Advisory: Your Brain has Implicit Content

The article in the New York Times magazine this week, titled, ‘Why are there still so few women in science?’, prompted me to reflect on the concept of implicit bias. According to those who study the way people make decisions and judgments, all of us have implicit bias, and in a way, all of us are also victims of it. I’ll explain what it is below; first, I’ll talk about why the NYT article brought it to mind.

 This article took a different view of the skewed gender ratios in STEM (science/technology/engineering/math) fields compared to many other recent publications, by focusing not on work-life balance and its challenges for women, but on the subtle discouragement and lack of support women receive all along their career paths. Most of the article is anecdotal; the author relies on her own experiences and those of women in STEM to demonstrate how women and girls with exceptional intelligence and talents in these fields are still not being accepted and mentored in a way that would ensure their success.

Boy, this article rings true for me. Rather than boring all of you with my own stories, I’d like to focus on an interesting aspect of the article, in which the author, Eileen Pollack, asks her former professors and teachers why they didn’t show her more support and encouragement to go into the sciences. It’s fascinating that most of them don’t perceive that they discouraged her in any way—yet, that’s the way Ms. Pollack experienced her interactions with them. She opens the article with the study I referenced on this blog a couple of months ago, in which male AND female researchers were presented with imaginary applicants for a laboratory position, and overwhelmingly chose ‘John’ over ‘Jennifer’, even though their credentials were identical—only the names were altered. Yet, I would bet that if you asked these researchers, ‘Do you think that men are more competent scientists than women?’, they would answer with a resounding, ‘No!’, and even be insulted by the question. I came across another fascinating tidbit recently: when men are the lone male members of a small work group, they tend to speak more than they do in male-dominated groups. Yet, again, if you asked these men whether they think their opinions or ideas are more important than those of the women in the group, they would probably deny that they do.

All of these phenomena—professors’ lack of support for female students, which they don’t recognize; the assumption that ‘John’ is more competent than ‘Jennifer’ ; and the impulse for men to talk more and listen less in groups with more women—are examples of implicit bias. This is bias that you don’t consciously think that you have. In other words, you might intellectually believe that men and women are equally competent at math and science; that the opinions and experiences of women are no less important than those of men. But your actions speak differently. The subtle stew of gendered bias and sexist messaging in which we marinate from the time we are small children infiltrates our thinking to the degree that our impulses, our knee-jerk reactions to situations and information, can be deeply sexist. And we don’t even know it.

I know some of you are probably squirming in your seats right now, or denying that this applies to you. Let me just issue you one simple challenge: go to Harvard’s Project Implicit website. Take some of the tests there—for example, the exercises that assess your bias (or lack of bias) against women in scientific fields. What do you find? Surprised? Shocked? In denial? I know that I was all of those things.

Believe me, I understand how uncomfortable it can be to confront your own implicit bias. Last spring, I had invited a senior female colleague to give a guest lecture in a graduate class I was teaching. I have enormous respect for this woman both personally and professionally. Before the class started, I asked her what she had been working on recently. She replied that she had been very busy since the beginning of the year, as she had been elected president of her scientific society, which is a very large and prestigious one. And—here is where my bias comes in—I am ashamed to admit that my initial internal reaction to this statement was not, ‘Wow, fantastic! And well deserved! I am sure she will make a good leader for that organization.’ It was more like, ‘Why should she say such a thing? That sounds like bragging.’ Of course, it wasn’t bragging at all—it was an honest response to my question about what she had been spending her time doing. And, she was very well qualified to hold the position as society president, having been actively involved in and a major contributor to her field for decades. But my initial, un-examined reaction was coming from a cultural background that gives much more space for men to tout their accomplishments than women. As a girl, I was taught from an early age that if I spoke honestly about my intelligence and accomplishments, people (especially boys) wouldn’t like me. And clearly, I internalized that message, and my sub-conscious felt the need to enforce it in my interactions with other women.

So how should we deal with implicit bias? In my experience, it doesn’t help either to deny that you have it, or to wallow in your own guilt about it. It’s better to acknowledge it, recognize the knee-jerk reactions that it tends to spark, and consciously counteract them. One mental exercise that I have been performing ever since taking the Project Implicit test is to imagine statements or actions coming from the opposite gender, and gauging my reactions. For example, if I think that a woman is bragging, or that she’s not qualified to speak about a given topic, I close my eyes and imagine her as a man, making the same statements. Do I still think that her words are inappropriate? This actually seems to help separate implicit bias from a genuine, thoughtful reaction. But, I’m still working on it. I hope you all will, too—as Socrates (quoted by Plato) pointed out, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. And it can also be sexist. And keep women—and men—from reaching their full potential.