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Women in Leadership: Implicit Association - Gender & Leadership

Inspired by AAUW's report, Barriers and Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership and created for ISU's 2017 Annual Ethics Conference

AAUW asks: Are You Biased against Women Leaders?

If asked, most of us would say that discrimination against women in the workplace is wrong and unacceptable. Unfortunately, research shows that treating women and men equally in hiring decisions, job evaluations, and leadership positions is more of an ideal than a reality. So if we agree that sex discrimination is wrong, why is it still happening? One answer is that many of us harbor unconscious biases that can affect our judgment, even though we may be unaware of them. Uncovering these unconscious, or implicit, biases can be the first step to eliminating them.

So how do we uncover them? AAUW has collaborated with Project Implicit and Harvard University researchers to create a test that looks at the mental associations we make between gender and a variety of concepts, many of which affect our beliefs about women in positions of leadership.[text from http://www.aauw.org/article/implicit-association-test, February 10, 2016]

LINK TO THE TEST