You and I pride may ourselves on being fair in our judgements and open-minded to other people’s ideas and practices. And we assume that everybody else, or at least the majority, share these views and practise these mores.
So how is it that all over the world there is such crass discrimination between classes, between ‘races’, between those with different socio-economic statuses, or different education or gender, or disability?
You might say that such discrimination is surely limited to a few individuals or sectors within the community.
Just look around you, starting with the country’s most lofty institutions, Parliament, or the judiciary, and you will find obvious gender discrimination, where the ratio of women is pitifully low. Gender discrimination is particularly blatant when it comes to differential salaries throughout the world, including Malta, where, almost invariably, women earn about 15 per cent less than men for doing the same jobs. Such entrenched discrimination has been sanctioned and accepted by practically everyone except by those affected by the disadvantage.
Even if we discount blatant discrimination such as that resulting from nepotism, old-boys’ ties or political party links, it seems that most of us suffer from elements of discriminatory behaviour without our knowledge and without our acknowledgement. Is this possible? And if so, how rife is it?
Even the President of the US seems to prefer to be surrounded by those who share his genes, and certainly those who share their cultural accoutrements with him
When it comes to selecting applicants for a job, even just for a job interview, it has now been well established that those whose gender is different from that of the selection committee members are likely to be disadvantaged. Even if an applicant manages to get to the interview stage, any indication that the applicant has a different skin colour, he (or more likely she) is more likely to be rejected.
In places like the US with so much bias against those of colour, it has been proven extensively that one is far more likely to be rejected if the name on an application form smacks of a non-Anglo background. This has led to applicants changing their names to sound more acceptably Anglophonic. Likewise, ‘lookism’ is alive and well: it has become common practice in some areas for auditions for musicians to be held behind a screen to ensure that candidates are not judged by gender, colour or degree of attractiveness.
One assumes that this is the result of ‘unconscious discrimination’, where discrimination affects not only the hard-wired, dyed-in-the-wool racists or those so set in their ways that they will base their choices on preconceived ideas, but also those who believe that their judgement is based purely on merit.
It seems to be a fact that most of us suffer from unconscious discrimination. We might assure ourselves that we are free of racist, homophobic or gender discriminatory tendencies, but in practice we seem to prefer to have as friends, colleagues or even employees those who share with us as many of their genes, their memes and other cultural characteristics as possible. Even the President of the US seems to prefer to be surrounded by those who share his genes, and certainly those who share their cultural accoutrements with him – what hope is there for lesser creatures like ourselves?
Humans are not expected to act as magnets, attracted by opposite poles. Neither should we fall to the trap of discrimination simply because we are unaware of our human frailties, which include unconscious bias that often leads to discrimination.
There is no easy solution to this problem. In the case of bias exhibited by selection committees, the only solution is to have such committees more representative of the general community. But this is a circular problem; you cannot have an unbiased selection committee unless members of a minority are already in positions of power, and this cannot happen unless selection committees are representative of those who are currently in a minority – a proper catch-22 situation.