A women who works in HR at a large company,  spoke at the Emerging Women Live Conference of unconscious bias in regards to women leaders.

She spoke about how a female leader had asked her to look into her compensation and a male leader a couple weeks later asked her to look into his.  She stated that she reacted quicker to the male leader’s request than the female leader’s request.  She stated that she had an unconscious bias toward the female leader.  She asked herself why that may be the case. She stated that she saw the male leader to be the provider for the family and didn’t have that thought for the female leader.  She found that interesting as she herself is the primary breadwinner for her family and her husband stays home with the kids.

Shen then showed a slide with two pictures on it. One was a male with certain leadership traits listed next to it (strong, direct, leader, assertive) and the second was a female with leadership traits (listener, nurturer, collaborator) listed next to it. Then she flipped the pictures and it was interesting to see the words next to the pictures and people’s perspectives. Many felt that the words listed with the female traits next to the male’s picture felt odd and the words with the male’s trait next to the female picture were off.

I found the reactions interesting. It makes me wonder how often is unconscious bias at play and how often do we check in with ourselves to test it.