BBC Future recently highlighted bias research from Patricia Devine, William Cox, Xizhou Xie and colleagues, detailing strategies for reducing bias:
“I don’t know if we could ever get rid of those underlying associations, but we can make them less powerful in our thinking,” says Devine. “We can learn to recognise the ways in which (biases) lead us to conclusions that we understand are not appropriate or unwarranted, and then we can do something else that reflects your intentions and your values much more.”
Devine and her colleagues have also shown interventions that emphasised gender bias led to increased hiring of female faculty in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While the percentage of females who were hired in the departments that did not receive the anti-bias training stayed around 32%, departments that received the training saw the proportion of women hired in the subsequent two years jump to 47%.
Read the article in full at BBC Future.