I'm posting this in honor of February which is Black History month. I posted 2 blog posts about race bias/ racism.
Here are 2 articles about gender bias/ sexism:
Aug. 16, 2019 "Study suggests common bias in doctors": Today I found this article by Tamara Mathias:
(Reuters Healt) - Researchers who examined implicit and explicit gender biases in the U.S. medical community found that professionals of both genders are more likely to associate the word "career" with men and the word "family" with women.
And U.S. surgeons broadly see surgery as a man's career and family medicine as a woman's field, the researchers also found.
It's important to be aware of such stereotyping and gender biases among doctors and other medical professionals, in order to minimize the potential effect, the researchers say.
Dr. Arghavan Salles and colleagues analyzed responses collected over a decade from 43,000 healthcare professionals who took a "gender-career" association test, a common tool used to measure unconscious and conscious biases that influence interactions with others.
Half of the professionals were over age 32. Although roughly four out of five were women, overall the responses showed conscious and unconscious biases associating men with "career" and women with "family," Salles' team found.
Next, the researchers recruited 131 doctors attending a surgeons' meeting in 2017 to take a "gender-specialty" test that assessed biases related to the medical specialties of surgery and family medicine. In this group, half the participants were over age 42 and 35% were women.
Both male and female surgeons held implicit and explicit biases associating men with surgery and women with family medicine, the test showed.
In both tests, however, women were less likely than men to explicitly make these associations, the authors note in JAMA Network Open.
Salles, herself a surgeon, said the study came about because she was interested in collecting preliminary data on the extent of gender bias in healthcare.
"I'd seen a lot of the ways in which women are treated differently from men, both when I was a resident, and as a faculty member," she told Reuters Health in a phone call.
"For years people have said, 'Well, we just haven't had enough women going into medicine, so we just need to wait a while and then we'll see that those numbers will go up,'" said Salles, who was at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri when she worked on the study and hasn't yet started her new position.
But, she added, "Women have been more than 45% of every entering class across this country since the late 1990's ... and yet only 16% of deans of medical schools are women, so there's something else going on there."
She doesn't think the results reflect only what people see in the real world.
It's true there are fewer women surgeons, "so of course we don't really expect women to be surgeons, so ... then we have fewer women surgeons," Salles said. "There's definitely (a cycle) going on there."
But there are also fewer women than men in family medicine, she points out.
Sociologist Jennifer Sheridan of the Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in either test, cautioned that implicit bias is an ordinary phenomenon and "does not actually tell us whether healthcare professionals and/or surgeons are acting with bias."
"This study merely documents the presence of biases that most people have, and it suggests that the bias could affect things we care about," Sheridan told Reuters Health.
Sheridan thinks the gender-specialty test may have been unreliable. "It seems to me that choosing family medicine as the discipline opposite surgery might not have been a fair choice, given the word 'family' is right in (the) name of the category," she said.
Another limitation of the study, the researchers acknowledge, is that they didn't know the specialties of the healthcare professionals who took the gender-career association test.
Still, while her team agrees on the need for further study, Salles believes the current results could inform hiring managers about the need to check for bias when making appointment decisions.
"What I think is the standard in medicine . . . is trying to assess whether someone is like you or not," she said. As long as people keep doing that in job interviews, she added, "then we're going to keep selecting for the same types of people."
SOURCE: https://bit.ly/2G3Tx2P and https://bit.ly/2MwJvLR JAMA Network Open, online July 5, 2019.
Uber is just the latest company apparently caught in the act of discriminating against women in its work force. “Sadly for many minorities in tech this is an old story,” says Penny Herscher, executive chairman at FirstRain, one of several technology companies she has helped to lead.
On her blog, she says she has worked in the “bro culture” in Silicon Valley for more than 30 years. “I have repeatedly experienced unconscious bias (sometimes not so unconscious), being underestimated, being dismissed, being propositioned etc.,” she notes.
Often, the problem tech faces with diversity is thought to derive from the pipeline: Not enough girls liking computers. But she argues there are plenty who actually enter the tech world.
Unfortunately, they leave in huge numbers within 10 years because of a hostile environment.
“It is time to set the tone at the top. To insist that boards have at least two or three women on them (not just none, or the ‘we have one so we’re done’ you see on so many boards),” she writes, noting there are executive recruiters who specialize in this area.
“It is also time for boards to insist that the CEO builds a diverse leadership team. This takes real work to find diverse, qualified executives but it can be done in most fields. Uber is just one of many examples where a mostly male leadership team is simply deaf and blind to the issues facing their female employees.”
The phrase “tone at the top” is usually applied to honesty and ethics around issues like accounting. She feels it now has to be broadened by boards to the matter of equal opportunity for all employees.
Study the diversity statistics.
With respect to women, look at how many are employed at each level and whether women are being paid less than men for the same work.
Check whether the percentages of women in leadership at your firm are growing or shrinking.
“It takes a serious discussion on the importance of diversity from the board down to build a world class company in the 21st century,” she says.
Accelerating gender diversity on boards
Looking at the companies in the S&P 500 with the highest percentage of women on their boards, McKinsey & Co. consultants Celia Huber and Sara O’Rourke came up with these six critical actions to improve your own board diversity:
Make a visible commitment to diversity with sustained action throughout the organization.
Set new principles for decision making, such as including women on every slate of candidates.
Look beyond chief executives and other members of the C-suite for directors, which will allow more women to be considered.
Consider candidates with the right expertise, not just with board experience.
Expand your network to include more women and explicitly ask search firms for female candidates.
Cultivate long-term relationships with prospective candidates, building a set of possibilities over the long haul.
“Effectively creating and cultivating an active pipeline of female candidates is arguably the single most important element of a successful board-inclusion effort,” they stress.
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