“The Problem is Really in the Environment” – Anthony Greenwald

6Oct/092

“The Problem is Really in the Environment” – Anthony Greenwald

I started a new job a couple months ago and had to undergo diversity training, as is the norm for all new joiners. While the session was fairly typical, the discussion on bias versus prejudice led to our instructor telling us to Google the Harvard Implicit Association Test to see what our individual bias is like. She said that while she had thought that she knew how she was biased, she was surprised by how strong the test showed her responses to be.

Of course, I took a look. I went straight for the Gender - Science IAT demo which tests for a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males. Ten minutes later I was told, "Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts compared to Female with Science and Male with Liberal Arts." I even got a pretty graph to go with it:

The FAQs tell me a 'slight' effect is one that is noticeable in statistical analysis, but you may not have been aware of it. I'm not sure if this makes it better or worse. There are two reasons why implicit attitudes don't agree with explicit attitudes (and I hope at this point it isn't unreasonable to assume that my explicit attitude is that women are just as likely to be associated with science as men - that is, I believe I have a neutral attitude: neither gender is better nor worse):

The person is unwilling to admit their implicit attitude, e.g. out of embarrassment.
The person is unable to admit their implicit attitude, because they are not aware of their implicit negativity.

So I'm either lying, or my subconscious just spoke up.

I took the time to think about it properly a couple days after taking the test, and as horrible as it is to admit, I think it may well be the former. It's not that I think that men are more naturally suited to science, it's that the world we live in grooms them for it and they get the advantages that women don't. The reality is that the adult men I know tend to be more proficient at science and technology than the women, because they have had a lifetime nurturing that ability, while the women have had the opposite. Here's hoping that changes!

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Priyan Meewella
October 6th, 2009 - 20:27

I forget whether I’ve mentioned this before in the site’s previous incarnation but I absolutely agree that in the current world stereotypes are often entirely accurate due to ingrained social engineering. The key is not to knock the stereotype but to work backwards and understand why.

As a basic (and probably simplistic) example take the one about boys’ spacial reasoning skills being superior to girls’. In fact that makes perfect sense if we look at the toys society instructs us to buy them: LEGO for boys, dolls for girls. So while the boys are playing they visualise shapes, learn how they interconnect and construct things. Meanwhile the girls are arguably developing stronger social and emotional skills via the “adult” relationships they mimic with dolls.

Now I’m not saying either is bad, nor that it’s the sole reason, but it does make the stereotype seem a lot less strange and sexist than it does out of context. The key to combating the problem isn’t to knock the stereotype, it’s to alter the disparities in the formative years that potentially lead to a divide later on. I think it starts long before many people realise.
Guillem Baches
October 16th, 2009 - 15:34

Nice blog imo (not spam)