It's the explicit biases you gotta watch out for
I’m relatively confident that you, dear reader, have attended your fair share of workshops, seminars, and trainings related to diversity, equity, inclusion, access, justice, and such. Me as well.
Some of them have been quite good, and when you sum it all up, I think I’ve learned a bunch from these experiences. And of course, some of them have been meh.
Perhaps the most common underlying current among all of these DEI trainings is the pervasiveness of implicit bias. No explainer is needed for any of us at this point, and I do hope that you’ve taken home the (absolutely factual) lesson that we all harbor various forms of implicit biases and though we are not conscious of them, per se, we should at least be aware that we are not conscious of them. And the good news is that you can get yourself tested. This stuff matters.
But you know what matters even more, and barely ever comes up at these trainings and workshops? Explicit bias. It’s everywhere, and in my opinion it’s a lot more harmful than implicit biases.
We talk about implicit biases because that a thing that we can work on on ourselves, it’s a bite-size challenge worth pursuing. On the other hand, addressing explicit biases involves dealing with structural change, removing the negative effects of powerful bad actors,
While we may or may not have some implicit biases based on gender, ethnicity, gender identity, and so on, you know what a lot of people have that is even worse in our system? Explicit biases against these same identities. People who openly do and say things that directly and overtly discriminate against people simply because of who they are.
Let me tell you about some explicit biases that I’ve seen in my own experience that will never, ever be fixed by implicit bias training.
Someone says that they’re concerned about hiring an unmarried woman because this might portend a shift in their dedication to the job in the future
Someone argues that this building doesn’t need all-gender bathrooms (while being aware that there are non-binary folks who work there!)
Someone constantly refers students of color to the small number of faculty in the department with similar minoritized identities, increasing that person’s workload while decreasing their own
The cost of the application to a graduate application to a program is an explicit barrier against students who are less wealthy and can’t afford to apply to as many programs as other people
Workplaces are structured with activities that happen after 5pm that exclude parents who need to leave work by then
When graduate programs don’t focus recruitment on institutions within the same region, this is a bias against people who value staying near their families and contributing to their own communities
Someone says that the prestigiousness/exclusivity/ranking of an undergraduate institution is a factor in admissions or selection, that’s essentially a bias against people based on their wealth and the zip code they were born in
Someone doesn’t take on a student into their lab because they’re not a cultural fit for their lab community
Someone prefers a candidate because of their “pedigree”
You get the idea.
For all of the -isms that are lurking inside of us, the most problematic ones are carried overtly in front of us for everybody to see. Fixing those problems involves rebuilding our institutions around different priorities and values, which is why institutions aren’t training us how to fix those things.
