Bias
Greater diversity leads to increased innovation
What drew me to a career at IBM was IBM’s culture of innovation. I began to experience IBM’s drive for innovation from my first day on the job. Nothing surprising there. One thing that astonished me, however, was IBM’s view that diversity and inclusion led to innovation; this was entirely new to me – I had never before viewed innovation through the lens of diversity! There is more to diversity and inclusion that meets the eye.
Have you come across the term unconscious bias? Do you know that it can influence your decision making? More importantly, do you know that it can have a negative impact on those around you? Bias isn’t just in AI algorithms, it’s in our head too. Bias in AI algorithms is something I am very familiar with from a technical point of view. In university, I wrote a dissertation on Neural Networks, a field in which bias plays a significant role. The nippiest way I can explain bias in neural networks without having to bore you with neurones synapses, partial derivatives, or activation functions is as follows.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but when that subjective view finds its way into a neural network algorithm, you’ve got bias in the program. Bias embedded into an AI model could result in discriminatory results.
A startling example of the above is how gender-biases were found in Google translate until very recently. Translating the sentence “She is a doctor. He is a nurse.” First into Turkish and then back to English would result in the genders being flipped around so that the sentence would read “He is a doctor. She is a nurse.” The reason for this being that Turkish has a gender-neutral singular pronoun that becomes translated into a stereotype in English! Artificial intelligence (AI) is about building machines that can think and act intelligently, however, AI systems are only as good as the data used to train them. Data can contain racial, gender, or ideological biases which, when used to train a neural network, will produce skewed outcomes as was seen with Google translate.
Bias – Unconscious & Cognitive
As in AI, bias also exists in the real world in the form of unconscious bias. Bias can result in prejudice in favour of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in an unfair way. Unconscious bias is far more common than conscious bias and if often found to be incompatible with one’s conscious values.
The human mind shows good design, although it is designed for fitness maximization, not truth preservation
Martie Haselton (Department of Psychology, University of California) and Daniel Nettle’s (Brain and Behaviour, University of Newcastle) researched into bias and its evolution in the human species. Their research suggests that the human mind evolved survival strategies over thousands of years, culminating in the human capability to make snap-judgment and risk-averse decisions. In other words, humans learned to leap to conclusions when they didn’t have time to ‘think about it’. A trait that science refers to as Cognitive Bias. A question I have asked myself, without coming to a conclusion, is whether these cognitive leaps could be the root cause of unconscious bias.
I was recently on a long-haul flight, returning home from work. A lady captained the plane. Having spent most of my adult life in the UK, I did not think much of it. Mid-way through the flight, there was a fire on board, and within minutes everyone panicked fearing for their lives (I am not making this up, this was BA104 Dubai to London on the 5th November 2019). The instant thought that raced through my mind at that moment was – “will the crew at the controls land this plane safely?”. All went well, and the plane landed safely. However, having spent much time during the previous months reading up on unconscious bias, I kept questioning myself – Did that thought go through my mind because I knew a woman was at the controls? Was my thought influenced in any way by unconscious or cognitive bias? This incident helped me practically apply what I had learnt about unconscious and cognitive bias. I was pleased that I was challenging myself and becoming cognisant to unconscious bias.
Here is another interesting story that further helped me get my head around the challenge of bias and its impact on diversity and inclusion.
My daddy told me you fly planes
Czarena Hashim smashed the glass ceiling when she became Royal Brunei and Southeast Asia’s first female airline captain. In 2016, she went on to become part of the first-ever all-female flight deck crew for Royal Brunei Airlines to fly a Boeing 787 Dreamliner from Brunei to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. That is a remarkable achievement; however, there is something more interesting in this story that drew my attention. Following Czarena Hashim unique achievement, she received a letter (the one on the right) from a four-year-old girl.
Some people might still think it’s an achievement for an all-women crew to fly a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. However, this little girl thinks it is perfectly normal and wants to fly a plane too someday.
Racial and gender stereotyes
Neuroscientists have uncovered brain regions that are involved in racial and gender stereotyping. It has been proven that such stereotypes begin to take shape form early in childhood. Scientists believe that stereotypes, in general, serve a purpose because clustering people into groups with expected traits help humans navigate the world without being overwhelmed by information. The downside is that the potential for bias gets hard-wired into human cognition. I believe that the action that Tsarina Lipscomb’s father took by encouraging his daughter to write a letter expressing her ambition to become a pilot went a long way in dealing with any bias that could otherwise have gotten ingrained into this little girl’s mind. I have a daughter too who is at university studying to become a doctor. I wouldn’t want her career to be restricted by someone’s unconscious bias. Our outlook for others should not be dissimilar.
The more we expose ourselves to ideas, images and situations that challenge negative stereotypes, the less discriminatory we will be
Unconscious bias can affect decisions in all areas of life, but especially in the workplace, and the more we are aware of this, the more we can mitigate it. Coming across cognitive bias and researching it has helped me open my eyes to the world of unconscious bias. I realised that everyone could have unconscious biases. Our predisposition to discriminate may not be intentional, but we can still do something to change it. I have learnt to recognise instances of unconscious biases and effectively deal with them. I am hoping that by sharing my personal experience through this blog, I’ll hopefully inspire you, to be cognisant of unconscious bias. I believe the more we expose ourselves to ideas, images and situations that challenge negative stereotypes, the less discriminatory we will be.
