Oh my goodness. I still can’t really believe it myself but it seems it’s true. It appears that I have a personal bias that suggests that career more closely aligns with men and family more closely aligns with women.
Maybe this should not surprise me, since I care deeply about both, but somehow feel I should get extra credit for having grown other humans in my body, my personal trump card in the gender equality [superiority] game.
How did I get here? To the idea of taking a test to check for bias?
I was from reading James Chartrand’s confession that he was a woman writing under a pen name. Such a well written and deeply personal story of gender bias blew my mind. I just could not believe that in this day and age this could still be happening.
But, of course, there are countless studies that say it is, I just figured it was only things like boards of directors in places like the UK and California, not bias against something as basic as your name.
And yet, I gave my daughter a gender neutral name.
I decided to try to test myself to see where I stood in the whole bias discussion. Not only did the results tell me I am biased, I felt it taking the test. I could literally feel my brain working much harder to resolve those questions that had career and female together. Ick!
I must admit I’m still shaken by the result.
We have to face the reality that we are biased. Each and every one of us. In America, we are most frequently biased by age, race, height, gender and even attractiveness.
The irony is, that for most of us we really don’t mean to be. We honestly think that we see everyone as equal but the evidence does not support that. The reality is, that we see the world based upon our own personal experiences. Our world view is closely tied to what we have seen, what we have experienced, and what we have been exposed to personally.
Social scientists suggest that the key to reworking bias, is experience. In other words we need to continue to have more role models and we need to continue to see change.
Seeing examples helps us better establish those relationship pairings in our brains that are so strongly rooted in our being. It is entirely possible, that my girls will have a more gender neutral view of the word career.
Or, at least, I hope so.
If you are interested to test yourself here is the link
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