By Christopher Furlong,Contributor,Ellen Choi

Copyright forbes

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 20: Kash Patel, President Trump’s nominee for FBI Director arrives to speak during an inauguration event at Capital One Arena on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. (Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
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Despite many of the best intentions of healthcare practitioners, healthcare outcomes are inevitably influenced by social biases as they operate under our conscious awareness. This isn’t a statement to criticize the healthcare system, it is simply an invitation to consider how our human subjectivity can spillover into our workplace decisions. Social bias can be defined as discrimination for, or against, a person or group, or a set of ideas or beliefs, in a way that is unfair. Common examples include presuming men who express their feelings are weak, women who assert themselves are “bitchy”, and that as people age, they become less valuable. In healthcare settings, these biases can influence how responsive practitioners are, and how they prescribe treatment. Research by Dr. Jana Mosey from the School of Public Health at Drexel University, found that Black and Hispanic patients are significantly less likely than Whites to receive pain medications, even for acute injuries, such as bone fractures and further, that when they do receive analgesics, they are at lower dosages than White patients despite reporting higher pain levels. Females, relative to their male counterparts, are also less likely to receive pain treatment. Male patients, are more likely to receive aggressive treatment in response to different heart-related issues, and less likely than females to receive lifestyle advice than medical treatment.

A typical first recommendation in addressing the problem of social bias is to take time to acknowledge its existence and reflect on one’s own position and potential biases. If you, like me, have tried this before, you may have found yourself reflecting on the biases you hold against people that are different than you. I asked myself about the implicit and explicit biases I hold about men, non-binary populations, other ethnicities, sexual orientations, generations etc. but in all these reflections, I did not sit long enough with the social biases I hold about the categories to which I belong. Additionally, because the “similar-to-me” bias typically expects us to be kinder and more generous with people who remind us of ourselves, I was surprised by the research a recent Masters student of mine produced in her thesis.

For her Masters Thesis completed at Toronto Metropolitan University, Trisha Bugra collected and analyzed qualitative data from 41 visible minority participants who responded to questions about their experiences of healthcare inequity in the Canadian healthcare system. Participants described the pain of being stereotyped or racially profiled, sharing many instances of being dismissed, or choosing to avoid obtaining the care they knew they needed because of they did not feel safe or cared for within the existing system. The project was inspired by a harrowing tale of a woman who described feeling herself bleeding out in her hospital bed after a miscarriage and fearing that she would not live to see her family again while she begged for attention to the medical team that kept insisting she was overreacting. Trisha’s findings called for increased cultural sensitivity training, like integrating mandatory cultural sensitivity training into medical school, and considering social biases with HR and patient care processes, like enhancing diversity in recruitment, ensuring multilingual support, and improving patient-provider communication with a focus on empathy and cultural sensitivity. These are logical recommendations; however, what Trisha’s work also revealed was that often the physicians engaging in dismissive behaviours were of the same gender or ethnic background as the patients themselves.

Social identity theory, put forth in the 1970’s by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, argues that people derive a sense of self from the social groups to which they belong. In this theory, individuals categorize themselves and others into in-groups and out-groups, which shapes perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours and that typically, people tend to favour those in their in-group. However, this theory also explains that when the in-group is of a marginalized identity, sometimes individuals reject or distance themselves from their in-group. Another relevant concept from the world of social psychology is social identity threat, which is broadly defined as the threat that people experience in situations where they feel devalued on the basis of a social identity. In the case of Trisha’s research, we see these ideas play out when visible minority healthcare workers were described as being more likely to engage in dismissive behaviours to patients that shared a similar social identity.

How Can Business Professionals Mitigate Bias?

The next time you find yourself in a situation where someone reminds you of yourself in an area that you evaluate as positive, decision making biases may have it that you may act kinder or more leniently towards this person. The corollary to this is that if someone reminds you of a part of yourself that you, consciously or non-consciously, hold with negative connotations, you may be more likely to treat them harshly or to create distance between yourselves.

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For leaders and team members, it is a worthwhile investment to contemplate the social identities they hold. In work contexts that have long histories of hierarchy, masculine traditions, and burgeoning new diversity/equity/inclusion policies, it’s possible that individuals are inadvertently (or explicitly) rejecting social identities related to historically marginalized populations, resulting in behaviour that reflects these views. It’s possible, for example, that women might be harder on other women if they experience social identity threat related to their female identity. There are, of course, many examples of social identities that could play out from race and body type, to physical and mental health or beyond.

To apply this research in the most practical terms, leaders must be willing to examine the parts of their identity that are associated with marginalized social groups so they can become curious about the ways in which they may be rejecting, judging, or distancing themselves from these identities and accordingly, in others. The next step involves a practice of honouring the grief that comes with the pain that these social groups have endured, and accepting the parts of ourselves that might have been previously rejected – either literally by the social norms of the times, or figuratively exiled within our own inner psychological experience.

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