Are You Gender-Biased?
April 2, 2011
by Marina DelVecchio
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
The following YouTube video was put together by Scientific American Frontiers. The host, Alan Alda, speaks with Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji (Harvard University) and Dr. Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) on how the subconscious mind can influence decision making, especially regarding gender and racial biases. They discuss several experiments that use the “Implicit Association Test” (IAT) to reveal hidden gender and racial prejudices.
Alan Alda takes the IAT test that Dr. Banaji created, which shows to what degree we associate men with careers and women with family and the home. Even while consciously we want to associate females with career, our choices on the test reflect that subconsciously, we don’t. The more you struggle during the test, the more you are at war with your subconscious choices. Try to go as fast as you can without thinking about the choices. This is key.
The video shows Alan Alda taking the test and discussing the results, but then you will have the chance to try it out yourself. Here’s the link for the IAT test. There are other tests to take as well, other than the gender one. There is one on women in science fields, racial biases, and so forth. Take as many as you wish, and see what happens. The tests are very revealing. Let us know what you think about the tests and/or the results in the end.
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Which IAT test did you take, and what were your results? Do you think it’s an accurate indicator of subconscious choices and biases?
That was really fun, you all should try it. I have a strong association between women and family and men and career. Being a woman I wouldn’t want it any other way. My career working in science is important and interesting to me but my family is the most important thing in the world to me.
This reminds me of when my daughter was about one year old and was in a study about child development. The researcher in charge was a woman, her techs were male and the children sat on their Mothers laps during the whole experiment. My daughter would not tolerate interacting with any strange woman and would hide her face from them and cling to me because she figured any woman was a potential baby sitter and I was preparing to leave her. She responded nicely to being chatted up by the male researchers and it never entered her head that she was about to be dropped off. So by age one my daughter had different expectations of men and women.
Bes, that is an interesting take. My results were moderate for the male/career and women/family test. I also took the women in sciences, and I kept bungling up, which showed my struggle with associating women with science. The truth is, even though I want to, I already know that there are few numbers of women in science fields, since it is dominated by men.
Unlike yours, my daughter came out scared of men. By the time she was one, she called men “bad” because every time she saw one, he was wrangling some big and loud machine, like a lawn mower or weeder. I think she was more afraid of noises, but she saw that if it was loud, usually a man had something to do with it. I started mowing the lawn, weeding, and blowing leaves to show her that women could use these loud machines too.
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