Where Do All the Biases Come From?
As a middle child with two sisters, I am growing up with the idea that women can do anything if they want and believe in themselves. The gender doesn’t matter but the hard work does. This notion comes from my grandfather who moved to a big city from a very small village when my mother was born. His motivation was to give her more educational opportunities. Thinking about the history and the culture of Turkey, my hometown, in the 1960s, this was a significantly huge step because our culture was not completely ready to welcome girls in both schools and work environments.
When I categorize the words I saw on the screen during my Gender-Science IAT, my inner voice tries to remind me of my family’s background and all the women that I know from the Science background. This experience is kind of forcing me not to think in a biased way, but it doesn’t completely work. My Gender-Science IAT test resulted that my responses reflected a slight automatic association for males with Science and females with Liberal Arts. So, where did all the biases come from? Thinking deeply, I realize that I couldn’t get rid of the codes or schemas I learned growing up. Sometimes, it came from a teacher, a relative, or a colleague from my parents. Sometimes, it came as a word, a gesture, a piece of advice, or a joke. As we discussed in the lecture, we are not just the reflection of our little family and our little environment. Instead, society, culture, media, and even the government have a broad effect on us, as Bronfenbrenner said in his Ecological Theory. Maybe, it can be the right metaphor to say that we were born like a Play-Dough and ready to be shaped by any external stimulus in any concept.
I remembered that when my older sister chose Mechanical Engineering as her undergraduate degree, she heard some feedback saying that “In that department almost 95% of the students are boys, are you sure?” After a year, when I choose Psychology, I also took some words pointing out that this kind of profession is better for girls because being sensitive, naive, and empathetic will work. So it was assumed that being a girl is an undeniably fragile concept, girls were automatically good at caring, nurturing, and understanding emotions. As a girl, you’d better choose a profession that is not conflicting with your “natural” tendencies. So, as a girl, you need to choose Psychology, not Engineering. To me, it is just dividing people into opposite directions, killing cohesion in society and it forces people to select a profession that is not in line with their interests. So, it creates a greater bias.
Thinking about the recent culture and the effect of social media on gender issues, sometimes I feel hopeful about the new generation because even if they are exposed to gender biases, categories, or strict classifications they seem that they are good at ignoring them and thinking what they are supposed to think in their way. However, I am kind of skeptical that what if all the biases find a hole to leak in their lives, too?
