Micro-Inequities: 40 Years Later


In 2013, 40 years later, we still find micro-inequities in the workplace. There has, admittedly, been a wide range of efforts to call attention to micro-inequities through seminars and workshops. But the issue continues to be a major problem at least in the workplaces with which I am most familiar, viz. universities.

One area of academia in which micro-inequities are especially prevalent is philosophy. There are about 20 percent women employed in philosophy. This under-representation of women has not changed for the better for decades, despite various attempts to call attention to the problem and illuminating possible causes. Micro-inequities have been less discussed as possible causes of the under-representation. However, they seem to be prevalent. Reader posts submitted to the blog “What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?” reveal just how widespread the phenomenon is. Some illustrative examples:

“My partner (male) and I (female) are both Masters students in Philosophy … [Philosophers usually] ask both of us about our research interests, but they almost always ask my partner *first*.”

“I [a female philosopher] noticed that the chair [of the talk] allowed each and every person who spoke to engage in dialogue with the speaker. But when I spoke … the chair … cut me off – I alone of all questioners was not allowed to explain my point further or engage in dialogue with the speaker.”

“A male colleague once told me laughingly that a bunch of male graduate students were exchanging emails about my dissertation topic, which was so ‘feminine’.”

“After I was placed in the very last session of two consecutive conference programs, I started noticing that those very last sessions of conferences, which hardly anyone attends, and last sessions of the day, during which nobody can concentrate, are where most of the female speakers get stuck.”

“I’m continuously amazed how otherwise enlightened people simply don’t think of women when they think about who to invite to conferences and contribute to edited volumes.”

“At one of the first seminars I went to, I was the only girl. I raise an objection … My point is completely ignored. Two minutes later, a male makes exactly the same point. The objection in his mouth is hailed as decisive.”

“I have been ignored, talked over, and talked down to on many occasions. When I gave an objection to a view in a philosophy seminar, just ten minutes later, the teacher credited and praised a male student for having come up with the objection. “

“I was fortunate enough in this year’s job market to get an offer for a position at a university located in a town in a part of the US that I hadn’t lived in. To help me decide whehter to accept the position, I asked the head of department what it was like to live in that town, to get a feel of whether it would be somewhere that I would want to move to. He replied saying that it is a great place to live, and for reference, sent me a link to a page reporting how the area was one of the best in the country to raise children. I do not have any children, nor has it ever come up that I was planning to have any in the near future.”

“My child had been born the previous year and I’m visiting in with a member of my dissertation committee. Wanting to share with him a great news that I my paper was accepted to a suberp conference, I said, ‘I have a wonderful news, Prof X.’ Prof X interjects: ‘Oh, are you pregnant again?’ ”

Though I don’t have as much insight into the micro-inequities that take place in other disciplines and in various other workplaces, I suspect behaviors similar to those that occur in philosophy are prevalent elsewhere.

It is well-known that most micro-inequities occur as a result of implicit biases that we all possess. Common reactions to the following riddle illuminate this phenomenon.

“A boy and his father are terribly injured in a car accident. They are rushed into the hospital, and the father dies soon after. The little boy is in desperate need of an emergency operation, but the doctor refuses to see the boy saying, “I cannot operate on him, he is my son!” Who is the doctor?”

“The boy’s stepfather?” or “I don’t know” are more frequent answers than “The boy’s mother,” which ought to be people’s first response.

The one-million dollar question is, how do we minimize implicit biases? Studies show that education may be the answer in some cases. Lebrecht and colleagues, for example, showed that racial biases become less significant when people are trained to recognize the faces of people of different ethnicity. The researchers first showed 40 white study participants a series of pictures of different races. After each picture the participants were shown a word that could be real or nonsense and was either negative or positive and were asked to decide whether the word was real or nonsense.

The researchers found that the subjects responded more quickly when a negative word followed a face of a black person as opposed to a white person. After half the subjects had undergone a 10 hour training session in facial recognition that taught them to tell apart individual African-American faces. When the implicit bias tests were run again, the participants whose ability to tell apart individual African-American faces had improved also had a great reduction of implicit racial biases.

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