This is an experiment introduced in a Google seminar on unconscious bias (1:04~). Some professors sent identical resumes to professors at prestigious universities across the United States, with the only difference being whether the name was female or male. The position applied for was an administrator at a scientific research institute. The professors rated the person with the male name as more competent, more hireable, and deserving of a higher salary compared to the person with the female name.
”The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A national Empirical Study”(1999) conducted an experiment using four types of resumes: resumes for female or male job applicants, and resumes for female or male tenure candidates. They used the pre-career history of real scientists as the job applicant resumes and their post-career history as the tenure candidate resumes.
As a result, the tenure candidate resumes of these highly competitive scientists who obtained tenure early were evaluated without gender distinction. However, for the job applicant resumes, the resumes with male names were considered to have more education, research, and service experience compared to those with female names, despite having identical content.
While the tenure candidate resumes seemed to be evaluated fairly, they received four times more cautionary comments from the subjects compared to those of males. These comments included statements like,“I would need to seee evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own” and “We would have to see her job talk”.
What does it mean that women are evaluated fairly as tenure candidates but receive more cautionary comments compared to men? Does the fact that women are subjected to more psychological burden and require more proof impose an unnecessary and unfair burden on women’s advancement in society? I believe that even if women anticipate challenges such as childbirth, it should not directly affect the evaluation of their resumes.
In this resume experiment, it is assumed that the subjects did not intend to discriminate based on gender, but the data shows such discriminatory behavior. These can be considered discriminatory actions of a nature that neither the doer nor the receiver is aware of.
The experiment known as “Becoming Famous Overnight” by Jacoby et al. is well-known in psychology. On the first day, participants were asked to judge the ease of pronunciation of dozens of names randomly selected from a phone book. On the second day, they were given a different list of names. This list included names from the previous day, newly added names from the phone book, and names of actual famous people. Participants were asked to judge whether these names were famous. The results showed that participants were more likely to identify previously seen unfamiliar names as famous.
In Jacoby’s experiment, only male names were used. Noticing this, Banaji et al. included female names in their experiment. The results showed that male names were judged to be more famous than female names.
"We hardly need to draw out the implications of this disparity. Suffice it to say that it can be advantageous to men if in public life they are more likely than women to benefit from (mistaken) assumptions that they have accomplished something when in face they have not." Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. M. R. Banaji, A. G. Greenwald
The subjects of this experiment did not realize that they were using the gender of names to judge fame. Regarding this, Banaji said the following:
“I've quizzed 400 subjects about this, not one of them was aware that he or she was using the gender of the name to decide on the person's likelihood of fame, and yet in their data, we saw this, if this is true, then harm is happening without the person doing the harm being aware that they're doing it, the person being harmed is not going to be aware that she was harmed. What does this mean for the big question of how we are going to treat each other in a democratic society where we believe that fairness and egalitarianism and so on, our other virtues we care about.” Can we unlearn implicit biases? With Mahzarin Banaji, PhD
As previously mentioned, even if people declare that they have no special attitudes or stereotypes towards certain groups or individuals, these can still be measured implicitly (OI), leading to invisible discriminatory behaviors. One major issue raised by research on implicit bias is this discriminatory behavior that is not explicitly expressed but can be measured implicitly.
What kind of outcomes do such discriminatory behaviors lead to?
References:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU
Steinpreis_Impact of gender on review.pdf
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