DenySystemicBias

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

To deny systemic bias is a common human trait. Everyone pretends that their faction or group is "objective" and has rational judgement that it applies in some process.

Systemic biases are often invisible and self-reinforcing. When people have the RightToLeave, or even the right not to participate, your community may only attract BirdsOfaFeather?. Often this is a good thing because it helps alleviate conflicts. However, sometimes there is a demographic you wish to reach out to, except that you have some systemic bias towards them that is silently and invisibly keeping them away. Thus, you remain homogeneous, and therefore biased.

To escape systemic bias, you need to continuously force yourself to interact with people outside your core community to determine a) if you are interested in them, b) if you can entice them to join, c) if not, why not? (cf. UsAndThem) That is, you have to market yourself and do market research.

To that end, in spring 2004, based on some comments made at the University of Toronto that (statistically speaking) UseRealNamesForWomen might feel more fearful than men, SunirShah hypothesized that UseRealNames might be a systemic bias against women. As we are overwhelmingly male, questions arise why? As men we constructed the policy. If the policy kept women away, the policy would have invisibly reinforced our maleness. In the end, we discovered that UseRealNamesForWomen was not the problem, but by posing the question we did learn a lot about how we construe ourselves as a community.

CategoryPower

DenySystemicBias

Discussion