Dr. Pratt

Aren’t women much more agreeable than men? Well, on average, women are a little bit more agreeable.

But the diversity of agreeableness within each gender is far greater than the diversity of average agreeableness between genders.

If a particular woman is agreeable, it is mostly not because she is a woman. It is mostly because she is an agreeable individual.

And if a man is disagreeable, it is mostly not because he is a man. It is mostly because he is a disagreeable individual.

Finally, since this is Toyota, let’s look at driving. In 2018, a study was published comparing the development of driving skill amongst novice drivers from a single driving lesson.

What were the results?

Well, as you might guess, despite both the men and women being novices, women were on average significantly less confident than men. But on average, men and women’s average driving skills were indistinguishable.

As to the gender differences in self-confidence, women on average started with a realistic amount of self-doubt but gained confidence with increasing experience.

Men on average started out confident even with no experience, and their self-confidence didn’t change as much with experience.

Did all women and men feel this way? No - The diversity of self-confidence within each gender was much higher than the diversity in average self-confidence between genders.

Dr. Pratt

In 2023, TMNA invited Anne Chow, the former CEO of AT&T Business, to give the keynote address at their women’s conference, and we followed up with an invitation for Anne to speak to TRI.

Anne explained that despite our strong wish that anti-bias training would lastingly remove biases like confirmation bias, scientific studies show that such biases remain. Why is that?

Well, for one, as we just discussed, our biases evolved as survival traits, so they tend to come back despite training.

Second, the way unconscious bias is usually measured - what’s called the Implicit Association Test - has been found to have little scientific validity.

Finally, telling people that their biases are wrong tends to lead to resentment and cynicism.

In other words, anti-bias training tends to try and persuade rather than empathize with people’s biases. As a result, training can sometimes make attitudes worse.

A better way to deal with our biases is to empathize with the reality that our minds are composed of two systems. As the late Nobel-Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explained: a fast system for making emotional decisions, and a slow system for making rational decisions.

It is our fast, emotional system that is most susceptible to biases, because it is our fast system that needed to not miss the detection of dangers, like a tiger in the grass.

Our slow, rational system is less biased – it can afford the time to carefully consider what is true and what is false.

Instead of trying to remove the biases of our fast system, we can accept them and develop a habit of reviewing them with our slow, reasoning system.

For example, when our brain’s fast system is thinking “because she’s a woman” or “because he’s a man”, we should first pause. Turn on our brain’s slow system.

And remember that diversity within groups is almost always much greater than the diversity of averages between groups. The most likely reason for a person’s behavior is their individuality, not their gender.

By adopting a growth mindset, slow thinking will become a habit. It won’t stop our fast system from being biased. But it will make it more likely that our fast system’s biases will have less impact.

This lesson applies to men as well as women. Taking a broader view, the best approach when teaching a student isn’t to judge. It is to empathize.

The most important takeaway is that women and men have far more in common than their differences.

Dr. Pratt

It is important to respect a woman who chooses a career over raising children, as well as a man who chooses to take time off to raise children instead of to work at the office.

These were the choices my wife and I made when our first two children were born, when she was training to be a surgeon. Then we switched roles for our next two children.

Our children and our careers benefited tremendously from our diversity of roles, as did our sense of fulfilment with life. My wife became a better mother because of her work in the hospital, and I became a better leader because of my work raising children.

I hope this talk has given you some insights and will help you use your brain’s slow system to counter the biases of your brain’s fast system, and think about people not as stereotypes, but as diverse individuals.

Embracing individual diversity this way will not only create happiness for all, it will also help Toyota become a much stronger company. Thank You.