Coding

I also leveraged a survey technique commonly used in Sociology to create an experiment that captures peoples’ biases towards gendered roles and stereotypes using Psytoolkit, a free-to-use toolkit for running cognitive-psychological surveys. The resulting experiment captured peoples’ biases about women in unconventional jobs (e.g. female carpenter, female mechanic, etc.) and identified the scope for improving the support provided to women taking up such roles.

The experiment is set-up in such a way that it avoids social desirability bias and respondent bias by not explicitly letting the respondent know that their biases are being tested. This, in fact, also helps to capture intrinsic biases that respondents may not be aware of or may not be exercising out of their own will but because of the social conditioning and gendered upbringing that they may have been subjected to.

Having never used Psytoolkit before, I had a steep learning curve in terms of understanding a new software, its documentation, applications, and thereafter leveraging it to fulfill the survey requirements of the research team.