to categorize. But by noticing your unconscious bias, you can lessen its impact on your decisions.
Think about it: you’ve probably changed your brain before.
Have you ever quit a bad habit, or started a good one? Have you ever become friends with someone you originally didn’t like? No matter what you did, the first step was almost certainly recognizing what you wanted to change.
It’s the same with unconscious bias: Once you become aware of and honest about your unconscious biases, you can begin to change your behavior accordingly.
For example, you might notice that you have a slight bias against Asian people. That might mean you haven’t treated them in the same manner as people of European decent and born in this country.
Perhaps you’ll ask certain people questions about US history even though a person from Asia has the same ability to answer them correctly. Your mannerism may not have been insulting, but it’s still unconscious bias.
Once you recognize it, you can work hard when you’re with immigrants and not let that bias affect how you treat them.
Recognizing a bias isn’t easy. It’s hard to find your biases, let alone admit to some of them. But once you recognize that you have a bias, I promise you’ll already start to feel yourself mitigating it.
If you realize that you tend to interrupt people who belong to a certain group, you actually start to notice yourself doing it and you’ll be able to stop it sometimes.
You won’t completely erase a bias overnight, but you’ll make progress, you’ll get better, and over time, it will get even easier.
Unconscious bias is built into your brain. But you can learn to notice and mitigate it.
Or simply know that even if you can’t eliminate bias, you can still work to lessen it.
Consider this:
Take a moment to think about a habit (or thought or action) you’ve changed in the past. Maybe you quit smoking, or started a new diet, or started reading every day. What did you do to change that habit? Knowing that you changed a habit in the past, do you feel more comfortable pursuing to change your bias in the future?
