Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog, Mediation Channel, and the Blogs of all other women who are making and recording the history of the United States of America every working day, that March is designated as Women’s History Month. Every woman blogger and every male blogger whose life has been enriched by the presence of women in it is requested to issue a proclamation each March, calling upon their fellow bloggers to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.
This resolution, calling upon “the people of the United States to observe March as Women’s History Month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities” was passed by Congress in 1987 and successive years since then. For more information about the origin of National Women’s History Month, or the activities of the National Women’s History Project, visit the National Women’s History Project.
This blog is celebrating National Women’s History Month by drawing attention to a series of posts on implicit gender bias in ADR. The first two posts are written by me, and the subsequent five by my colleague, commercial mediator and author Victoria Pynchon:
Victoria Pynchon’s series on gender and bias:
A quote attributed to author Anais Nin declares, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
The truth of these words is apparent in the following anecdotes, which I invite you to consider.
Anecdote 1
When my son was tested for a coveted spot in a private prekindergarten, he was asked, ”What color is a banana?”
”White,” he answered.
”A banana isn’t white!” he was told.
Fortunately, my son was not intimidated. He replied: ”Yes, it is. The peel is yellow, but the banana is white.”
He was accepted.
Anecdote 2:
When people say there’s no real difference between the way men and women in public life approach the issues, I am reminded of a pop quiz my seventh-grade biology teacher thought up, which I flunked. The quiz was simple: match the parts of the human body to the parts of a car. So the lungs were matched with the carburetor, the spark plugs were the nervous system, joints were like shock absorbers – or something. I am sure I still have it wrong.
The point is that almost all of the 13-year-old boys in the class aced the test and the girls – even ones who knew the functions of the human body cold – failed. Most of us had never looked under the hood of a car. We had a different reference for understanding the material, which the teacher (male, of course) never considered.
The first anecdote, originally part of a letter to the editor of the New York Times, appeared in “What is this question about?”, a post by Arnold Zwicky on the popular linguistics blog, Language Log. Zwicky was discussing the role that meaning plays in developing educational tests for children.
Boston Globe editorial page editor Renee Loth recounted the second one in an opinion piece on gender and politics.
The anecdotes may differ as to the events that each describes but the moral is the same.
In the first anecdote, the adult posing the question assumed that the child understood that “banana” signified “unpeeled and ripe but not overly ripe banana”. It was the question that was wrong, not the child’s answer. The question also rested upon a cultural assumption: that children taking such tests are familiar with yellow bananas. Children from other cultures may be familiar with bananas of a different hue. As Zwicky points out,
Note that there are red and purple varieties of banana, and that naturally ripened yellow bananas go from green to greenish yellow to brownish yellow (not a “good” yellow) as they ripen. The bananas of commerce in the U.S. are almost all yellow varieties; in fact, they are almost all artificially ripened Cavendish bananas. The ripening process produces vivid yellow bananas. So unless a child taking the test is accustomed to eating red bananas — say, in a Central American neighborhood — the child will give the expected answer, “yellow”.
In the second anecdote, the test-giver assumed that every student in his biology class shared his frame of reference and that the analogy of the car would be readily accessible to all. In that instance, gender played a significant role in the test scores that resulted. But in other situations, the car analogy would be just as incomprehensible regardless of gender but as a matter of economics and class – for example, among students whose parents don’t own a car or in schools located in neighborhoods where public transit not personal motor vehicles is the primary mode of transportation.
Each of these anecdotes reminds us that who we are shapes how we see the world. We are susceptible to influences of which we are often unaware, affecting our perception and our ability to judge. Until they are pointed out to us, our biases remain hidden from us, like the fruit concealed within the peel.
Just be careful not to slip on them.
Maps enable us to picture the world we inhabit. They depict physical spaces, marking the borders between nations or nature’s own boundaries between plain and mountain, water and shoreline. To those who can read them, they tell stories of crops, climate, culture, and economies. Maps also speak of war and violence, of divided nations, of claims for territory, and of peoples locked in conflict, where even the names that places bear are in dispute.
In depicting geopolitically sensitive locations, what can the mapmakers do in the face of competing claims of naming rights or ownership? Google’s Public Policy Blog discusses the ethics of map-making, describing the hierarchy of values that informs Google’s practice in creating maps. Google draws on its own mission, while seeking guidance from authoritative references and honoring local expectations, in creating its map products, available in 41 languages and via 32 region-specific domains:
In all cases we work to represent the “ground truth” as accurately and neutrally as we can, in consistency with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We work to provide as much discoverable information as possible so that users can make their own judgments about geopolitical disputes. That can mean providing multiple claim lines (e.g. the Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan Heights), multiple names (e.g. two names separated by a slash: “Londonderry / Derry“), or clickable political annotations with short descriptions of the issues (e.g. the annotation for “Arunachal Pradesh,” currently in Google Earth only; see blog post about disputed seas).
Sometimes, as Google acknowledges, these principles may conflict:
For example, is localizing a place name inconsistent with Google’s mission? What happens when an authoritative references does not seem to represent the truth on the ground? What about when local user expectations don’t match international convention, or when local laws prohibit acknowledging regional conflicts?
Like the borders themselves, the answers are not always easy to define.
(With a hat tip to The Map Room.)
Conflict resolution work can be demanding, asking much of those who practice it. Among other qualities, practitioners must ideally bring to the table an openness and curiosity to learn more about how others see and experience the world; respect and compassion; the humility to acknowledge an error and express regret for an unintended outcome; and the willingness to remain alert for their own cognitive errors and biases.
These attributes flow from the capacity for self-awareness — a quality that requires eternal vigilance and constant practice. (I cheerfully admit that I’m a slow but persistent learner myself, hopeful nonetheless that there’s truth in the adage “practice makes perfect”.)
Fortunately the internet, with its almost infinite bounty of resources, offers plenty of opportunity for self-reflective exercise, with online tools, ongoing research studies, and tests to help new and experienced dispute resolvers gain greater self-awareness. Here’s a partial list:
- The Interactive Johari Window, a tool allowing users to map personality awareness with the aid of friends, family, and colleagues.
- Face Research, online psychology experiments about preferences for faces and voices
- The Moral Sense Test, a study into human moral judgment
- The Implicit Association Test, the best known of the implicit social cognition instruments
- Northeastern Illinois University Department of Psychology Cognitive Neuropsychology Experiment Site; the current study involves perception of emotional expression
- The Cognition and Language Laboratory, ongoing experiments in language, thought, and memory
- The Perception Lab at the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Scotland, provides opportunities to participate in online studies on perception
- The Police Officer’s Dilemma, created by the Stereotyping & Prejudice Research Laboratory, a video game that tests the effect of racial bias on decisions to shoot.
If you’re interested in finding additional ways to both contribute to scientific advancement and continue the voyage of self-discovery, a whole list of current psychological research projects can be found on the web site for the Hanover College Psychology Department.
Update:
Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure – Oil & Gas, and the host of the outstanding ADR podcast series, International Dispute Negotiation, kindly suggested the addition of two other resources for readers:
Thanks so much, Mike!
Hour by hour, print, TV, and web sources bring news, narratives and dramatic images from Iran of protests and violence as Iranians take to the streets to voice opposition to the results of the recent presidential election.
The news from Tehran has brought back memories from a summer long ago. In 1976, a 17-year-old just a year away from high school graduation, I spent the summer studying Russian language in the Norwich University Summer Russian School, a full-immersion Russian language and cultural program. Norwich, a private military college in Northfield, Vermont, was also the site of another kind of cultural exchange program. Enrolled at Norwich at that time were about 30 members of the Iranian Imperial Navy, young men given the opportunity to study in the U.S.
One of them, Morad, became my friend. When I wasn’t studying myself or involved in Russian School activities, I would hang out with him, taking long walks or gamely learning tennis under his patient tutelage. He was 20 years old, far from home for the first time in his life. He missed his family, particularly his sister, and his friends in Tehran, and would describe his life with them back home. We constituted our own small cultural exchange program as we asked each other questions and eagerly swapped stories about life in our respective countries. He spoke English flawlessly, enjoyed language study, and appreciated my own curiosity about foreign languages. He was pleased when I asked him to teach me some words of Persian, and he happily did so, pointing out the similarities between his native language and mine, both Indo-European tongues.
As I recall, he phoned me once or twice after I’d returned home when my program ended, and then we soon lost touch as kids do. In 1979 the Shah fell from power, toppled in the Islamic Revolution, and months later the U.S. severed all diplomatic ties. At that time I thought of him and the other young men from the Iranian Navy and feared for their fate on their return.
The news from Iran resurrects these half-forgotten memories of a long-ago friendship. I wonder where Morad is now and whether he is safe. I think how fortunate I was to meet him, to learn something of his country and language with their ancient cultural roots, and to spend a little time with him — two kids, just talking and hanging out.
If only diplomacy were so simple. If only our shared humanity and mutual curiosity were enough.
