Looking within - Am I biased?

In the wonderful art collections of the Aborigines in the Caixa Cultural across the Marco Zero square in Recife, was a questionnaire. A simple bias test.
Which of these groups of people are perceived to be capable at handling money (Economist, Aborigine, kleptomaniac..) , who do you think is dishonest (politician, Aborigine, priest..). A laugh ended up my nose as I read the last question: do you think you are racist? (yes, maybe, the questions are stupid, I have a sneaking tendency I might have racist tendencies!). Most of us educated folks would claim we are not sexist or racist, yet we are. And data all around the world shows us the impact of our everyday biases.

Take the case of gender bias: it surprises me every  single time when people consider gender bias to be a thing of the past, 'out there', happening to someone else, when it is 'right here', sitting in  the room with you and me. And yet, we fail to acknowledge it.

In India, where I come from, families consider themselves progressive if they give girls a chance to have an education or 'allow' women to work. The reality though is that ~70% of married women across all economic strata undergo intra-household violence, a woman is raped every 20 minutes and the illegal foetal sex determination market is a whopping $150 Mn industry today! These biases don't come from outer space nor are they done by someone else 'out there', it is done by us, people around us, our friends, colleagues, neighbors, relatives! They are manifested in us through so many subtle verbal and non-verbal cues by our families, media and people around us; by the time the child is 10, she/he feels violence is acceptable and even justified, a woman ought to be 'put in her place', and she should feel extremely fortunate or even ashamed if her spouse helps her in domestic duties. For come on, how manly can he be to do normal work at home!

And yet, by not acknowledging our inherent biases, we enable this poisonous ivy to grow into our lives thicker than ever. The situation is complicated because how do we even recognize our own biases?  Because by acknowledging it, we acknowledge we have flaws, and that's uncomfortable! Why then would we want to change the status quo! For it takes tremendous courage to honestly ask within, this one question, every single time we act: how would I have responded (differently) had this person been of the opposite sex? 

If a person tells me he/she is being harassed at the workplace, would I support the man to take legal action and 'advise' the woman 'to adjust because this is how workplaces in real life are'? There's gender bias for you. When a woman gets promoted at her work, and we hear her male and female colleagues say 'Oh, she must have slept her way up', there's another gender discrimination happening right under our noses. When I create a stormy situation at home because my daughter decides to live alone but feel proud when my son does, that's gender bias. When we see a bad driver on the road, and comment 'Oh, she must be a woman!', we perpetuate the vicious cycle of bias. When I tell my daughter that her dad wanted a son, but we got her instead (and then of course grew to love her), there's gender inequality staring at your face. When I, as a woman, tell my children that the dad is the head of the family, because he earns the money, I lay the foundation for subservience in the minds of my children. When I use the pronoun 'he' to refer to every third person pronoun in my sentence (A leader is a person who leads an organization; so he should be honest), I effectively signal that 'she', the remaining 50% of the planet, is fit to be ignored.

An accumulation of these small biases have ended up so costly for the 3.8 Bn women living on the planet today. Simply because we have not had the moral courage to question ourselves.

And yet, we say that we are not biased.

We all are. Only the degree of our bias is different. Are we willing to take the moral courage to reflect on it?