Bringing Bias into the Light
Bringing Bias into the Light
1. In the first part of this article it talks about a strong woman named Jennifer Allyn and how she embraces her womanhood and breaks the stereotypical notion of women being houses wives. She got a degree from Harvard Kennedy School and has served as an HR consultant to Fortune 500 companies and is leading diversity efforts for PricewaterhouseCoppers LLP. She is doing very well for a “woman” but even with all her accomplishments Jennifer still associates women with families and men with careers. This is known by the Implicit Associate Test she took. Jennifer goes on to say she was raised in a family where her father was the breadwinner and her mother stayed at home. Zabeen Hirji explains that having these ideas doesn’t make you a bad person just normal and after you accept that it will be easier to look at things differently. The article also talks about skin color, gender and age being the only things considered biases, but there are a lot more including height and weight, introversion and extroversion, martial and parental status, disability status, foreign accents, where someone attends college, and hobbies and extracurricular activities. All of those characteristics and many others can influence how people treat you and who gets hired for what job.
None Are Immune In this section of the article there is a discussion of the fact that no one is immune to biases and lists the number of biases that people that have taken the IAT test have had. Some are just flat out ridiculous. The reason the IAT was created was to give people the realization that they are making unconscious judgments even though they are trained not to, for example HR professionals and recruiters. When the article mentions married men, single women, people with a southern accent the biases came to mind and it astonished me that I thought that way as well. Having these hidden biases can have legal repercussions and are dangerous for employees and employers if they are
1. In the first part of this article it talks about a strong woman named Jennifer Allyn and how she embraces her womanhood and breaks the stereotypical notion of women being houses wives. She got a degree from Harvard Kennedy School and has served as an HR consultant to Fortune 500 companies and is leading diversity efforts for PricewaterhouseCoppers LLP. She is doing very well for a “woman” but even with all her accomplishments Jennifer still associates women with families and men with careers. This is known by the Implicit Associate Test she took. Jennifer goes on to say she was raised in a family where her father was the breadwinner and her mother stayed at home. Zabeen Hirji explains that having these ideas doesn’t make you a bad person just normal and after you accept that it will be easier to look at things differently. The article also talks about skin color, gender and age being the only things considered biases, but there are a lot more including height and weight, introversion and extroversion, martial and parental status, disability status, foreign accents, where someone attends college, and hobbies and extracurricular activities. All of those characteristics and many others can influence how people treat you and who gets hired for what job.
None Are Immune In this section of the article there is a discussion of the fact that no one is immune to biases and lists the number of biases that people that have taken the IAT test have had. Some are just flat out ridiculous. The reason the IAT was created was to give people the realization that they are making unconscious judgments even though they are trained not to, for example HR professionals and recruiters. When the article mentions married men, single women, people with a southern accent the biases came to mind and it astonished me that I thought that way as well. Having these hidden biases can have legal repercussions and are dangerous for employees and employers if they are