A balanced response to bias

Tackling unconscious bias is the new frontier in organisational efforts to improve diversity and inclusiveness and collect the benefits they’ve been shown to produce across many different domains of business performance.

Understanding unconscious bias and the introduction of interventions to minimise its presence and effects can produce many more benefits beyond those due to greater diversity and inclusions, including more effective and more adaptive decision-making, greater trust and a better learning organisation.

Unconscious bias is one of many factors that contribute to discrimination against qualified and capable women and minority groups in organisations in Australia and around the world.

Compared with conscious prejudice and discrimination, the effects of unconscious bias are more subtle, more pervasive and more difficult to change. 

They’re more subtle because they are unconscious, meaning people are often not aware of their own biases. They’re more difficult to detect because the effects are often not recognisable against the background of factors that influence human judgments and decisions. And they’re more pervasive because they are embedded in cultural norms that shape interactions between people across a wide range of settings. 

They are also difficult to change, because of their subtle and pervasive effects and because the unconscious knowledge that leads to bias is often tied to a rich network of other knowledge that includes identities and beliefs.

Aside from the ethical considerations of unconscious bias, such judgments and decisions are more likely to be suboptimal and less adaptive to the demands and circumstances of the particular problems to which they relate; that is, better outcomes would occur if the bias could be addressed.

In particular, decisions that are the product of systematic and transparent processes are more likely to be perceived as fair, which in turn leads to greater trust in those who make the decisions, the systems used, and the organisation.

In addition, those who don’t like the outcomes of decisions – such as those who miss out on promotions or rewards – are less likely to perceive those decisions as unfair if the process used was demonstrably unbiased.

Research on the subject of unconscious bias explains unconscious knowledge as being acquired when associations develop without people being consciously aware they are learning that two concepts are linked, being aware of the nature of the association, and of the effect the associations have on their responses.

For instance, people might have a strong association between men and leadership without being aware of it. They might have no idea that their life experience created that association, and they might not know how that association affects their responses toward male and female leaders.

Two significant advantages of unconscious processing efforts – speed and efficiency – account in part for our tendency to use it. Unconscious processing and related responses happen automatically, as fast thinking. Conscious processing requires more deliberate processing, or slow thinking.

Obviously fast thinking enables efficient processing of information but this efficiency comes at a cost when the resulting responses are biased.

The two types of biased responses we’ve examined, evaluation bias and backlash, are focused on different types of judgments, including evaluations of competencies and predictions about likely future success and hireability.

Evaluation bias refers simply to a consistent or systematic devaluing of a social group. That these effects are most common in leadership and other male sex-type jobs suggests a mismatch between characteristics we assume are more common in women and attributes we assume are required for jobs traditionally and commonly occupied by men. 

This mismatch can produce more negative perceptions about the abilities of aspiring female applicants as well as more negative evaluations of the behaviour of women currently occupying these roles.

As more women enter and occupy traditionally ‘male roles’ these evaluation biases should logically decrease. Indeed, there is research evidence of a weakening association between leadership and stereotypical masculinity.

However, as women enter these roles and take on masculine attributes they risk a new form of evaluative bias: backlash.

The male stereotype includes both positive and negative traits typically expected of men such as being ambitious, assertive, decisive and self-reliant.

The traits of the female stereotype include being warm, sensitive, friendly or communal and less competent in male-dominated roles. While these female behaviours are typically valued, they are deemed less important than the male stereotype behaviours.

So gender backlash occurs when we encounter men who display more feminine stereotype behaviours or women who display more male stereotype behaviours: a ‘mismatched stereotype condition’.

Generally speaking, information about men and women in matched stereotype conditions is easier for people to process as it conforms to their expectations for how a person will behave. When a mismatched stereotype condition is encountered, it contradicts the observer’s unconscious expectations, creating dissonance.

Gender backlash is a significant issue for women who feel they need to challenge their gender stereotype to show competence. In doing so, they risk backlash in other perceptions and outcomes. 

For example, a successful, self-promoting woman will be recognised as being as competent as a similarly behaving man but will be seen as comparatively less likeable, less likely to be hired and less likely to be promoted. A man exhibiting stereotypical male behavior will more likely be seen as likeable, hireable and promotable.

Tackling the diversity challenge provides an opportunity to build a more adaptive learning organisational culture that could enhance performance across many task domains.

We recommend four levels of intervention to help minimise the effects of unconscious bias which are: raising awareness of the presence and processes of unconscious bias; developing strategies and tools for effective, slower, conscious thinking in bias hot spots; audit and redesign systems and processes where unconscious bias is likely to be an issue; and work toward targeted culture change.

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