How are implicit biases holding us back? | Allison Stanger

It's extremely important to realize that we have biases about what genders are good at what.

So for example, I was a mathematics major in college. I went through all of high school without anyone ever telling me that I was good at math, even though I got hundreds on all the exams. I just thought that that's how math was. There was a right answer and you got the right answer, and this is what everybody was doing.

And it took a female professor in college who told me, "You're really good at math. You really should become a math major." And I said, "What would I do with a math major?" And she said to me something I'll always remember. She said, "If you're a woman who's good at math, you can do anything."

It's really important that women be encouraged to pursue their interests from an early age and to be taught that they too can be good at math because mathematics builds. I'm saying this as a lead into greater diversity in the cybersecurity field because I think it's really the case that all sorts of assumptions are made about bell curves and who's at the tail.

And there's some real statistics that show that if you're looking for the high achievers in mathematics, there's disproportionately males in the sort of aptitude tests. But guess what? Bell curves don't matter. Individuals do. That doesn't tell you a single thing about the individual, and it's extraordinarily important that women be educated to believe that they can accomplish as much in mathematics as men do because we don't really know whether that's a social artifact or whether that's a tendency that might have more robustness.

But what we want to get away from is women essentially being invisible when they're good in STEM fields. I can cite countless examples that I've seen of women being equally good at math and at verbal things, and yet they're encouraged and noticed for their verbal accomplishments when their mathematic accomplishments might be equivalent.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that we have all kinds of implicit biases, and I think it's really important for women to believe that they too can excel in whatever field they choose to enter.

And it's in the interests of society that everybody be allowed to pursue their interests without trying to put them in different sorts of boxes. It's also important because with technology, technology just isn't the engineering. What we're seeing increasingly within fields like artificial intelligence is that sometimes if you just pursue a scientific or engineering solution, the technology can go off the rails.

And so we need people studying cybersecurity, artificial intelligence from diverse backgrounds precisely because we want to be able to ensure that the products we produce aren't actually bringing about unintended harms.