interprets the paragraph on gender bias
Answers
Answer:
While bias comes in many forms, this article focuses on gender bias and its role within the workplace. We'll cover what it is, where and when it happens, along with 12 ways you can reduce gender bias and ultimately build a more diverse and inclusive workplace. It should be noted that while there is a spectrum of gender identities, due to constraints within existing literature we’ll focus on the gender binaries — male and female. Feel free to click the links below to skip ahead.
PERFORMANCE SUPPORT BIAS
Performance support bias occurs when employers, managers and colleagues provide more resources and opportunities to one gender (typically men) over another.
One study found that among sales employees — who are paid based on performance and commission — women are unfairly assigned inferior accounts compared to men, even though women have proven to produce the same results when given equivalent sales opportunities.
1 School of Economics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
2 School of Economics, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China
3 Center for Economic Behavior and Decision-making (CEBD), Neuro & Behavior EconLab (NBEL), Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China
4 Interdisciplinary Center for Social Sciences (ICSS), Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Stereotypes exist in the interactions between different social groups, and gender stereotypes are particularly prevalent. Previous studies have suggested that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in the social cognition that plays an important role in gender stereotypes, but the specific causal effect of the mPFC remains controversial. In this study, we aimed to use transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to identify a direct link between the mPFC and gender bias. Implicit stereotypes were measured by the gender implicit association test (IAT), and explicit prejudice was measured by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). We found that male and female participants had different behavioral and neural correlates of gender stereotypes. Anodal tDCS significantly reduced male participants’ gender D-IAT scores compared with cathodal and sham stimulation, while the stimulation had an insignificant effect in female participants. The reduction in male participants’ gender bias mainly resulted from a decrease in the difference in reaction time (RT) between congruent and incongruent blocks. Regarding the explicit bias measurement, male and female participants had distinct attitudes, but tDCS had no effect on ASI. Our results revealed that the mPFC played a causal role in controlling implicit gender stereotypes, which is consistent with previous observations and complements past lesion, neuroimaging, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies and suggests that males and females have different neural bases for gender stereotypes.
Stereotypes refer to socially shared conceptual attributes associated with members of a social category that describe their traits and characteristics (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Amodio, 2014). On the one hand, this automatic association process strengthens the distinction of different groups through overgeneralized social categorization, which is efficient as a cognitive heuristic for simplifying the complexity of the physical and social world (Abrams and Hogg, 1988); on the other hand, it influences people’s social attitudes and behavior, which leads to prejudices, discrimination, and more severe social conflicts (Amodio, 2014). Gender stereotypes have appeared in the mass media and the general public, have been described and discussed in the research literature (Gray, 1992; Rudman et al., 2001), have attracted the attention of both males and females, and have contributed to the foundation of beliefs and behaviors in terms of gender (Becker and Sibley, 2009). In part, gender stereotypes reflect the different characteristics of genders; however, the broad generalization of such a large group of people can never be true and accurate. For example, although social gender stereotypes accentuate gender differences, males and females are more similar than different on most but not all psychological variables (Hyde, 2005). In addition, the intensity of gender stereotypes and the perception of similarities and differences in characteristics between males and females vary across cultures (Guimond, 2008).
Explicit measures are commonly used for assessing an individual’s stereotypes and bias towards a particular group, and these measures require participants to report their own attitudes (Olson and Zabel, 2009).
Studies using explicit measures have shown that levels of stereotyping and sexism have reduced in the past few years, but these specious conclusions were drawn from women more than from men (Spence and Buckner, 2000) and cannot reflect unconscious bias when controlled and regulated by social norms and political correctness (Rudman et al., 2001). Moreover, old-fashioned sexist beliefs have gradually evolved from the appearance of discriminatory behavior and negative beliefs towards women to modern sexism (Swim et al., 1995) and neosexism (Tougas et al., 1995) and have been expressed under subtle guises, such as ambivalence and chivalry (Glick and Fiske, 1996; Barreto and Ellemers, 2005).