[Crabber]

The term "unconscious bias" is based on the (false) assumption that every group of human is exactly identical.

It is 100% a political term that is shoved at people to make them feel like a bad person for noticing differences where there actually are differences.

If you want to eliminate "unconscious bias" you are trying to create a society where women talk to men in the exact same way that they talk to other women, women act the exact same way around attractive men as they do around ugly men, adults talk to a 5 year old the same way that they would talk to a 95 year old.

i.e. a delusional utopia that is completely detached from nature and reality, and which has never existed in any society.

[refurb]

This guy gets it.

"Unconscious bias" is so embedded in corporate-speak today that nobody has stopped to actually challenge its existence or the proposed solutions. Plus the "evidence" for such bias is so shaky ("Bill said I'm raising my voice, but he only said that because I'm a woman") it can be "found" or "dismissed" very easily, depending on what political goals you have.

I find it odd that we attempt to somehow reshape the innate human psyche (which is constantly taking in information and making assumptions based on them), rather than just enforce workplace rules around how you treat people. Seems like a bit more direct, objective and actionable than diving into some deep conversation about "unconscious bias".

But regardless, the real answer why this is being discussed is: 1) HR is told it needs to be done [usually because some other company is doing it], 2) it provides cover again lawsuits if employees sue over workplace harassment and 3) it's a moneymaking business for the consultants that teach these class [a lot of money].

[xiphias2]

It’s also profitable for both companies and governments (income tax) to make women delay staying with a baby at home and focus on work instead in their most fertile and productive age (late 20s, early 30s). For men you don’t need extra motivation, as they are not making this choice anyways.

They can feed the lie of ,,having lots of time to have a baby later’’, and I’m seeing many women at age 40 realizing that no man wants to start making a baby with her at that age, because it’s just biologically not practical.

[smolder]

Acknowledging substantial differences in people is typically just left as an exercise for the reader, because everyone understands that part from their formative years, implicitly. The part people don't implicitly understand is how their powerful but imperfect approximation-machine brains lead them to treat others unfairly based on differences that are immaterial to a given context. That's why it's taught about.

I think maybe the term "unconscious bias" is misaligned with its use, because the fact is we have lots of biases we don't actively think about, and most of those are useful, not harmful. It's specifically the unconscious biases that are unfair to others that we need to beware.

Unconscious bias is innate to the way we think, it's real, and it's sort of measurable in a way. There's a test called an "implicit association test" where you categorize words as quickly as possible into one or the other group of categories. It attempts to measure the relatedness of categories within a group through the response time of the testee as they sort words. It's something a junior programmer can code up themselves in a day, and having taken the test in good faith and seen the results, I believe it does peak under the hood of how we think to some extent, revealing unconscious biases.