For quite sometime I have been active in quality
improvement, leadership, patient safety, human factors and related areas. My
interest includes discrimination in general but healthcare in particular and
especially doctors. This relates to discrimination in the western world
particularly in the UK.
We know bias plays a part in this discrimination. Government and organisations
have taken efforts in dealing with discrimination, this takes the form of law,
training in equality and diversity and monitoring selected data. We are told
how to deal with discrimination and how to avoid discrimination.
We were never asked to assess, quantify and declare our
bias.
Bias is a part of life. For better or worse our history,
legacy and as humans our capacity to pattern match means that bias gets in. We
could even argue that bias is a normal part of life. However when bias affects
the career, livelihood, reputation and freedom of certain segments of the
population, it ceases to be normal. While bias could be accepted as normal, the
positive or negative effects of bias that affects segments of population
repeatedly can never be accepted as normal.
How do we prevent bias from affecting others?
In my opinion unless we assess our bias by a common method
and then declare it publicly we cannot begin to tackle discrimination.
Once our bias is published publicly, then we can start
having methods to take that into account in our decision making by appropriate
counterbalances, algorithms, adjustments etc.
I cannot ask others to publicly declare their bias unless I
have done so myself.
Currently, the Harvard Implicit Association Tests are a good
(but not totally proven) method to assess our bias. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
I have taken the test that relates to race and I am posting
the results by screenshot here.
I am aware that this test relates better to the USA and refers
to the black-white races. I also took this test thrice; twice the same result
came up that I had a moderate automatic preference for white people and once
the test showed no preference between white and black people; on the occasion
that the test showed no preference, I had deliberately slowed down to take the
test.
So does that make me a racist? I do not think so. Does that
make me biased? May be it does, but since I have known this for sometime now, I
make deliberate conscious effort to overcome my Harvard IAT data based moderate
automatic preference for white people. I think very deeply on how my actions
are impacting. I take extra effort to review decisions before implementing them
with the awareness of my bias to ensure that my actions do not affect black and minority ethnic
people adversely.
If I was an examiner, investigator, police, judge, etc I
would want my decisions to be counterbalanced by a formal algorithm to prevent
my bias from hurting BME people.
I am not in an unusual category as far as my bias is concerned;
I am part of the largest category of persons who have taken this test. How does
this affect the society?
We need to start somewhere.
I encourage you to take the test and post it publicly. I am
happy to add your test result to this blog if you send it to me. Let us make a
change. Let us reduce bias. Let us take the first real step by publicly
acknowledging our own bias.
Here is the list of persons who have agreed to go public with their bias tests. My sincere thanks for permitting me to add their names:
Dr Kim Holt: 'slight automatic preference to black people over white people'
Dr Joe Karthikapallil (Ophthalmologist) : 'moderate automatic preference to white people over black people'.
Dr Joydeep Grover: 'no automatic preference between African Americans and European Americans'
Dr Vivek Chhabra (ED): 'no automatic preference between black people and white people'
Mr Bhavik Patel (Financial Sector) - ' slight bias towards white individuals compared to black individuals'
Here is the list of persons who have agreed to go public with their bias tests. My sincere thanks for permitting me to add their names:
Dr Kim Holt: 'slight automatic preference to black people over white people'
Dr Joe Karthikapallil (Ophthalmologist) : 'moderate automatic preference to white people over black people'.
Dr Joydeep Grover: 'no automatic preference between African Americans and European Americans'
Dr Vivek Chhabra (ED): 'no automatic preference between black people and white people'
Mr Bhavik Patel (Financial Sector) - ' slight bias towards white individuals compared to black individuals'
©M HEMADRI
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M Hemadri’s mini e-book 'Standardised Management Conversation' is available - click http://www.amazon.co.uk/Standardised-Management-Conversation-Hemadri-ebook/dp/B018AWBJTU
