Module 1 - Beat Gender Bias

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What is Gender Bias

Feeling vulnerable and second-guessing yourself, leading to feelings of inferiority. * discourage them from attending the workshops, saying that they needed to concentrate

We associate traits like ambition, competitiveness, dominance, decisiveness, and assertiveness with masculinity.

We associate traits like kindness, understanding, gentleness, and submissiveness with femininity

We associate good leadership with having masculine traits like assertiveness, dominance, and decisiveness.

Leaders that embody purely masculine traits usually practice a competent style of leadership. This sort of leader concentrates only on getting the job done, and treats the people who work for them as expendable

Feminine leadership is typically associated with warmth, and with a nurturing atmosphere. This leader is good at relating to their subordinates and engenders a feeling of belonging and acceptance within their team.

Examples for gender bias

• Women’s managers seemed to be treating them differently than their male coworkers.
• In fact, parents still expect less from their daughters than their sons when it comes to their STEM capabilities.

What are consequences of gender bias

Research shows that, as workplaces become more masculine and competitive, their performance decreases.

When women and girls can’t see any female role models in a particular field of work, they’re much less likely to reach for that field themselves … Affinity bias

Positive effects from removing Gender bias?

When managers stop favoring and promoting people just because they seem to embody extreme masculinity, then many bad leaders will effectively be barred from achieving leadership positions.

A leader who’s both warm and competent will help create a healthy working environment, characterized by compassion, responsiveness, flexibility, and safety.

How to prevent from gender bias

• Leaders can get to the root cause of gender bias is by simply taking the time and space to listen to the women affected.
• Have clear criteria for making their decisions (especially in field of hiring and promotions). By giving managers a clear list of criteria for recruitment and promotion, as well as by holding people accountable for their decisions about who to put into key leadership positions.
• Adopt a diversity mindset. Make your organization more innovative and productive

More insights on diversity

Team diversity, such as teammates being of different genders, only benefits performance when the work involves nonroutine cognitive tasks. These tasks could include things like research, planning, strategy, and problem-solving.

When a team’s work involves routine tasks, where stability and efficiency are the biggest predictors of success, then homogenous, nondiverse teams perform best.

Diverse teams make more accurate predictions, generate a greater number of high-quality ideas and opinions, think more critically, are more creative, and are better at discerning truth from falsehoods than homogenous teams are

Linking

• [[Team Genius]]

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