Why our brains tend to discriminate even though we don’t want to | Chantal van der Leest

Sometimes I muse: How much easier would my working life be if I were a white man? Would I have been taken more seriously? Would I have been promoted more often and had more development opportunities? Well, at least I’m white. Recently I heard a teacher at a college say that she was often mistaken for a student, or even the cleaning lady, because she wears a headscarf.

When you know how the brain handles information, you can hardly blame us humans. Our brains prefer to brush entire groups with one brush, which costs very little energy. But instead of looking at talents, our brain is limited to a few superficial characteristics. Is it a man or woman? What kind of origin? In a few seconds, our brain has already made its judgment. Handily solved, because the world is already complex enough.

We all know its drawbacks. There are more men named Peter who are CEOs than women, people with a ‘difficult’ name – with the exact same letter as a Jan Jansen – are not invited for a job interview, and women are still paid less than men.

On the one hand, this is due to racism and prejudice, and therefore conscious behaviour. But there is also such a thing as an implicit or unconscious Bias: Without us being aware of it, our assumptions guide our behavior. We take our daughters to flute lessons and our sons to guitar lessons. We unintentionally think to a third-generation Dutchman: gosh, he speaks Dutch very well.

These persistent beliefs even change how we think and function about ourselves. Women are good at math, but if you tell them often enough that they can’t, they will perform measurably worse on a math test.

How do we get out of here? These distorted ideas are instilled in us at a very early age; for example, we unconsciously offer boys toy cars more often than girls. Some companies offer implicit biastraining, which is noble, but to me it still feels like setting the heating to 30 degrees and then giving people tips about drinking enough water when it’s hot. Moreover, such individual interventions appear to only help a little. Shouldn’t we think bigger? Can’t we think of something to make our environment, our society more fair?

Would you like to know more about psychology and work? Read Chantal’s books Why Perfectionists Are Rarely Happy, 13 Tips Against Perfectionism (2021) and Our Fallible Thinking at Work (2018).

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