Gender Bias in Academia

Gender, being an identity contingency as coined by Claude M. Steele in his book Whistling Vivaldi, is not self-chosen, is virtually impossible to escape, and comes with expectations, prejudice and – most importantly – uneven pre-conditions for our choices in life. Gender inequality is a wide-spread problem, causing much harm on the
individual and societal levels, and the academic world is no exempt. One major source of gender inequality is related One major source of gender inequality is related to implicit (subconscious automatic associations) gender bias that can harm e.g. the careers, work-life balance, and mental health of women. While sexism still might be part of the explanation on gender differences in academia, the concept of implicit bias suggests that this is not the only explanation for injustices but still as problematic. The extent to which teaching personnel at LTH is gender biased might influence the education they provide and is hence of great relevance to investigate, as awareness of implicit bias might be a way forward to reduce the systematic unfairness in academia. Implicit biases have been investigated for many years, 2003-2015, in an American-based web project (Harvard Project Implicit) but have not yet been investigated among teachers at LTH. In this study, we let 56 teachers at LTH partake in a survey and in the
Implicit Association Test (IAT) for Gender-Science [2] and compared our results with those of the 628,295 participants in Project Implicit to investigate how the gender biases at LTH differs from the population at large.