The game of bias
The game of bias
The game of bias
By Delia Croessmann
July 08, 2020
Summary
Teaching about hot-button topics like gender bias can be a challenge because those topics often threaten the way students view themselves and provoke defensiveness.
To help overcome the challenge, Jessica Cundiff, an assistant professor of psychological science, in collaboration with Leah Warner, an associate professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey, developed a game to teach students about gender bias in a way that is interactive, engaging and non-threatening.
WAGES is an acronym that stands for Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation. Players are randomly divided into two teams, a green team and a yellow team .
The game concept was originally developed by Stephanie Shields, a professor of psychology at Penn State University, Cundiff says. The original version targets faculty and administrators, but the new version Cundiff and Warner developed targets students.
“A side-by-side comparison of the cards illustrates the seemingly minor biases the green team experiences compared with the yellow team’s experiences,” Cundiff explains. “For example, a green team card might read ‘A yellow team coworker gets credit for something you said at a meeting’ while the yellow team’s card would read ‘You get credit for something you said at a meeting.’
“The discrepancies between the two teams’ experiences seem small and innocuous at first, but over the course of the game, these minor discrepancies grow to produce large disparities between the two teams,” Cundiff says. “In this way, the game simulates how small gender biases accumulate to negatively affect women in the workplace.”
Reference
Croessmann, D. (2020, July 08). The game of bias. Retrieved July 09, 2020, from https://news.mst.edu/2020/07/the-game-of-bias/