Unconscious Bias, Seminar at Vik Campus: Are we biased against biases?

On November 11th 2019, the administrative management (AM) at Vik Campus at the University of Helsingfors organized a seminar about unconscious bias. The rational for the AM to organize such an event was the trending claim that middle aged white men push young women out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Similar things had happened at Luleå Instutute of Technology, and Lund university, where the administrators discriminated men in the application process. Could it really be that middle aged men favor older women and men in general over young women? And what is non-conscious/Implicit bias? Implicit bias is based on constructive memory and social cohesiveness. Some studies suggest that men are favored over women in job selection. In 2017 a team of behavioral economists in the Australian government published a RCT refuting those claims. Science demonstrate that men and women are similar from a cognitive perspective but different from an emotional point of view. This is explained by our evolutionary past. So, the claim that there's a bias against women in certain educations and occupations do not 'hold water' - it's rather the opposite! Instead, when a manager invite a femist phycisist to give a lecture about something that she claims she doesn't understand, we have a case of mental bias which in turn can be explained by relational agressiveness/misandry and/or groupthink. 5 pages.

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On November 11th, 2019, the administrative management (AM) at Vik Campus at the University of Helsingfors organized a seminar about unconscious bias. The rationale for the AM to organize such an event was the trending claim that middle aged white men push women out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at the University of Helsingfors.

Despite the fact that there are at least 200 known mental biases, the seminar didn't focus on biases in general but only on the hypothesis that there's a bias against women in STEM. And the AM didn't assign an expert in psychology, but a female physicist, with a strong interest in feminism!?

The female feminist physicist, who on request admitted that she didn't know anything about how the antecedent theories worked, claimed that middle aged white men suppressed young women in STEM, and if those men didn't accept that, they needed to be schooled about it.

The inspiration may have come from Luleå Technical University. In 2015, the AM there discriminated against an applicant for a professorship because he was a man (ARW, 2015).

And in a current case, which recently has been brought to light at the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University, a document was found saying that if only men applied for a position as lecturer [biträdande lektorat], the application process should be terminated (ARW, 2019). This, of course, is a demonstration of something called Equality of outcome, as opposed to Equality of opportunity and a bias against men, or misandry.

A similar thing happened a few months ago when I attended a course about pedagogy for university lecturers at the University of Helsingfors. During one lecture, the bias-against-women-issue [in the whole of the academy] came up, framed by the claim that older men in the academy suppress younger women in the academy. Really?

Could it really be that middle aged men favor older women and men in general over young women?

And what is non-conscious/implicit bias?

Non-conscious/implicit comes from the general notion in psychology that the memory-system is divided into one conscious/explicit and one non-conscious/implicit part (Schacter, 1987). And in 2007, Schacter and Addis summarized neuropsychological evidence about how the mind operates - to use memory and perception to form mental models and run them forward in time. Already in abstract they wrote:

“Since the future is not an exact repetition of the past, simulation of future episodes requires a system that can draw on the past in a manner that flexibly extracts and recombines elements of previous experiences”.

In 1995, Greenwald and Banaji published a paper in Psychological Bulletin arguing that:

“considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion”.

With implicit, Greenwald and Banaji writes:

“The signature of implicit cognition is that traces of past experience affect some performance, even though the influential earlier experience is not remembered in the usual sense—that is, it is unavailable to self-report or introspection” (p. 5).

Greenwald and Banaji also show how their theoretical approach is limited to the cognitive part of the mind (which is made up of motivation, emotions, and cognitions):

“The preceding paragraphs show that implicit social cognition, although strongly rooted in existing constructs, offers a theoretical reorganization of phenomena that have previously been described in other ways and, in some cases, not previously identified as having an unconscious component. The relations to prior theorization are emphasized in this article by using established construct terms—attitude and stereotype—as labels for two major categories of implicit social cognition” (p. 6).

But as they list examples of definitions of attitudes, it becomes apparent that emotions are included in the construct, for example:

“Attitudes [are] enduring systems of positive or negative evaluations, emotional feelings, and pro or con action tendencies with respect to social objects” (Krech, Crutchfield, and Ballachey, 1962, p. 139) (p. 7).

They also conclude something important, from a methodological point of view:

“In summary, the observed high level of reliance on direct measures of attitudes indicates a widespread (even if not widely stated) assumption that attitudes operate primarily in a conscious mode” (p. 8).

This is how they define implicit attitudes:

“Implicit attitudes are introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects” (p. 8).

On page 14 Greenwald and Banaji describe Implicit stereotyping as:

“a socially shared set of beliefs about traits that are characteristic of members of a social category”.

Compare Conformity:

“the act of matching attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to group norms or politics” (Cialdini and Goldstein, 2004; wikipedia)

And Groupthink:

“a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome” (Wikipedia).

(In the footnote, they mention the Balance theory (Heider, 1958) which I coincidentally use every now and then during teaching, for example, yesterday on Agere 026: Leadership and Organization, when talking about culture and inter-personal communication.)

On page 16 they delve into Implicit Gender Stereotyping:

“Also, a well-established line of research based on the finding
that essays were judged more favorably when attributed to authors with male rather than female names (Goldberg, 1968) can be interpreted as indirectly assessing a gender stereotype that associates men with greater achievement than women” (p. 15).

This is consistent with a later study claiming:

“Discrimination against women has been alleged in hiring practices for many occupations, but it is extremely difficult to demonstrate sex-biased hiring" ... "Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen [blind audition] increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by several fold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round” (Goldin and Rouse, 1997).

The Colding and and Rouse-paper was recently disputed:

“The research went uncriticized for nearly two decades. That changed recently, when a few scholars and data scientists went back and read the whole study. The first thing they noticed is that the raw tabulations showed women doing worse behind the screens” ... "The screens seemed to help women in preliminary audition rounds but men in semifinal rounds. None of the findings were strong enough to draw broad conclusions one way or the other” ... “There is, however, one study that stands out for its rigor and transparency. In 2017 a team of behavioral economists in the Australian government published the results of a large, randomized controlled study entitled “Going Blind to See More Clearly.” It was directly inspired by the blind-audition study” ...“that de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist” (Sommers Hoff, 2019).

Ergo. There's little or no evidence that men are biased against women in STEM. Then why are there fewer women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) compared to men?

Men and women seem do differ when it comes to psycho-physiological set-up: motivation - the driver of behavior and a sub-set of emotions (anger, curiosity, disgust, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise (PRIMEs; Buck, 1985; Darwin, 1872; Deng ett al. 2016; Österberg, 2001).

Studies done on Personality (Big five) show that women worry more about the future (neuroticism) compared to men (Maestripieri, 2012; Weisberg, DeYoung and Hirsh, 2011). And neuroticism is related to aggression.

Hyde (2005) conducted a meta-analysis over 124 variables. The results show few and small psychological differences between men and women. Even so, the study revealed some significant differences. For example, men are better at certain imagery abilities such as mental rotation, which is used when elaboration on scenarios forward in time (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Kaku, 2014). This gender difference is manifested already är 6-13 month of age (Lauer et al. 2015). Another difference is that men are more openly aggressive towards each other whereas women are more relational aggressive (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995).

This is manifested in domestic violence which is more prevalent among women (Archer,2000, 2004; Bergkvist, 2002;Bates, Graham-Kevan och Archer , 2014; Bates och Graham-Kevan, 2016; Bates, 2018; Bates, Kaye, Pennington och Hamlin, 2019; Crick och Grotpeter, 1995; Hyde, 2005; Thornton et al. 2012).

Why?

For most of our existence, we have lived on the African continent as hunters (typically men) and gatherers (typically women) (Coolidge and Wynn, 2018; Pobiner, 2013, 2016. We have incrementally transformed through a process of 'evolution by natural and sexual selection', from tree-leaving creatures to bipedal 'big-brains' (Darwin, 1859; Pickford, 2006; Wallas, 1859).

Our history as hunters and gatherers is therefore most likely ingrained in our motivational and emotional processes that guide our everyday decision making. This was demonstrated ~ 20 years ago by a research team using eye-tracking devices on one-day-old boys and girls, they saw that most boys focused on things and that most girls focused on humans (Baron Cohen, 2003).

In 2018, Stoet and Geary explored STEM as a function of gender and socio-culture. The results revealed that women in autocratic cultures choose STEM as a ticket to freedom whereas women in democratic cultures choose human-related educations/occupations (Stoet & Geary, 2018).

Ergo, when women get to choose - they tend NOT to choose STEM. So, the claim that there's a bias against women in certain educations and occupations do not 'hold water' - it's rather the opposite! Instead, when a manager invite a femist phycisist to give a lecture about something that she claims she doesn't understand, we have a case misandry, which in turn can be explained by relational agressiveness and/or groupthink.

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