It's a tough pill to swallow, but Dushaw Hockett believes recognizing this in ourselves is a positive step forward for the industry By Natalie Bruckner “Right now, your hidden brain is doing many more things than your conscious brain could attend to with the same efficiency. The brain sacrifices sophistcation to achieve speed. If you missed the spelling error in the last sentence, it is because your hidden brain rapidly approximated the correct meaning of “sophistication” and moved on.” —Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain
We all have implicit bias: you, the person next to you, your colleagues, even your family and close friends. You just might not know it yet. This statement may seem antagonistic, especially considering SMACNA and SMART have been working so hard to fight for equality and collaboration in the industry. But according to Dushaw Hockett, founder and executive director of Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs) who equips leaders with skills in the area of bias reduction and bias interruption, “Having implicit bias doesn’t make us bad people. It makes us human!” So what exactly is implicit bias? During the 2022 Partners in Progress Conference in Las Vegas, Hockett presented a talk on this very subject during the session entitled, Bias and Belonging. He describes implicit bias as “a preference for or prejudice [or aversion] against a person or group of people, and one that operates outside of our conscious awareness.” 18 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
Hockett says implicit biases are triggered through rapid and automatic metal association of other groups of people, and he says they are both social and structural (i.e., TV, news, friends, family, radio). Bias is a subject that the construction industry has been working to overcome for many years now—tackling issues of gender, generation, and race—but Hockett says implicit bias goes much deeper than that. “The science of implicit bias says that you can be a school administrator, for example, and say that you are deeply committed to nurturing and building up young people, and yet be the same school administrator who leads your school in high rates of suspensions and expulsions of young people. And both of those things would be true. Consciously, you’re deeply committed to building young people up. Unconsciously, you’re doing harm in the process.” To better understand implicit bias in the sheet metal industry, Hockett says we need to look at the three characteristics that make a bias implicit. Characteristic number one is that implicit biases operate at the subconscious level, outside of conscious awareness. “We don’t know that we have them, and they can’t be accessed through introspection. In other words, the science of implicit bias says that none of us can sit here in this room right now, scratch our heads, and wonder out loud, ‘Do I have a bias against men, against women, against Black people, against white people, against immigrants?’ and expect to accurately answer that question. Because the nature of an implicit bias is such that we don’t know that we have them,” he says.
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Overcoming Implicit Bias
