In the News: Science Wants to Smash Discrimination

“There are a lot of people who are very sincere in their renunciation of prejudice,” she said. “Yet they are vulnerable to habits of mind. Intentions aren’t good enough.”

The quote above is by Patricia Devine, the director of the Prejudice Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and it highlights one of the most difficult elements of bias and prejudice to stamp out. While it is an absolutely necessary first step to renounce conscious prejudice and racism, even individuals with the best intentions are still prone to make unconscious snap decisions and assumptions about people based on preconceived and internalized stereotypes.

The latest issue of the Atlantic has an excellent profile on work that Devine and her team are doing to create a protocol for eliminating unconscious bias. While others have attempted to develop methodology for tackling this problem, nothing seems to have proven effective. The Atlantic writes:

“Until, perhaps, now. I traveled to southern Wisconsin, because Devine and a small group of scientists have developed an approach to bias that actually seems to be working — a two-hour, semi-interactive presentation they’ve been testing and refining for years. They’ve created versions focused on race and versions focused on gender. They’ve tried it with students and faculty. Next, they’ll test it with police.”

Implicit bias can mean the difference between getting hired after a great interview and getting dinged, as well as color the entire workplace experience. Georgene Huang, the CEO of the amazing startup Fairygodboss.com, a tech enabled marketplace to keep women informed about potential employers , recently wrote an article for Forbes giving a shout-out to HP for acknowledging and implementing training to combat implicit bias. She writes:

HP recently released a video that caught my eye because it drove home exactly the cost of someone’s race when it comes to getting hired. In this video, HP tells us that “when qualified for a job, African-Americans are 3 times more likely to experience a denial.”

She also goes on to describe experiences of women of color in the job market :

Even after they are actually employed, self-identified black women in our community generally report being less satisfied at work than Caucasian women. According to Fairygodboss community data, only 37% of black women say their job satisfaction levels are a 4 or 5 (on a scale of 1–5 where 5 is very satisfied with their job) compared to 52% of Caucasian women.

Understanding these inequities, HP is working on a large campaign to begin the hard work of ramping up diversity, and is putting its hiring managers through implicit bias training.

Implicit bias is thankfully now being discussed in the context of a wide spectrum of spaces — not just Silicon Valley, but also with regards to the arts, the sciences, politics, and law enforcement. Implicit bias is not just a major roadblock in equitable hiring and the maintenance of diverse workplaces, but as this article makes abundantly clear it also can also be the difference between life and death.

The work Devine and her team are doing highlights the complexity and enormity of the problem, and the jury is still out regarding how best to tackle it. That being said, she insists that the first step is awareness. The Atlantic writes:

“And if there’s one thing the Madison workshops do truly shift, it is people’s concern that discrimination is a widespread and serious problem. As people become more concerned, the data show, their awareness of bias in the world grows, too. In the days after attending, I noticed my own spontaneous reactions to other people to an almost overwhelming degree. The day I left Madison, in the lobby of my hotel, I saw two people standing near the front desk. They were wearing worn, rumpled clothes, with ragged holes in the knees. As I glanced at them, a story about them flickered in my mind. They weren’t guests staying here, I thought; they must be friends of the clerk, visiting him on his break.”

It was a tiny story, a minor assumption, but that’s how bias starts: as a flicker — unseen, unchecked — that taps at behaviors, reactions, and thoughts. And this tiny story flitted through my mind for seconds before I caught it. My God, I thought, is this how I’ve been living?

Afterwards, I kept watching for that flutter, like a person with a net in hand waiting for a dragonfly. And I caught it, many times. Maybe this is the beginning of how my own prejudice ends. Watching for it. Catching it and holding it up to the light. Releasing it. Watching for it again.

It’s a long battle, but this is a good place to start.