Imagine you are watching the following scenario take place: A small meeting is being held in a board room. At one end of the table sits a man (we will refer to him as man A) and across from him sitting side by side at the table is another man (man B) and a woman. The three are discussing some issues that have recently come to light in their organization. During their conversation the woman calmly shares a set of relevant facts on the matter with man A. A few moments later man B speaks up and states the very same facts that the woman had just shared but does so far more aggressively and far more dramatically than the woman had. By the end of this discussion how would you guess that man A described his belief in the accuracy of man B’s statements versus how he described his belief in the accuracy of the woman’s exact same statements? The answer to that question should sicken every father with a daughter because it sheds light on a very serious problem…it’s known as unconscious gender bias.
At a recent conference I attended a speaker presented on Unconscious Gender Bias that exists in today’s workplace and Universities. It was a fascinating presentation that shared numerous studies that have been performed to determine whether unconscious gender bias really affects how men treat women in these situations…the research resulted in a resounding, but unfortunate, “yes”.
For example, Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research found that in the workplace men are significantly more likely to critique females for coming on too strong. In addition they found that men tend to attribute a woman’s success to external factors and “luck” rather than attributing it to her individual effort and abilities as they would have for a man.
Studies also show that, whether men admit it to it or not, they are far less willing to put a woman in leadership positions. As one study shares, “Unconscious bias often also emerges during deciding on the right candidates for leadership positions through preconceptions of what “good” looks like, says Stomski, Partner at Aon Hewitt. While senior managers genuinely agree about the need for diversity at leadership levels, they still tend to fall back on unconscious beliefs when making final hiring and promotion decisions – such as the idea that it would be easier to align strategies behind people with similar backgrounds to them. The end result of this pattern is a management team with little real diversity.”
It is critical for organizations to take seriously the danger of men’s unconscious gender bias because even the smallest amount of bias can lead to very big consequences. And organizations that lack gender diversity in leadership are beginning to suffer their consequences in much more publicly seen ways. They are proving to be far less innovative, far less profitable, and far less successful. While those organizations that do have female executives and female board members are outperforming organizations with all male leadership by over 53%.
One of the worst consequences of men’s unconscious gender bias is the messages it is sending our young women who are entering Universities across the world. When women enter a University and see majors that have no women faculty and no women leadership on staff, they immediately assume they don’t belong there. Along these same lines, in a Stanford Study they “took a group of undeclared undergraduate students to rooms decorated either in a traditionally male, geeky way (think video games and "Star Trek") or in a gender-neutral way (nature posters) and gave them questionnaires about different majors. The female students were much more likely to give a positive consideration of tech majors when not in the nerdy, masculine room.” Is it any wonder that having no female role models at Universities is resulting in young women not choosing certain majors? So why are some Universities still ignoring this negative impact their unconscious gender bias is having? Author Joe Humphreys spent time researching that very question and determined, “A common theme to such studies is that academics have been slow to acknowledge gender bias precisely because they assume – given their supposed intellectual objectivity – that they’re above it.”
No man is above unconscious gender bias toward women, because it’s just that - “unconscious”. So to combat this problem it takes companies and universities being willing to require their leaders and their employees to undergo trainings on how to overcome unconscious gender bias in the workplace and then holding those individuals accountable to treat everyone equally, regardless of their gender. Someday your daughter(s) will thank you.
~Amy Rees Anderson (follow my daily blogs at http://www.amyreesanderson.com/blog)
