Pink tie and blue stilettos — Let’s talk about stereotype and bias
Prologue
I’d like to start the post with a short story.
X and Y were a couple who lived in a fairly undersold locality in New York city.
X was strong, bold and adventurous.
Y was sweet, innocent and good looking.
X was logical, Y was creative.
X loved blue. Y loved pink.
X was an investment banker in Wall Street and Y was a freelance writer working from home.
And they lived happily ever after.
All good? So, how many of you pictured X to be a man and Y to be a woman?
What if I told you that X was the woman and Y was the man in the story. I’ll give you a minute to go back and read the story substituting X with Lisa and Y with John.
Section 1: What?
Does it still make the story believable? Did you have a tingling nudge to re-check the names?
That hiccup, one-second of confusion, that urge to compare something you heard or saw with your believable standard is what I want to talk about today. The ten letter word that is the root cause of multiple problems — STEREOTYPE.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. There are multiple experiments conducted around the world to understand stereotypes and more than 90% of them always fall prey to stereotyping others.
So, why does this happen? Stereotyping is your brain’s natural tendency to categorize, link, and bucket similarities between different people of the same groups to something that could be used as a tool for future reference. It’s your protective instinct, your brain’s urge to keep you prepared for whatever is in store when you meet someone new. Which means it’s possible that if you’ve only met five women in your life, you might tend to think that all women have or need to have characteristics similar to those five women.
Section 2: So what?
When you watch movies and flip through magazines that showcase women/men/others of a certain body type and skin color as successful or unsuccessful/ good or bad, you immediately tag such people with the same characteristics in the outside world, even before you meet and get to know them. The opposite holds true too. When there is very less representation of some type of people, you fear them. You hold yourself back from initiating contact with them. Because, they are just not relatable and feel alien to you. This holds true for minorities.
Now imagine a movie where you only see male characters playing lead roles and female characters made to ‘look pretty’, you are going to instantly connect that as the most ideal situation. This is where the famous ‘men are providers, women are caretakers’ stereotype takes its roots.
Strong and successful women as she-devils, nice men as boring, fat and dark as ugly, thin and fair as beautiful, bearded as macho, blue for boys, pink for girls, Indian girls being shy, Asian people being brainy — all these assumptions bundled up as labels and stereotypes changing the way we think, believe and perceive.
In a large scale, this is just wrong. We are basically projecting our assumptions as someone else’s standard to achieve. And if they fall out of that assumed standard, they are subjected to hardcore criticisms.
Categorizing people into buckets based on your observation of a small sample set not only leads to your dismissal of a person’s potent but also makes it difficult for that person to prove themselves to you. This leads to one of the biggest, most awful aftermaths — BIAS.
Biases can take multiple forms. Some examples-
Cognitive bias — People creating their own “subjective social reality” from their own perceptions. Their view of the world may dictate their behavior. Example — When people around you crack inappropriate jokes and make comments, you participate by nodding or laughing hesitantly because you fear that you will not ‘fit in’ otherwise. You assume that people will not like you if you do not act in the way others do. ‘Peer pressure’ is one of the most common types of cognitive bias.
Confirmation bias — Tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses while paying disproportionately less attention to information that contradicts it. Eg — When interviewers like a person, they look for reasons to hire them and give them a chance even if they are not truly fit for the role but when they don’t like a person they look for reasons to not hire them even if they are fit for the role. This leads to bias in the interview process. The questions might be different for these people, the interviewers might behave differently in these two interviews.
Attribution bias — When individuals assess or attempt to discover explanations behind their own and others’ behaviors. Eg — When you keep rejecting someone’s ideas because you have a problem with the person or you think your ideas are always better than others. But you choose to believe that you are doing it because their work is not good. This is a classic example of outcome-to-problem scenario. You already make a decision and then look for reasons to back you up.
Favoritism — Sometimes known as in-group favoritism, or in-group bias, refers to a pattern of favoring members of one’s in-group over out-group members. A male leader favoring other men over women in the workplace. When you give credits to one person over others because they are from the same group or community as you.
Unconscious biases — These are learned stereotypes that are automatic, unintentional, deeply ingrained, universal, and able to influence behavior. This is what leads to the thought process behind posing questions like ‘how do you balance work and home’, ‘can we talk about what you’re wearing’ and so on to women. On the other hand, talking about ‘achievements and skill sets’ to men.
Section 3: Now, what?
So how do we avoid such biases? How do we stop ourselves from stereotyping? Here are three things you can do.
Question your perception
Every time you make a decision that involves other people, always place yourselves in their shoes. If a girl doesn’t respond to you properly, she is not being a bitch, she just doesn’t want to talk. Not every girl is meant to be nice. If a boy doesn’t want to drink or watch football that’s his choice. Again, not every boy needs to be that way.
The best way to do this is for you to step back every time your brain starts throwing in stereotypes and ask yourself the ‘true reason’ behind your intentions. Start substituting the reason in place of your bias. This makes you mindful of your decisions. Let me give you an example. If you do not want to hire a person, ask yourself the true reason behind this decision. “Why don’t I want to hire that person?” — “Because the candidate is not fit for the role.” But, what’s the ‘true reason’? When you ask yourself that question you are introducing some consciousness in your decision making. “I don’t want to hire the candidate because she is a young woman and she might not be capable of leading a team.” Now sit back and be the judge of your reason. Is it a fact or an assumption? If it’s an assumption, “how can I clarify this?” “Let me ask her more questions to make a better decision.”
Question your perception, reason out your behavior, clarify your assumptions. This makes you mindful and conscious of your stereotyping and helps you have a fair and unbiased thought process.
Negate your bias
This is a foolproof method to avoid bias. If you dislike someone because of bias, give yourself reasons to like them. If you like someone because of bias, give yourself reasons to dislike them. By doing this, you end up negating your bias and clearing your assumptions before the actual interaction begins with a person. This is a scientific method to train your brain. Let’s look at the same hiring example. If you already like a candidate because they belong to a particular group that you are biased towards, then you will lean towards hiring that person and you will look for reasons to hire them. In this case, right before you go for the interview, ask yourself why you shouldn’t hire this candidate. That puts your head in a neutral perspective, sort of like a clean slate. Now, the same holds good when you already dislike a candidate. You will have million reasons to not want to hire that person. In this case, ask yourself, why you should hire this candidate.
This can be applied to any decision that you make. If you like some idea because you respect the person who proposes the idea, look for reasons why that idea might not work. If you dislike an idea because you do not trust the person who ideates, look for reasons why that idea might work. This works like gold.
Standardize your process
Bias leads to dealing things differently with different people. For example, 54% of the people who work in startups feel that the leave policy are different for new employees as opposed to the ones who’ve been in the company for a while. They claim to have it easy. Difference in process might seem like a smaller problem to think about, but is something that truly deters equity and growth in the workplace. Standardization ensures homogeneity in process and also makes it easy for you to put your bias aside.
Again, the process should be formulated in such a way that it does not cause trouble to one particular person or group of people.
Circling back to the hiring example, this HBR article talks about how unstructured interviews — which lack defined questions whereby a candidate’s experience and expertise are meant to unfold organically through conversation are often unreliable for predicting job success. On the other hand, focusing on a standard set of questions that allow you to check the true potential of the candidate and the fit for the company, can help with pointing out the actual factors that help with a hiring decision. You also know for sure that the candidate is selected because of their skill set and not because they were ‘likeable’.
Epilogue
Stereotype and bias are not something that can be easily solved. However one way to start contributing to the change is by being aware of the problem and making conscious decisions thereafter. Understand that all of us are biased at some level, and it is important to first be aware of the problem so that it’s easier to empathize.
The second thing you need to start doing is acknowledge the bias. When someone points out your stereotype, acknowledge it. Start pointing out your own stereotypes. Acknowledgement takes in more effort than being aware of the problem. Here you are accepting that you are a contributor to this problem. Yes, it’s a little difficult, but push yourself to acknowledge it. Next time you deny someone an opportunity, think about bias. Next time you mock at someone, think about stereotypes. Acknowledge. Be responsible.
Let go of your bias. Fight it out. ACT as fast you can!
