Here’s a cold hard fact: Humans are a biased bunch.
Sure, it isn’t our most prized character trait but that doesn’t make it any less true. And if we’re sticking to the path of honesty, there’s a pretty likely chance that we've all exercised bias a time or two in our lives.
Another interesting piece of information? One study found that a whopping 90 percent of people are biased against women. With a number that large, we could only suspect that there had to be a psychological reasoning behind this bias. We called on three experts to help us dissect the societal issue: former California State Senator Gloria Romero, author of “Just Not That Likable: The Price All Women Pay for Gender Bias”; Dr. Sarah Yu, consumer neuroscientist; and Dr. Joel Nadler, industrial/organizational psychologist and author of “The War on Women”.
Together we discussed why gender bias forms in the brain, how gender bias affects groups in the workplace and what can be done to help.
Gender bias is a learned action
A survival tactic all its own, gender bias was created as a way for humans to simplify the world around them — it morphed from there.
“We naturally categorize everything. It’s how we function, and it’s those categories that allow us to make predictions,” Nadler said. “At the base level, it’s how we operate as humans — we have a natural tendency to break things down into simple-to-understand blocks. At a survival level, it’s usually good versus bad and then we develop additional stereotypes around that.”
Those stereotypes are also known as schemas, constructed thought patterns that are designed to make sense of information. They typically live under the umbrella of our biases, in the unconscious, rationalized part of our brain. The reason why gender bias manifests in the brain is because we have learned schemas around what gender looks like in our society.
“We’re not born knowing how things in the world are represented. We learn that throughout our lives; we look at patterns and make up rules,” Yu said. “In terms of gender bias, those rules we’ve learned are the schemas in which we look at femininity, masculinity…and in the workplace, looking at people and sorting them by the schemas can be very detrimental to both women and men when we’re putting them in certain buckets.”
If you were to say "woman" or "man" to someone and then look in their brain, the schema they have with that word is the network of associations their brain would start to pull up about what a woman is versus what a man is.
“Typically those traditional schemas for a woman might be: A woman is nurturing, caring and emotional. When we think about what a woman at work looks like — thankfully we’re getting much better about this as a society — but 50 years ago, that network would lead you to believe a woman is probably a secretary or in hospitality. She’s probably not seen as a leader, and if she is, she probably has a number of negative attributes associated with that schema — bossy, aggressive…” said Yu.
Romero says this is a result of women being held to the “likeability penalty.” What’s that? It’s a term coined by Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Meta and author of "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead," that refers to working women being penalized for displaying the same characteristics as their male counterparts.
“...Gender bias permeates our institutions and our workplaces,” said Romero. “Women still get evaluated on: Are you a team player? Are you nice? Do you defer to others?”
This leaves women professionals to participate in an internal battle on how they should operate in the workplace.
“Women who are seen as competent, which is great because you need that for leadership, are consequently viewed as less likable,” said Yu. “It’s kind of a tightrope that you have to walk the more you get into senior leadership positions, which is: ‘Do I become more competent and less liked? Or do I become more liked and then therefore seen as less competent?’ ”
Maternal bias also lives within workplace culture
While gender is a social construct, biology certainly plays a role in the overall fascination with masculinity and femininity.
Considering how cis-gendered women are often the ones to have children, they also are often expected to actively participate in all related familial matters including taking on the brunt of household responsibilities.
“During the pandemic women left the workplace at significantly larger numbers than men. The pandemic really brought out the dynamic that working women are also expected to be present at home; the pressure that these women felt — women of color, senior women, working moms — caused them to leave the workplace and when they have to do this, it is causing our workplaces to be a lot less diverse and it harms our bottom line,” said Yu.
Yu says that workforce culture has a tendency to deem working mothers as less capable and less committed to their jobs than other employees. This sort of thinking can be detrimental to women.
“We see that a lot of time women who are successful in their roles will take time off for their families where men often aren’t and those can either be little interruptions in their career or they happen at very key points where you’re hitting a threshold that not a lot people make it above, and in order to surpass it you have to have a spotless record,” Nadler said. “If you’ve got someone who did exactly what the company wanted for 10 years, always delivered a quality product, and then you have someone else who did nine-and-a-half years of that work but took six months off for their kids, you start to see a problem.”
So what can brands do to close the gap? Nadler says everyone in the organization needs to be given the same flexibility of time, whether they’re using it to golf with friends or take care of children.
“If everyone was expected to take two weeks of personal time every year or were given three months every few years as a reward and were expected to use that time, you can even the playing field on the organizational level,” said Nadler. “The natural tendency for any adult to want to balance their work, their family and their life needs to be a part of the expectation of work.”
Eliminating gender bias in the workplace
In addition to creating expectations around balance and time off, here are a few things workplaces can do to help combat this issue:
1. Start using skill-based words
“The more we use skill-based language to describe women’s contributions, the more we can start to change that subconscious conversation that’s always going on in our heads,” said Yu.
2. Challenge biased remarks right on the spot
“When people start having to explain themselves, they start to catch themselves in a biased comment,” said Yu. “If I’m asking you to explain why you gave a certain task to a woman or made a certain statement, that gives you the opportunity to really check yourself.”
3. Share your own stories of bias
“The more we share what bias looks like, especially microaggressions, the more we can identify when they are happening to us or when we are inadvertently doing it to someone else,” said Yu.
4. Understand how biases work
“A big part of the battle is just recognizing that our brain stores information as networks of association, and if I have a network of association that is antiquated and wrong and harmful about women and women at work, then those are going to contribute to me possibly good-naturedly saying and doing things that are actually biased,” said Yu.
Those "things" can take form as microaggressions, like telling a woman they should take notes because they have good handwriting or that they should be the one to handle the birthday dinner, for example.
Eliminating gender bias is a tough hill to climb, but there is good news: Just like society has learned biased associations, we can unlearn them. It might just take a little work. Fortunately, you know why gender bias exists and how to start tackling it. We can’t wait to see all the good you’ll do.
