Bringing Bias into the Light

The following sample essay on Bringing Bias into the Light about Jennifer.

In the first part of this article it talks about a strong woman named Jennifer Allan 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 HER consultant to Fortune 500 companies and is leading diversity efforts for PricewaterhouseCoppers ALP. She is doing very well for a ‘Vivian” 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 eased in a family where her father was the breadwinner and her mother stayed at home. Cabmen Hire 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 there 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 TAT test have had.

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Some are just flat out ridiculous. The reason the TAT was created was to give people the realization that they are making unconscious judgments even though they are trained not to, for example HER 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 not handled right away. Millions of dollars of suits have been filed against companies for disparate impact and biases. Retraining Your Brain In this section Hire talks about what she did at the Royal Bank of Canada to retrain people on biases.

Since 2013 1,000 people from corporations, academia, government, and diversity advocacy have attended the hidden bias training. The bank also has internal social media platforms that allow employees to talk about unconscious biases. This training has helped a lot of high up executives and recognize the biases they commit daily and correct them. Allan now even sends reminders to her managers to be on guard for “prototype bias” and “affinity bias”.

There is also a suggestion to conduct blind reviews of resumes and see the outcome. For Smaller HER Shops This last section discusses what smaller companies can do to train their employees to watch out for theses biases. What one HER director did was create questions for her employees to see that it was more important to see the company and culture fit rather than allowing managers to ask biased questions. Janet Harding a director of cultural awareness uses role playing to train her employees at a hospital in Maryland.

This goes to show that no matter how big the company there are always options of training for biases to not only protect the company but also the current and future employees. I took the gender TAT test and I was a little surprised but the results but the way the test was set up made it seem as if they expected you to make a mistake. I took a gender communication class last semester and learned about many biases and how men and women see each other and themselves ND I learned a lot of about my definition of gender.

I also took a diversity and cross cultural management class that helped me remove a lot of biases had and hope to better the way I see people. The statistic that surprised me most from the article was that 7% of salaries for blonde women are higher than women that are brunette and redheads. To me the idea of hair color affecting how much anyone gets paid is just stupid. Someone’s hair color should never affect the amount of money they get paid period.