Implicit Bias and Managerial Decisions

I selected the ‘Gender-career’ and ‘Age’ categories. I expect the ‘Gender-Career’ test to reveal that I associate women with family and men with career and I expect the ‘Age’ test to reveal that I prefer young people as compared to old people. In both cases, I am expecting my biases to be weak. I think these biases will impact me as a manager especially while making hiring decisions and evaluating people’s future potential. My implicit biases may lead me to believe that men have more potential than women because they are more focused on career or that younger people are more driven, ambitious and hardworking as compared to older people.

The results of both the tests showed that I had a bias in both categories and the direction of bias matched my expectation. I was somewhat surprised by the degree of the bias revealed by the test which was ‘moderate automatic preference’ for both as I was expecting it to be weak. Acting based on either of these biases will pose an ethical challenge. For example, if I selfishly make all my hiring decisions based on my bias for younger people, I’ll end up with a team of fresh college graduates. While this might result in high energy team of go-getters, the team will be severely impacted due to lack of experience or maturity that older people usually bring to the table. Therefore, this bias is clearly not universalizable.

A personal policy I can put in place to insulate my future decisions is by basing them on the results that people deliver or their past performance record. If I apply this policy while making hiring decisions or calibration decisions it will help me be objective and prevent me from giving in to my biases. I do think this personal policy can be scaled to the entire corporation. If everyone in the company followed this policy and hired people based on their past performance record and rewarded them based on the quality and impact of the results they have obtained, we will attract and retain good talent in the...