I never imagined learning about my unconscious biases with Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, and his management team. It was fascinating.
Harvard Prof. Mahzarin Banaji (center) is the author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, and she led the group through her implicit bias test — a timed word association test. We did the test on gender-career associations, where a series of words flash on the screen, and our task is quickly sort them into Career vs Family buckets while also sorting names into Male vs Female buckets. It is a simple task, but wildly enlightening when stereotypical gender biases are inverted — the cognitive load (measured in time taken to do the sort properly) skyrockets. I strongly encourage you to take this test yourself; instructions below.
Prof. Banaji took the test herself and shared the results. She was just like us. She also shared the stories of Feminist Studies academics and activists for women’s rights who strongly believed they were devoid of stereotypical gender bias. These people — who have spent their whole career trying to address and redress gender discrimination — were shocked to discover that they too harbored unconscious bias on gender issues.
This struck me as a very effective way to start a conversation on gender bias. By revealing the near-universality of implicit biases (once you test for gender, race, age and religion), Banaji can bypass the defensiveness and cognitive dissonance that often arises when people are challenged to confront their biases. When asked about bias in the workplace, I can imagine many managers protesting “I am not biased” and little progress is made from a place of denial. Once we accept the existence of our biases, we can decide how to proceed to overcome them. We need not be governed by unconscious bias, and it becomes so much easier to do so once we move past denial to acceptance and cognitive transcendence. By analogy, we all have primitive limbic reflexes to certain provocations, but we can choose to override them and consciously choose to live a non-violent life.
You can take her Implicit Association Test (IAT) here. To take the same test we took, click the “proceed” link at the bottom of the first page, and then select the Gender-Career IAT blue button. Then, there are 23 pages of demographic questions, but if you just want to jump to the test for now, choose “Decline to Answer” in the bottom right corner of each page.
and an earlier interview on the benefits of 
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