Do women face unconscious bias

Women’s Day is an opportunity to think about how to make conscious choices to build a more inclusive workplace. That means we should look at policies that allow for flexibility in when, where, and how work is done. Today technology enables us to dis-aggregate work and distribute it across the world to anyone who is capable of doing it. Progressive organizations are rethinking not only maternity benefits but also recraft their parental leave policies.

Unconscious bias

GitHub with its 12 million users is a favorite hangout for coders. Anyone can request help in getting code written by GitHub’s users. It is truly an open marketplace of talent and ought to encourage the meritorious to thrive. Is that what really happens? People on GitHub use nicks that don’t always give gender cues – but the researchers wrote a program to automatically link contributor emails to Google Plus pages so they could figure out users’ genders. Among the three million submissions (or “pull requests”) the researchers examined, female-written code saw a 78.6% approval rate. With male-written code, it was 74.6%. If female coders specified their gender on their profiles, though, their acceptance rate fell to 62.5%.

Music to my ears only

Do we conclude that women geeks are the only ones who are facing this problem? No, women coders are not the only ones facing this problem. The top five orchestras in the U.S. had fewer than 10% female musicians till the ‘80s. That is when they decided to put a screen between the judges and the musicians during the auditions. The judges could only hear what the musician was playing but could not see them. As this became the norm, other orchestras followed suit. Now the women musicians represent almost 30% of an orchestra.

For your eyes only

All the nominations in acting in 2016 came from all white male jury. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, is taking sweeping measures to double the number of women and minority members by 2020. The belief is that people will push the case of their “own kind” and hence we will see more women and minorities getting nominated. The solution lies in making the majority see the world from multiple lenses – not just what they have inherited.

Implications for organizations

Businesses are getting more and more complex. They need diversity of talent to bring in multiple lenses with which to view the problem. That means taking a broader definition of diversity. It has to be about creating teams that are transdisciplinary and also the people are as different from each other as possible in the way that they work and think and behave. Diversity is a competitive advantage. But it has to be developed and nurtured through education and exposure to alternative points of view – often uncomfortable and contradicting one’s own. Privilege is invisible to the privileged.-----------Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduriRead: Should women authors be treated differently?The study on coders: <click here>Blind auditions for musicians <click here>