What Price Subconscious Bias?

This post answers the riddle of the last post — if you haven’t done the 2 min exercise I suggest you do that first, things will then make sense.

1. Mary Alice Schulman (first economics professor of career journalist Daniel Pink) — from this video
2. Lynn Singer (she ran the Long Island Committee for Soviet Jewry) — from Roots Schmoots
3. Mayu Yamamoto (she invented a way to extract vanilla from cow dung) — from Improbable Research
4. Amber Kinser (she studies human interaction, families, feminism and motherhood) — from RH Reality Cast
5. Francesca Grifo (senior associate of the Union of Concerned Scientists) — from Point of Inquiry

I’ve often heard a name, pictured it being a man only to have my image contradicted in the seconds following when it’s learnt that the person in question is a woman. It’s always been slightly embarrassing for me when it happens since it is a fairly blatant bias (that I think most of us have to a certain extent). So last month when it happened I decided to write down the name and see if I can keep a scorecard. These 5 names above were cases just in the last month where I originally pictured a man only to be embarrassed by the contradiction. And in my experiment in the last post, I did my best to influence you — Dear Reader — to have the same experience.

There is a continuum about language use. On the one end is the opinion that the way we see the world is imprisoned by our specific languages and so even the subtle sexism in how a language deals with gender has an effect. The idea of worldviews being moulded by language is essentially the Sapir Whorf hypothesis and is fairly out of favour in modern linguistics. The other end of the spectrum is the “it’s just a word! actions are more important” idea.

I think this case illustrates that reality is somewhere in the middle. A score for the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is that in English, a term like “scientist” is technically not gendred but it’s precisely because it’s the same term for men and women that it usually gets attached to one prototypical representative. And that’s almost always male in the context of science. For languages where there are two separate words (male-scientist and female-scientist) eg. Russian, the problem is replaced with a different one. When talking of scientists we can’t use both words so the male one is also usually the generic — hence being a female scientist is changing something about the prototype.

I can’t see how this particular case would not colour our thinking. Of course Sapir Whorf should not be taken to extremes. But still, it’s a bit disconcerning — and perhaps the problem is in the very fact that humans seem to rely on prototypes. We find it hard to picture a “person” as “someone 50% likely to be male, 50% to be female; 50% to live in Asia, 50% to live outside Asia etc”. Instead we lock in to specifics, which are inevitably loaded. So stereotypes seem to persist because the brain is wired for them — and from my continued embarrassment I don’t think there’s much you can do.

There’s only one clear answer: transhumanism is the only way to equality. Right? Who’s with me?!