Wokeness at work

March 8th was International Women’s Day and so people at work made a few posts about it. One person made a post about “Gender bias“:

“Gender bias comes in many different forms including stereotypes, assumptions and discrimination. It can be both deliberate and unconscious, malicious and unintended – but above all, it is a common barrier to equality – both for women and those who identify as women.

Today is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the role of gender bias in the workplace and in society as a whole and how we can all become allies and support our female colleagues, friends and family members. The best place to start is with our own learning.”

Person 1

I find today’s “woke” culture quite interesting because it’s actually quite difficult to say the right thing and it’s very easy to be hypocritical. She says “both for women and those who identify as women.” which implies they aren’t equal – this is basically a microaggression. The correct thing to do is not actually point it out, and just use the term “women”. However, she then goes on to use the term “female” instead of women in the following sentence. Ironically she did call out it can be “unintended” discrimination, and the “best place to start is with our own learning.”

Another person recommended these “unconscious bias” tests https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html 

“I tried the gender and race tools and it helped highlight to me where I have to think and work on my ‘implicit associations’. These associations should not be judged by anyone other than myself (they are after all how my brain has become wired over 50+ years) – but will help me understand, moderate and change my interactions and thought process when looking at a whole number of things.”

Person 2

I gave a few of them a go. The ones I tried had the same style. The test is that there’s a group of words associated with 4 categories. You are given a pair of categories, one on the left, one on the right. You are shown one word at a time, and have to press “I” and “E” on the keyboard to assign it to the correct category.

For example: “Gender – Career. This IAT often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males.”

I think the idea is that when Career and Males are paired together on one side, and “Family and Female” on the other, then you will match the words faster because of the strong association that these words are related.

As the Result screen states:

The order in which you take the test can influence your results, but the effect is small. We minimise this effect by giving practice trials after the categories switch sides. We also randomly assign the order of the IAT so that some people get one order and other people get the reverse order.

Harvard

I do think this will have a bigger impact than they claim, although maybe it depends on the individual. When I got to the end, sometimes I thought I was submitting the answers faster because I was used to the way the test worked, but then sometimes I ‘d get the wrong answer and think it was down to the fact that I recall pressing “E” when I saw “Salary”, but then in this round, I should be pressing “I”.

I did the Sexuality (‘Gay – Straight’ IAT) test first, and I was conscious of how it was expecting me to be biased, so I focussed more and was more determined to score higher. In the end it suggested I had a fairly strong preference for Straight. I would have liked to have seen the timings because I was convinced I had scored consistently in the later rounds, or even better because I was aware of how it was trying to trip me up. I think I messed up more in the early rounds because I was getting used to the test.

Personally, I wouldn’t read too much into the results anyway.