For my implicit bias test, I chose to take the Gender-Career Task test. The Harvard website describes this as a test that “often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males,” and I was curious to test my implicit biases regarding this topic. Last semester, I took a class called Gender and Work where we spoke in-depth about gender stereotypes in the workplace, so I wanted to see if I conformed to these implicit biases.

My results were: Your result is described as an “Automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family” if you were faster responding when Career and Male are assigned to the same response key than when Career and Female were classified with the same key. Your score is described as an “Automatic association for Female with Career and Male with Family if the opposite occurred. Your automatic preference may be described as “slight”, “moderate”, “strong”, or “no preference”. This indicates the strength of your automatic preference.

I am not surprised with my results because I grew up with a pretty heteronormative, male-dominant family structure where my parents filled pretty traditional gender roles. My father is the main breadwinner for my family and my mom worked part-time after she had kids to take care of my siblings and me. While I am now well-aware that this is not the familial structure for many other families, before taking WGSS/Leadership classes at college I couldn’t envision a family structure any differently than I had it. It is often hard thinking about for women whether they want to rear children or continue on a full-time career path because they are often the ones giving up their careers to become full-time mothers (and there is nothing wrong with this!). My implicit biases show that I intrinsically associate careers with male figures and the family with female figures, but not super strong, so I figure I can continue to challenge these implicit biases in my lifetime and learn during Critical Thinking how to address stereotypes when analyzing sources/information.

Anna Marston