‘Goodwill is not enough’

To introduce the concept of unconscious bias participants were shown a ‘line-
up’ containing three men and four women and asked to guess which person
was a physicist. The point is not whether or not they guess correctly but that
most people are happy to do so: they believe that they can pick which person
is a physicist just by looking at them. This provides a basis for subsequent
discussion of the key ideas summarized in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The self-reinforcing cycle of the effects of gender schemas on the
evaluation and progress of women in business, the professions and
academia. The operation of gender schemas (unconscious bias) together with
the scarcity of women (lack of critical mass) leads to a bias in evaluation. This
in turn leads to the performance of women being underestimated. The
accumulation of many such instances of such underestimation leads to a
lowered overall success rate, which both reinforces the gender scheme of
women being less competent and contributes to the scarcity of women. After:
University of Michigan STRIDE Faculty Recruitment Workshop Presentation
available from http://sitemaker.umich.edu/advance/stride.

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