The trick is to recognise it.

People talk about unconscious bias, and other people react as if they have been mortally insulted by the suggestion that they are judging people and situations without even thinking about it. This primal instinct is ingrained and there’s nothing you can do to change it. The world in which we live is rife with traditions and assumptions about what is and isn’t normal, about what should and shouldn’t be.

Those that get mortally insulted are missing the point. It isn’t wrong to have these ingrained assumptions, because we all have them. While having a conversation with someone about some recent time they’d spent in hospital I referred to the nurse they’d been talking about as ‘she’. In fact, I’d never been told the gender of the nurse, and my friend gently and casually corrected me because the nurse in question was in fact a man. No harm no foul, but a sharp reminder that even someone like me who likes to think he’s not judgemental needs to remember that I can still fall into this unconscious assumption trap. The thing is not that we do it, but that we should recognise that we do it and correct ourselves when necessary.

It seems important to me to also recognise that other people don’t see the world in this way. On the one hand, I witnessed someone getting upset over a Stonewall poster that said “Some people are gay. Get over it.” His offended response was something like “We did. In 1985.” On the other hand, I overheard someone else that very same day claim that homosexuality was not natural. I suspect that pointing out that homosexual behaviour has been observed in over 400 species and homophobia in only one would have done little to persuade them of what is truly unnatural.

An attitude that seems all-pervading at the moment is that this unconscious bias is not only OK (it is, because it can’t be stopped – it’s recognising it and correcting it that is the important thing, and is the thing that will eventually lead to it disappearing altogether), but because it’s something we do naturally, it is something that we should continue to do, deliberately and consciously.

A story broke recently that a game that included a scene of sexual abuse on a male character would not be for sale in Australia caused some of this on a forum (the decision has since been changed and the game will now be on sale in Australia). Somehow, outrage at the game not being available in one country caused some commentators to point out that if the scene had involved a woman there would have been much more controversy, and ‘the feminists’, as they put it, would be up in arms. This struck me as a very odd reaction to the news, but the comment was soon joined with other offended people, one of them pointing out that women get more upset about being the victim of sexual assault than men do, and that his manly brain didn’t dwell on it, like women did. This kind of illogical logic struck me as one of the most stupid things I’d ever heard. It really is very stupid, but it is also the result of a person being unable to recognise that being male brings a certain amount of privilege that, if you’re not careful, or if you have no concept of empathy, makes you very, very stupid. Obviously (or rather it should be obvious), being male, you are not going to have to worry about being sexually assaulted because [newsflash!] you’re a man. You don’t have to live with the very real possibility of being sexually assaulted, harassed or raped pretty much every day of your life. You therefore have the luxury of considering the possibility as an interesting mental exercise. Not keeping your unconscious bias in check leads to this kind of idiocy. So try to remember to put yourself in other people’s shoes and not be a bloody moron.