{"id":95,"date":"2015-09-15T09:55:29","date_gmt":"2015-09-15T09:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/?p=95"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:25:56","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:25:56","slug":"bias-the-uncomfortable-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/2015\/09\/15\/bias-the-uncomfortable-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Bias – the uncomfortable truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bias\"<\/a>Having recently attended the\u00a0Vitae annual conference for those of us who work in the field of researcher development, I find I am now reflecting on the content. Along with the usual pieces about policy, practice and current topics of interest was a plenary session looking at unconscious bias.<\/p>\n

Biases \u2013 yes, the evidence is we all have them. Whether we care to admit it or not, it is true. Part of the preparation for the talk was the completion of an online psychometric looking at respondents. This challenged us to look at our associations with gender in a work and research context. Whilst one can argue with the accuracy of such a measure, it nevertheless raises some interesting issues.<\/p>\n

The key messages within the plenary centred around how we build up beliefs about people, not necessarily on an individual basis but on the basis of stereotypes. Our observations drive the building of neural links in our brain, essentially \u201cwiring our brain\u201d around these associations. So, we develop beliefs about gender, race, ethnic groups, physical attributes etc\u2026 The materials provided post conference included some useful tips on breaking down our biases.<\/p>\n

However, the overall exercise reminded me of the many times I have seen bias in action in the workplace. Times in a selection process when I found a colleague putting forth a belief about a candidate, be it positive or negative, that I could see no evidence to support; times when a colleague developed a reputation for having certain characteristics, when I could find evidence of them having performed the behaviour on only one or two occasions and no evidence of repeat instances; and worst of all times when someone lost a job because of what seemed to be implicit beliefs.<\/p>\n

For a PhD graduate approaching their first post-graduation role this is a concern. Sorry, if this is not a soothing piece of information. The evidence would appear to indicate that bias will impact:
\n\u2022 the employee selection processes you face, be they in academia or elsewhere;
\n\u2022 the eyes of those you need to impress with your enterprise ideas, e.g. spin outs from your research;
\n\u2022 the judgements made on your grant bids;
\n\u2022 the editor\/referee decisions made about your research papers;
\n\u2022 etc\u2026
\nAll we can do is be aware of our own implicit biases and hope in doing so we help spread a positive engagement with others, minimising the impact of bias where we can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having recently attended the\u00a0Vitae annual conference for those of us who work in the field of researcher development, I find I am now reflecting on the content. Along with the usual pieces about policy, practice and current topics of interest was a plenary session looking at unconscious bias. Biases \u2013 yes, the evidence is we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/pgrcareers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}