Women and Minorities Punished for Caring about Diversity?

Implicit bias is a well-documented phenomenon. Careful studies have shown lots of lots of implicit biases that we have. Most of them are only tiny. The effects are demonstrable but not huge. If we are evaluating a resume, we are slightly more likely to see someone with a name that we expect to be black to be less competent than we would if we saw the same resume with a name attached to it that we would not have any racial associations with (and thus we might assume the person to be white). Police officers are slightly more likely to see a cell phone or wallet as a gun if the person holding it has darker skin. These biases are just as present, or nearly as present, in populations affected by these stereotypes. For example, black police officers have a similar bias to that of white police officers in the case I just described.

If the effects are tiny, why do we care? Because the effect is demonstrable when you look at lots and lots of cases. Implicit biases can explain disproportionate effects without relying on accusing the people involved of being racists. They just have the biases that we all have. Certain groups have a stigma attached to them, and it lowers our expectations that someone in that group will be as competent. This stereotype affects members of that group as much as it affects everyone else. In fact, all it takes is knowing that the stereotype exists, and you are likely to display this implicit bias. Nor does it occur in a lower frequency among those with a more progressive agenda. Believing the stereotypes to be false does not help remove the bias, although being more intimately connected relationally with people who are in the stigmatized group can sometimes help reduce some of these biases.

None of this is new. Psychologists have been aware of this for several decades and have been publishing careful work refining our understanding of what's going on throughout that time. But every once in a while I see something about an implicit bias that goes along surprising lines or stems from more complex causes. I have found one that deals with a stereotype within a stereotype. I was directed to one a while back that is very interesting but not quite in the way it's described in the article. The headline suggests that it shows that women and minorities are punished for caring about diversity. If that means anyone is deliberately punishing them, then it's completely the wrong idea. If it just means there is an implicit bias against women and minorities who care about diversity, that's much closer to what they have found. But I think the explanation they offer for this is very unlikely to be correct, and what seems to me to be a more likely explanation involves a very interesting hierarchy of embedded biases.

Read More