Male filter bubbles affect how women are recruited

The good news it that it can be fixed.

Filter bubbles are not only created when algorithms create your social media feed and filter out everything they assume you won’t like, filter bubbles are also created in your head. This phenomenon is called confirmation bias and the implication is that we value information that aligns with our existing views higher than information that contradict what we believe to be true.

Confirmation bias is a well-established fact in psychology and the everyday effect is that there’s a natural resistance to accepting facts that would mean you would have to accept that you have been wrong.

The word “filter bubble” is often interchangeable to “world view”. Local patriots may in fact have no factual reason to love everything local, but they interpret everything good that is happening locally as a validation and value negative news as being not that important. Male intellectuals have obviously no facts to support their view that female authors are inferior to male authors, but their view of literature is influence by the fact that they never read books written by women and with a very special backwards logic, they assume women don’t write good enough to penetrate their bubble.

Whoever is against the idea of establishing targets for gender representation or question the idea of using quotas in order to fix gender imbalance, is likely to be trapped in a bubble too.

The majority of leadership and board positions are occupied by men. Of course, in theory, quotas should not be needed since all positions should be filled based on an assessment of competence, not gender. In practice, that’s not the case. Now, and throughout history, men have been quoted to jobs just because of their gender again and again. (If you disagree, then you are in fact saying that women in general are less competent than men.)

I hate quotation as much as the next guy, but I see no other solution to quickly get the gender balance to where it should be unless companies do what should have been done ages ago: Get the facts on the table and set goals. What gets measured gets done.

Filter bubbles can only be changed from the inside, by starting to follow people that represent other views than your own, by reading books written by women and by acknowledging the fact that competent women are as common as competent men are.

There’s a risk of being trapped in a filter bubble if you want to understand the world. There’s also a risk of not harnessing the potential of half of the available talent pool if you filter out women when recruiting.

Every businessman that is feminist and start acting for greater gender balance is thus of greater importance than every woman he joins in that struggle. She’s outside the bubble but he’s inside it and it what gets filtered out can only be changed from within.

So get this: The responsibility of making sure that leadership positions and boards are balanced, do never belong to women, but to men.

Per Grankvist latest book is called The Big Bubble — how technology is making it harder to understand the world and is available everywhere.