Should We Anonymise CVs?

Research has highlighted the impact a name could make when applying for a role. Race and gender are two of the biggest indicators for biases when applying for a job. 14% of the UK population, and 40% of London population belong to ethnic minority groups, with 50.59% of the population of the UK being women. This is over half of our population at risk of being overlooked for a role qualified for. Unconscious bias can create these problematic areas. Providing a greater risk of insecurity, low self-esteem and ultimately, poor representation of a significant percentage of the population. 

Within all societal descriptions of women, there is an element of a fairy tale. The desires need and wanted by women means the ambition may lead to only want a designer bags or shoes, and to be looked after. Unfortunately, a lot of younger groups conform to this ideology believing this is what is accepted and wanted as a woman and therefore in disbelief for any conflicting dialogue.

The older we get, the more wisdom can be shown at the annoyance of these misconception and expectations, with a lot of advice focusing on not caring what other people think. A general desire from human is to be spoken and treated with respect, and not to be bought. Interestingly, these ideas did not just appear, we can see indicating points of development for women in the workplace.

In the UK, it was still acceptable to reject women’s request to open a bank account, up until 1975 when the discrimination act was implemented in the UK, globally these dates vary over the last 70 years. This slow political development has coincided with progressive thought in our marketing and advertisement of what women want, by men. From World War II onwards the development of women moving from unskilled work had created a shift. Yet the ripple effect to make opportunities and taboos really be more of an equal opportunity to progress only started from the 1990s onwards. Gradually, the attitudes towards women holding roles of influence became more mainstream thinking. This means beforehand the opinions or visualisation pushed was from men about what they perceive women to be and want. As time has gone by, the women in the roles would not have had power of respect to give these opinions on what is wrong, they were already sexualised, due to this vicious cycle of what people perceived women to be. We can see generalised attitudes of the time to what they believed women to be like, and the consideration of them in a working environment.

Mel Brooks’ “The Producers”, made in 1967, whilst a comedy has some insight for the time. The main female character was the assistant that was ditzy, and oblivious with strong naivety to the obvious sexualisation. Of course, this was a product of its time, but with this we can see how far we have come, for some. Unfortunately, these confirmed stereotypes of what women bring to an organisation can be hard to break. Some of the unconscious bias has been passed down through parents to children that have now grown up, and only remembers these visualisations. The unconscious bias of the new age child, which soon becomes an adult would therefore be unaware of the bias origin and believe this to be fact from someone they respect and trust. This pattern can be very difficult to break and provides further understanding as to why this is an important discussion to be had. To encourage the normalisation of women in organisations means their CVs need to withstand any bias from application stage.

Unfortunately, in 2021 we are still tackling the great divide of the unknown. Isolating or creating a presumed understanding of a gender or race impacts everyone in society. The fear, ignorance, and lack of awareness of the asset certain groups can bring into an organisation is showing itself. We understand marker bias when going into an exam, hence the use of numbers, therefore we should demand applications to mandatorily erase indicating biases.

At Pomegranate House, we can help dive into the unconscious bias that may be specific to your institute. Contact us today to get further information on how we can help tackle this problem.