Bias can be disastrous for its targets, affecting their health, success, and happiness. Can we overcome bias? We all tend to make unconscious judgments about people based on their social identities and the cultural stereotypes that cling to them. However, we can do more to help eliminate bias.
The Roots of Bias
Bias exists because our brains naturally seek shortcuts for understanding our complicated world
- We categorize things we encounter in life and absorb cultural knowledge
- This leads to stereotyping and biased expectations in our everyday interactions
- It takes effort to avoid these knee-jerk responses
- Even if we are not consciously prejudiced, we are still prone to automatic stereotyping
- For the privileged, it can be especially hard to see bias because privilege can create a sort of blindness to others’ suffering
Tips for reducing organizational bias
Uncover places within your organization where workers are evaluated from a personal rather than objective perspective
- Take precautions to ensure that bias doesn’t creep into those systems
- Stay open to listening to people who may challenge the usual ways of doing things
- Consider enacting a form of affirmative action
- Partner with people who have expertise in bias reduction
The Consequences of Prejudice
Unexamined bias has dire consequences for all of society
- For example, if you are a darker shade of black, you are more likely to be arrested and convicted for a crime
- If you have a criminal record you are less likely to get a job call back from an employer
- A woman working in tech gets much more critical reviews than a man in the tech industry
- Even a company with equal numbers of women and men in leadership positions will soon have fewer women leaders if common gender biases are allowed to continue unimpeded
Tips for reducing personal bias
Don’t aim for “colorblindness”-meaning, don’t try to ignore difference.
- Learn your history
- Increase your sense of common humanity by purposefully engaging with people of different backgrounds
- Recognize how undoing bias has meaning for you
- Fighting to create a fairer, more just society may make you part of an important social movement, too
