WAGES

Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation

  1. Home
  2.  | Why WAGES?

People want to be fair — Why is it difficult to accomplish?

Women have made tremendous strides in scientific fields in recent decades. Women work hard and know what it takes to succeed. Most men do not want to be unfair and, in fact, know that gender equity benefits them, too, when their women partners and family members can advance and be paid fairly. Despite women’s hard work and men’s good will, however, gender-related inequities in opportunity, advancement, and salary persist in nearly every industry and profession studied.

Good intentions and efforts to be objective are not enough.

If you are like most of us, you are confident of your ability to be objective and impartial when it comes to weighing and comparing the qualifications of colleagues in your area of expertise and your discipline more generally. Here’s a demonstration of how that might work.

A keen eye and good intentions alone, however, are not enough to neutralize powerful—and quite natural—information processing biases shared by all humans. Much of the time we rely on cognitive shortcuts. On the plus side, these shortcuts make it possible for us to juggle quantities of complex information without becoming bogged down in detail. On the negative side, cognitive shortcuts can lead us to overlook information or come to premature conclusions—even when we aim to be objective.

People process social information to be “efficient.”

How we process social information, especially information about other people, can be heavily influenced by stereotypes, a form of cognitive shortcut that entails quick and unconscious generalization about an individual based on her or his group membership.

Other kinds of cognitive short-cuts can trip up our objectivity, too. For example, when asked to think of examples of a given category like “vegetables” or “movies,” or “prominent scientists,” we are more likely to think of examples we’ve encountered recently or that are commonly encountered.

Stereotypes, both positive and negative, can have powerful effects, even when we do not explicitly believe them. Research in scientific psychology repeatedly shows that everyone—regardless of the social groups we belong to—is influenced by stereotypes. We are all influenced. And we may even unconsciously buy into stereotypes of our own groups.

Cognitive short-cuts impair objectivity.

These unconsciously deployed stereotypes underlie the persistence of patterns of gender inequity (and other inequities) in the workplace. Prejudice and blatant discrimination still occur in work environments, however, most gender discrimination today happens “under the radar.” See a sample of WAGES items for an illustration.

Even when we know about the power of stereotypes and cognitive short-cuts to impair our objectivity, it takes work to organize evaluative information to reduce our susceptibility to those biasing influences. Crosby and colleagues have shown that even just the arrangement of the data can disguise or reveal a pattern of inequity. Click here for a demonstration.

To learn more about the power of cognitive short-cuts and our difficulty in neutralizing their biasing effects, UnderstandingPrejudice.org is a good place to start.