@Greymeer Yes, there IS such a thing as “unconscious bias”. In fact it’s extremely common. That when you truly believe that you’re not biased, yet you somehow always will select a certain type of person as your lawyer or accountant, or doctor, or babysitter, etc. You won’t think “I won’t choose that person as a doctor because he’s Black”, but, when given the choice, you will somehow almost always choose the White doctor for what you think are other reasons.
Program committees of big engineering conferences consistently select only men as keynote speakers, even though about 30% of the well known figures in many engineering fields are women. My wife was recently on a panel with other seniot figures in CS, and, while every male member of the panel was introduced as “Dr. X”, or “Prof Y”, my wife, a full professor and a PhD, was introduced as “Mrs. FirstName”. The person who did the introducing didn’t think that he was being discriminatory, or that he was biased against women. He just unconsciously assigned less importance on my wife’s academic credentials (her PhD, BTW, is from one of the very best graduate schools for CS).
Recruiters consistently demonstrate bias in hiring when thee is a photo or a name that is easily identifiable for gender or ethnicity, while, when there is nothing on the resume which allows them to identify gender or ethnicity, that bias disappears. Most of these recruiters are absolutely certain that they are not biased against anybody.
When students write evaluations of instructors, the descriptors of male and female instructors differs significantly. In a study of online teaching, in which the actual gender of the instructor was unknown, students evaluated instructors who were identified online as males significantly higher than the instructors who were identified online as females, regardless of the actual gender of the instructor (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4).
I am sure than a significant number of those students would adamantly deny that they are biased against female instructors, and actually believe that. Yet, their evaluations were lower for instructors who they thought were female than for instructors who they thought were male.
My wife has been in CS for almost 30 years, and is extremely familiar with the amount of unconscious bias there is in engineering. She’s also studied the effects of training, and it works. The point of the training is to move the unconscious biases to the conscious mind, and deal with them.
Here is the thing - removing bias is extremely difficult, and perhaps, in some cases, impossible. The point is to identify the bias and counter its effects on your decision making. Denying that unconscious biases just allows those biases to continue to influence one’s decisions.
Of course, refusing to test whether one has unconscious biases often means that a person doesn’t have many unconscious biases - just a lot of biases which they deny.
If, after exploring your decisions making, you discover that you have none, than great. However, most people do, and very often the biases are ones which surprised them.
