{"id":1732,"date":"2019-09-12T18:08:29","date_gmt":"2019-09-12T22:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/northeast\/?p=1732"},"modified":"2019-09-12T18:08:29","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T22:08:29","slug":"combating-implicit-bias-in-judging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/northeast\/combating-implicit-bias-in-judging\/","title":{"rendered":"Combating Implicit Bias in Judging"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eliana
Article by Eliana Rabinowitz<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Hey folks, it has been a while since I wrote any public articles, and based on some recent experiences, I decided it was about time I write about something that influences the lives of many judges on a daily basis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine your team lead.\u00a0 In the morning, she holds a team meeting.\u00a0 The event is short-handed, so she is a little stressed out about making sure everything goes well.\u00a0 She tells your team that it is critical that you be where you are needed throughout the day, and that everyone is going to be working very hard this day.\u00a0 She outlines a very thorough plan for what needs to happen when, and she has high expectations for you and your teammates.<\/span><\/p>\n

What do you think of this team lead?\u00a0 Is she in over her head, or freaking out?\u00a0 Is she bossy, demanding, controlling? It turns out that in scenarios like this, the difference between being bossy and being a leader, between freaking out and making do in a difficult situation, between being controlling and being detailed-oriented are, statistically speaking, the pronouns used in the paragraph.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the context of social science, an implicit bias is an unconscious association between a group and some characteristic.\u00a0 (There are lots of groups of people who experience implicit bias against them, but for this article, I will talk about women so as to draw upon my own experience.)\u00a0 Now, a good number of people reading this are going to be thinking \u201cI don\u2019t have implicit bias, I\u2019m not sexist!\u201d Honestly, for most people, the later (\u201cI\u2019m not sexist\u201d) is true, while the former (\u201cI don\u2019t have implicit bias\u201d) is not.\u00a0 In fact, by definition, you are not aware of implicit bias while it is happening, because it is unconscious. And having biases does not make you a bad person. Far from it, in fact, because if you are reading this, you probably have some interest in trying to reduce or account for that bias.<\/span><\/p>\n

In study after study after study, it has been proven that just changing the gender of a job applicant, leader, or employee tremendously changes the adjectives used to describe them.\u00a0 Strong or driven becomes bossy, pressure becomes stress, and detail-oriented becomes controlling. There are other ways that bias crops up, too. Men are seen as more creative on average than women, so their ideas are sometimes rated higher, even when they perform empirically worse.\u00a0 Even more relevant to judging, men are seen as more authoritative, so they are considered better leaders and their directions are followed more readily, even if they act the exact same way as a woman in an identical role. This isn\u2019t just true of what men think, either. These biases are ingrained in our society, and women display the same biases against other women.<\/span><\/p>\n

How do these come up in judging, you might ask, and in the real world instead of just in studies?\u00a0 If you ask judges who are women, you\u2019ll hear about a lot of common situations:<\/span><\/p>\n