Curbing journalistic gender bias: How activating awareness of gender bias in Indian journalists affects their reporting

This study examines the effect of gender bias awareness on journalistic decision-making. The study establishes a link between activating journalists’ awareness of their implicit gender bias and objective decision making. Using a randomised experimental setup, journalists were (or were not) administered an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to ascertain their implicit gender bias, followed by decision-making vignettes to measure their explicit gender bias in journalistic reporting. Results indicate that inducing awareness of implicit gender bias through the IAT strongly reduces the production of biased journalistic content. The experiment highlights that journalists who are made aware of their implicit cognitive biases before making the journalistic decisions are more sensitive to avoid cognitive bias errors as compared to the control group of journalists who are not made aware of them. While offering a novel experimental framework for exposing journalistic bias, these results help ascertain solutions for curbing bias in journalism.