How Unconscious Bias Impacts Women’s Careers

You may have recently heard a lot about unconscious bias, especially after Women’s Month and Mother’s Day. If you haven’t, let me quickly explain it:

Unconscious bias is a learned assumption or belief that exists in our subconscious. Everyone has biases, and we use them as a mental shortcut to process information faster. Over time we accumulate life experiences and get exposed to different people. We create unconscious stereotypes. Within microseconds, we judge people without even noticing it.

According to the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,

These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.

As a result, unconscious biases can significantly influence our beliefs and behaviors. In our professional lives, it can affect how we hire, interact with coworkers, and make business decisions.

These biases can also negatively impact a company’s workplace culture and team dynamics if not adequately addressed.

Although these biases are ubiquitous, you can reduce their impact with purposeful attention and effort. Awareness of and understanding the biases can help you find ways to combat them.

In this post, I highlight the unconscious gender bias and how it impacts women and share some strategies to mitigate it.

How Gender Bias Affects Women

It can be tricky, but unconscious bias can not only influence the way others evaluate an individual woman or her performance but also influence a woman’s own self-judgments and behaviors.

According to The Sasakawa Peace Foundation’s research, gender stereotypes can influence a woman’s behavior through stereotype threat. This phenomenon was first described in an experiment that is now considered one of the modern classics in social psychology. In this experiment, male and female undergraduates at a top university in the United States, all of whom saw themselves as strong mathematics students, were given a test composed of difficult items from the mathematics section of the Graduate Record Examination.

Half of these students were told that the test showed gender differences, while the other half were told that the test showed no gender differences.
Remarkably, female students performed worse than their male counterparts when the test was described as showing gender differences but performed as equally well as men when the test was described as showing no differences. Stereotype threat leads individuals to underperform relative to their abilities when they are members of a group that has negative performance as part of its stereotype whenever they are reminded of their group identity.

The “Women in the Workplace” surveys conducted by McKinsey & Company concluded that women faced challenges in hiring and promotions at all levels. Still, the most significant negative impact is on the first step towards the senior leadership level (directors and C-level). Research shows that women are less likely to be hired for a senior leadership position and the probability of being promoted is even lower.

The survey also shows that gender stereotypes and unconscious biases impact women’s path toward the top of organizations. It already happens at the management level, where men occupy 62% of management positions and women only 38%. These numbers highlight the stereotyped associations between men and women.

While men are more associated with characteristics like: competent, ambitious, assertive, task-focused, independent, self-confident, decision-makers, and rational, women are more associated with: kind, caring, friendly, collaborative, obedient, discreet, intuitive, and understanding.

These biases form an invisible and powerful barrier that hinders women’s advancement in corporations. It is unintentional, but it undermines women’s careers, reduces the chance of gender equity, and favors men.

Benefits of Diversity and Gender Equity

Studies show that companies that support gender diversity and have more women on their teams manage to increase employee cooperation and obtain incredible financial results.

A global study by researchers from the Peterson Institute for International Economics identified that the presence of women in leadership positions can improve the financial performance of companies. Companies that increased the presence of women by up to 30% in senior leadership positions had a 15% increase in their profitability.

However, the study found that 60% of companies do not have women on their boards of directors, more than 50% still do not have women in senior leadership positions, and less than 5% have a woman as CEO.

The success of companies is also related to the support of senior leadership and the absence of prejudiced and discriminatory attitudes towards women.

Another survey carried out by the Boston Consulting Group in partnership with the University of Munich with more than 1,700 companies of different sizes and segments in eight countries shows that gender diversity, in addition to being a matter of justice, is a factor of innovation and performance.

Strategies to Mitigate Unconscious Gender Bias

The first step in dealing with unconscious biases at work is recognizing that everyone has them. It’s important to use empathy as a critical factor in deconstructing ingrained prejudices and knowing all kinds of biases that affect diversity in corporations.

Raising awareness through ongoing training and workshops is essential for everyone to understand how beliefs, prejudices, and stereotypes negatively influence their decision-making, which unconsciously compromises the arrival of women in management and leadership positions. But bear in mind that training alone doesn’t do the trick; you need to do more.

Organizations must offer employees a safe place to recognize their biases and prejudices. Interventions and training can reduce the occurrence of implicit biases, but conversations, dialogues, and actions can promote even more changes in behavior and learning.

Here are some strategies your organization can use to leverage women’s careers and minimize and reduce unconscious gender biases:

• Develop and empower women. Sincerely help them develop themselves by providing guidance and feedback.
• Increase the number of women in leadership. They will be role models for other women and encourage them to pursue this path too.
• Make small but profound cultural changes, starting with awareness of unconscious biases.
• Create organizational structures with women in all of them.
• Make sure the company is a place that welcomes all people.

To build a more diverse and sustainable organization, it is essential to create an environment of trust and empathy that addresses unconscious bias. It starts with the awareness of leadership, managers, and employees about their own inconsistent biases and opening the way to address the issue of diversity and gender equity.

Unconscious gender bias can also be reduced in Hiring practices.

At ArcTouch, we aim to reduce the likelihood of unconscious gender bias in the evaluation of candidates. Based on our learnings, here are some recommendations that can also help your organization:

• Ensure you provide equity directives and anti-bias training, so interviewers do not feel coerced to hire a woman. The feeling that the interviewer is "obligated" to do it without understanding the context behind it can lead to bias and might make interviewers hire unqualified men over qualified women.
• Encourage interviewers to spend adequate time in the interview and focus on it, avoiding distractions; it can trigger the cognitive habit of relying on gender stereotypes.
• Use structured rather than unstructured interviews. Needing to think about what question to ask during the interview can create a cognitive distraction, and make interviewers unconsciously rely on gender stereotypes.
• Use gender-inclusive language in job titles. Avoid using male-related words such as Chairman and Fireman. This can lead interviewers to assume the position requires male-gendered traits. Instead, use a gender-neutral word: Chair/Chairperson, Firefighter.
• Substitute descriptive language for abstract terms that are more stereotypically linked to men. For example, replace strong leader with an individual who has experience leading a team.

Breaking the Gender Bias Habit

As with any habit, breaking the bias habit is not easy. It is a multi-step process that requires more than good intentions. According to the Sasaka Peace Foundation, here are some cognitive-behavioral strategies that could be practiced to overcome gender bias:

• Stereotype replacement. For example, if girls are being portrayed as bad at coding, identify this as a gender stereotype and consciously challenge and replace it with accurate information.
• Positive counter-stereotype imaging. Before evaluating job candidates for a position traditionally held by men, imagine in detail an effective woman leader.
• Perspective-taking. Imagine in detail what it is like to be a woman and have your credentials questioned or to be viewed as unlikeable for being competent at your job.

Individuation. Gather specific information about an individual woman to prevent unconscious gender bias from leading to potentially inaccurate assumptions.

Increase opportunities to engage with counter-stereotypic exemplars. Meet with senior women in your company or industry to discuss their ideas and vision.

Breaking bias allows us to hire and retain diverse talent, learn from diverse perspectives, generate better and more innovative ideas, and create outstanding products and solutions.

At ArcTouch, diversity is extremely important, and, as a manager, I make sure to always keep the diversity perspective in mind in everything that we do; it is an enrooted part of my work but also a fundamental part of me.

It is unlikely that biases can be eliminated, mostly because society continually reinforces the stereotypic assumptions between men and women. Assumptions that help unconscious bias grow. Even if you consider yourself fair and egalitarian, you can easily activate and apply unconscious gender bias without knowing it.

Defeating our unconscious biases starts with us being honest with ourselves about how we really feel about other groups and reflect on it. Gender bias may not be intentional, but our will to change is.

Having biases is human; the only shame is in making no effort to improve.