Well Informed: Implicit Bias test

I took the Harvard Implicit Bias test on Male and Female words with Career and Family. My result somewhat surprised me, because it's not the way I would have previously categorized myself. My result was this: "Your data suggest a strong automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family."

Even though I work with several females and I have no problem with women working, I was raised in a traditional conservative home where my father worked and my mother stayed home, which is probably where my implicit bias came from. 

However, despite this revelation of my implicit bias, it does not mean I can't choose to look past it. While the test indicated that I have a "strong automatic" implicit bias against women with careers, I laud women in the workplace and I personally believe we'd have a lot less problems as a world if we had more women leaders. This is part of the reason I voted for Hillary Clinton. Some of my political heroes are women like Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

It's no secret America as a whole has a implicit bias to women in the workplace. With American women only being paid 80 percent of what men of the same occupation are being paid, the U.S. is ranked as the 47th best country for women to work. Those are embarrassing statistics. But it is a problem that is fixable. 

After the genocide in Uganda, it was a tough time to be a woman in that country because of all the violence and extremely conservative views on women's role in the workplace and in in government. Women didn't even have the right to vote in Uganda before 1980. Since then, laws were signed to give more rights to women in Uganda and increase diversity in the government. Long story short, women now make up 35 percent of Uganda's parliament. 

If Uganda can turn on a dime and allow so many new opportunities to women in such a short amount of time, the U.S. can do the same. It would take passing policies like placing a minimum on the amount of women who are to serve in government positions, and enacting laws to enforce workplace diversity. It would take some time, but I believe the U.S. can move toward reducing this implicit bias against women in careers that I have, according to the implicit bias test.