I took the implicit bias test about gender bias. I found myself really having to concentrate as they changed the sides around. My results said that I had “a weak automatic association between Me and Woman and a moderate automatic association between Not-me and Man. I was a little surprised that the connection between “me” and “woman” was not equally as associated as my connection between “not me” and “Man”. I think I spend a decent amount of time thinking about my female identity and women’s rights, but I guess that also plays into feeling particularly more separate from the male identity.
“Blindspot” by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explores the hidden reasons for our biases. I found the section about the Innocence Project especially interesting because it provided a clear example of the real world effects of hidden biases. The reading mentioned how 250 people had been exonerated through the project, and 190 of those wrongful convictions were because of incorrect eyewitness accounts. They were able to go back and correct the cases by using DNA data, but the fact that 75% of wrongful convictions were based on false eyewitness accounts makes the importance of learning about availability and implicit bias all the more important. The reading described how we tend to trust people who have features that are similar to our own more than those who don’t. It was really easy for people to assign characteristics to images of strangers even simply based on their appearance and no other information. The authors argue that it’s harder for us to refrain from split second judgments than to not assign them in the first place.
I think your response about a moderate association between “not me” and “man” is really interesting. Perhaps there is some subconscious process in which we identify ourselves more often as separate from one thing as opposed to the same as something else. Maybe it’s easier to identify differences than similarities. Given the landscape of the world and the divide based on bias, I think that differences are valued much more than similarities.
I think what your test results show is something many people already know but few really embrace: that gender is not a black and white issue, it isn’t binary. When you look at it, gender is a spectrum, and even if you identify as cisgender, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are 100% constrained to that gender, especially when you get down to the implicit level. It is interesting, and it shows how confusing it can be for us when we are confronted with something that challenges our preconceived gender norms.