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This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil

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QUALIFIED: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work with Shari Dunn | 284 33:58

vor 10 Tagen33:58

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In this episode, we delve into the concept of being "qualified" in the workplace, examining who gets labeled as such, who doesn't, and the underlying reasons. We explore "competency checking"—the practice of scrutinizing individuals' abilities—and how it disproportionately affects underrepresented groups, often going unnoticed or unchallenged. Our discussion aims to redefine qualifications in a fair, equitable, and actionable manner. Our guest, Shari Dunn , is an accomplished journalist, former attorney, news anchor, CEO, university professor, and sought-after speaker. She has been recognized as Executive of the Year and a Woman of Influence, with her work appearing in Fortune Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Ad Age, and more. Her new book, Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work , unpacks what it truly means to be deserving and capable—and why systemic barriers, not personal deficits, are often the real problem. Her insights challenge the narratives that hold so many of us back and offer practical solutions for building a more equitable future. Together, we can build workplaces and communities that don’t just reflect the world we live in, but the one we want to create. A world where being qualified is about recognizing the talent and potential that’s been overlooked for far too long. It’s not just about getting a seat at the table—it’s about building an entirely new table, one designed with space for all of us. Connect with Our Guest Shari Dunn Website& Book - Qualified: https://thesharidunn.com LI: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/sharidunn TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thesharidunn Related Podcast Episodes: How To Build Emotionally Mature Leaders with Dr. Christie Smith | 272 Holding It Together: Women As America's Safety Net with Jessica Calarco | 215 How To Defy Expectations with Dr. Sunita Sah | 271 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music…

Social Science Bites

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Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists

151 Episoden

#Sociology #Science #Sociology Education #Science Education #Communication #Criminology #Media #Psychology #Social #Socialscience #SAGE Publishing #Society #Social Sciences #Michael Todd #Podcasting Education #Behaviour #Study

Social Science Bites

2,483 subscribers

updated vor 5 Tagen

Serie-Home•Feed

Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists

151 Episoden

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Social Science Bites

1
Crystal Abidin on Influencers 29:11

vor 5 Tagen29:11

29:11

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin , a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both adult and child and the general pop culture centered on social media, especially in the Asia Pacific region. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Abidin offers interviewer David Edmonds a metaphor to understand how her cyber-ethnography and digital anthropology work in practice. “I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We're not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We're looking for what's neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we're measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study. … [A]s an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don't always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what's left behind.” In this conversation, though, Abidin talks about something very shiny indeed – those professional internet celebrities known collectively as “influencers.” She explains how while the top influencers do generate the paydays seen in popular media, the ecosystem extends down to individuals who are spending their own money in hopes of someday making it big. She also draws a distinction between influencers and creators, and also between influencers and memes. Abidin also dives into regional differences in influencer culture, using her own detailed analysis of Asia Pacific influencer cultures, to explore regional differences that should be understood when assessing content on global platforms. “[I]f we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who's not included in them?” In addition to her role at Curtin, Abidin founded the TikTok Cultures Research Network and is an affiliate researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centr e at Jönköping University. She was named an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow for 2019 to 2024. Currently the editor-in-chief of Media International Australia , she has written or edited a number of books that bridge popular concerns with academic rigor, including 2018’s Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online and this year’s Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Lauren Gurrieri and Jenna Drenten),…

Social Science Bites

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Katy Milkman on How to Change 35:21

vor 5 weeks35:21

35:21

Everyone, we assume, wants to be their best person. Few of us, perhaps, none, hits all their marks in this pursuit even if the way toward the goal is generally apparent. If you want to know how to do a better job hitting those marks, whether its walking 10,000 steps, learning Esperanto, or quitting smoking, a good person to consult would be Katy Milkman . Working at the nexus of economics and psychology, Milkman – the James G. Dinan Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at Penn – studies the almost alchemical process of turning good intentions into solid actions. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she details for interviewer David Edmonds some of the biases and some of the critical thinking processes that both define and then overcome the obstacles to changing our behavior. These range from concepts with such academic names as present bias and temptation bundling to the more colloquial ‘what the hell effect’ and its antidote, the emergency reserve. But the point of her research – especially as it gets translated to the public through her podcast Choiceology or her 2021 book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be – is to find practical ways to change yourself. For example, she explains that “it's important for goals to be measurable and achievable, although they should be a stretch. You know, if your goal is ‘exercise more,’ how can you measure that? How could you even set a commitment device, for instance? … It's also important to have a plan of, sort of, when will I do it, where will I do it, how will I get there. These are called “implementation intentions.” I think the most important part of them is they associate a cue with the action. So just like an actor needs a cue to know when to say their lines, we need to not forget to take action on our goals.” Her influence in turn is felt practically. Choiceology , for example, is sponsored by the brokerage house Charles Schwab, and Milkman has been a consultant for organizations ranging from the U.S. government and Walmart to 24 Hour Fitness and the American Red Cross. She is a former president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. We'd love to hear your feedback on the Social Science Bites series. Please let us know your thoughts on Social Science Bites by taking our short survey , and you'll be entered to win one of five free copies of the Social Science Bites book, Understanding Humans .…

Social Science Bites

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Janet Currie on Improving Our Children’s Futures 24:31

vor 9 weeks24:31

24:31

There is a natural desire on the part of governments to ensure that their future citizens -- i.e. their nation's children -- are happy, healthy and productive, and that therefore governments have policies that work to achieve that. But good intentions never guarantee good policies. Here's where economist Janet Currie steps in. Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she co-directs, with Kate Ho, the Center for Health and Wellbeing . In this Social Science Bites podcast, the pioneer in assessing the nexus of policy and parenting explains to interviewer David Edmonds how programs like Head Start in the United States and Sure Start in the United Kingdom provide real benefits over time to both their young clients as youths and later on in life. After looking at a variety of programs and interventions, she details that "the general conclusion [is] that the programs that were spending more money directly on the children tended to have better outcomes." Her findings suggest this holds true even when similar approaches don't have the same effect on adults. "[I]n the United States," she says, "if you give health insurance to adults who didn't have health insurance, they use more services, and they are happier about that, that they get to use services. But it doesn't actually seem to save very much money. On the other hand, when you cover children from a young age, that is cost effective, that does save money, and in fact, the costs of the program probably pay for themselves in terms of the reduction in illness and disability going forward." In addition to her work at Princeton, Currie is also co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Program on Families and Children. She has been president of the American Economic Association for 2024 and has also served as president of the American Society of Health Economics, the Society of Labor Economics, the Eastern Economic Association, and the Western Economic Association. Two years ago, she received the Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize "for her foundational work on the influence of context such as policy decisions, environment, or health systems on child development."…

Social Science Bites

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Joshua Greene on Effective Charities 25:23

vor 14 weeks25:23

25:23

Social Science Bites

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Julia Ebner on Violent Extremism 23:58

vor 18 weeks23:58

23:58

As an investigative journalist, Julia Ebner had the freedom to do something she freely admits that as an academic (the hat she currently wears as postdoctoral researcher at the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences at the University of Oxford) she have been proscribed from doing - posing as a recruit to study violent extremist groups. That, as you might expect, gave her special insight into how these groups attract new blood, and on the basis of that work, as well as more traditional research for groups such as the Quilliam Foundation and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, she has been hosted by the United Nations, national legislators, intelligence agencies and Big Tech. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ebner details some of the mechanics of her undercover research for host David Edmonds before discussing the prevalence and characteristics of violent extremist groups. Given the variety of ways governments tally these groups and the groups' own amorphousness in an online age, determining whether such groups are on the rise - which seems to be a perennial fear - proves devilishly difficult to determine. "I would say," Ebner concedes, "it often comes and goes in waves, but now we are seeing a very strong wave of very young people, including minors, radicalizing towards violence." That radicalization proves remarkably similar regardless of ideology, Ebner notes. Plus, it's not straightforward determining who might be open to recruitment. "Based on my research, I would say that everyone is potentially susceptible to radicalization, especially in vulnerable moments in our lives, and everyone has them." Ebner serves up that potential universality in a different context to close the podcast. It's what keeps her up at night: "I think the mainstreaming of some of the extreme concepts and ideas and language that I used to observe only in the darkest corners of the internet, but that is now being heard in parliaments, that is now being seen in large social media channels of influencers or voiced by politicians." Given her journalistic chops, it is no surprise that Ebner has written extensively on extremism in a series of well received books. The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism , received the Bruno Kreisky Award for the Political Book of the Year 2018; Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists was a Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 and Germany publishing's Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres 2020 ("Science Book of the Year") Prise as well as the Dr Caspar Einem Prize from the Association of Social Democratic Academics; and Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over , was published in 2023.…

Social Science Bites

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Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System 22:57

vor 23 weeks22:57

22:57

The relationship between citizens and their criminal justice systems comes down to just that - relationships. And those relations generally start with essentially one-on-one encounters between law enforcement personnel and individuals, whether those individuals are suspects, victims or witnesses. When those relations get off on the wrong foot - or worse, as in the case of a number of high-profile police killings in the United States attest to - the repercussions can resonate far away from where a traffic stop occurs. This is the field that social psychologist Nick Camp researches. As his website at the University of Michigan explains, Camps studies "the role routine police-citizen encounters play in undermining police-community trust, and how these disparities can be addressed." As he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, "[O]ne of the things that we know from research and procedural justice is that when people don't view policing as legitimate, they're less likely to cooperate with police requests for assistance, for example. Until now, it’s hard to find experimental evidence for this, but one of the things we can use body cameras for is not just to look at disparities in these interactions, but their consequences." In this episode, Camp cites research on body camera footage, traffic stops, and even first names to describe how anecdotal tropes about often poor police-citizen interactions, especially in the African-American community, are borne out by the reams of data modern recording devices provide. He also offers hopeful signs of improving these relationships with training based on this very same data, and suggests that artificial intelligence might be useful in mining this data for more insights.…

Social Science Bites

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Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence 27:33

vor 26 weeks27:33

27:33

Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity . Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor. “[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot is gunning for their livelihood, “Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.” This is not to depict Acemoglu as an apologist for our new silicon taskmasters. Current trends such as the consolidation of power among technology companies, a focus on shareholder returns at the expense of all else, a blind trust in companies to somehow muddle through to societal equilibrium, and a slavish drive to automate everything immediately all leave him cold: “I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.” His conversation doesn’t end there, thankfully, and he offers some hopeful words on how we might find that modus vivendi with AI, including (but by no means only relying on) “the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another.” Acemoglu is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the academic-cum-policymaker group of economic movers and shakers known as the Group of 30 . Besides Power and Progress , his books include the popular bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written with James Robinson. Acemoglu has received a number of prizes, including two inaugural awards in 2004, the T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago and the Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, as well as the Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006 and a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.…

Social Science Bites

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Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature 16:48

vor 31 weeks16:48

16:48

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect. That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent , a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research. She notes that her students, for example, are “astonished” at how much of human behavior and reactions are innate. “They think this is really strange,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “They don't think that knowledge, beliefs, that all those epistemic states, could possibly be innate. It doesn't look like this is happening just because they reject innateness across the board.” This rejection – which affects not only students but the general public and sometimes even social and behavioral scientists -- does have collateral damage. So, too, is misinterpreting what the innateness of some human nature can mean. “[I]f you think that what's in the body is innate and immutable, then upon getting evidence that your depression has a physical basis, when people are educated, that psychiatric disorders are just diseases like all others, that actually makes them more pessimistic, it creates more stigma, because you think that your essence is different from my essence. … [Y]ou give them vignettes that actually underscore the biological origin of a problem, they are less likely to think that therapy is going to help, which is obviously false and really problematic” Berent’s journey to studying intuitive knowledge was itself not intuitive. She received a bachelor’s in musicology from Tel-Aviv University and another in flute performance at The Rubin Academy of Music before earning master’s degrees in cognitive psychology and in music theory – from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1993, she received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Pittsburgh. As a researcher, much of her investigation into the innate originated by looking at language, specifically using the study of phonology to determine how universal – and that includes in animals – principles of communication are. This work resulted in the 2013 book, The Phonological Mind . Her work specifically on innateness in turn led to her 2020 book for the Oxford University Press, The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature.…

Social Science Bites

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Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work 21:23

vor 36 weeks21:23

21:23

Do policies built around social and behavioral science research actually work? That’s a big, and contentious, question. It’s also almost an existential question for the disciplines involved. It’s also a question that Megan Stevenson, a professor of law and of economics at the University of Virginia School of Law, grapples with as she explores how well randomized control trials can predict the real-world efficacy of interventions in criminal justice. What she’s found so far in that particular niche has echoed across the research establishment. As she writes in the abstract of an article she saw published in the Boston University Law Review : "This Essay is built around a central empirical claim: that most reforms and interventions in the criminal legal space are shown to have little lasting effect when evaluated with gold standard methods. While this might be disappointing from the perspective of someone hoping to learn what levers to pull to achieve change, I argue that this teaches us something valuable about the structure of the social world. When it comes to the type of limited-scope interventions that lend themselves to high-quality evaluation, social change is hard to engineer. Stabilizing forces push people back towards the path they would have been on absent the intervention. Cascades—small interventions that lead to large and lasting changes—are rare. And causal processes are complex and context-dependent, meaning that a success achieved in one setting may not port well to another." In this Social Science Bites podcast, Stevenson tells interviewer David Edmonds that “the paper is not saying ‘nothing works ever.’ It’s saying nothing works among this subset of interventions, and interventions, as we talked about, are the type of interventions that get studied by randomized control trials tend to be pretty limited in scope. You can randomly allocate money, but you can’t randomly allocate class or socioeconomic status.” Despite this cautionary finding in her research. Stevenson hasn’t despaired about her career choice or that of other social and behavioral scientists. “Many of us are in this line of work because we care about the world,” she notes. “We want to make the world a better place. We want to think about the best way to do it. And this is valuable information along that path. It’s valuable information in that it shuts some doors. … So keep trying other doors, keep experimenting.”…

Social Science Bites

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Rob Ford on Immigration 32:01

vor 40 weeks32:01

32:01

Social Science Bites

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Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income 21:33

vor 44 weeks21:33

21:33

Here's a thought experiment: You want to spend a reasonably large sum of money providing assistance to a group of people with limited means. There's a lot of ways you might do that with a lot of strings and safeguards involved, but what about just giving them money -- "get cash directly into the hands of the poor in the cheapest, most efficient way possible." You and I might prefer that, since we, of course, are reputable people and good stewards and understand our own particular needs. But what about, well, others? Economist Tavneet Suri has done more than just think about that; her fieldwork includes handing out money across villages in two rural areas in Kenya to see what happens. Her experiments include giving out a lump sum of cash and also spreading out that same amount over time. The results she details for host David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast are, to be frank, heartening, although the mechanisms of disbursement definitely affect the outcomes. Despite the good news, the idea of a universal basic income is by no means a settled remedy for helping the poor. For one thing, Suri says, "it's super, super expensive. It’s really expensive. And so, the question is, “Is that expense worth it?” And to understand that I think we need a few more years of understanding the benefits, understanding what people do with the incomes, understanding whether this can really kickstart these households out of poverty." And perhaps the biggest question is whether the results of fieldwork in Kenya is generalizable. "I would love to do a study that replicates this in the West," she says. "The one thing about the West that I think is worth saying that's different is you wouldn't add it on top of existing programs. The idea is you would substitute existing programs with this. And that to me is the question: if you substituted it, what would happen?" Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. She is an editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics ; co-chair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab , known as J-PAL, at MIT; co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; a member of the executive committee at J-PAL; and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.…

Social Science Bites

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Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias 19:32

vor 49 weeks19:32

19:32

How hard do we fight against information that runs counter to what we already think? While quantifying that may be difficult, Alex Edmans notes that the part of the brain that activates when something contradictory is encountered in the amygdala - “that is the fight-or-flight part of the brain, which lights up when you are attacked by a tiger. This is why confirmation can be so strong, it's so hardwired within us, we see evidence we don't like as being like attacked by a tiger.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of the just-released May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It , reviews the persistence of confirmation bias -- even among professors of finance. “So, what is confirmation bias?” he asks host David Edmonds. “This is the temptation to accept something uncritically because we'd like it to be true. On the flip side, to reject a study, even if it's really careful, because we don't like the conclusions.” Edmans made his professional name studying social responsibility in corporations; his 2020 book Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit was a Financial Times Book of the Year. Yet he himself encountered the temptation to both quickly embrace findings, even flimsy ones, that support our thesis and to reject or even tear apart research, even robust results, that doesn’t. While that might seem like an obviously critical thinking pitfall, surely knowing that it’s likely makes it easier to avoid. You might think so, but not necessarily. “So smart people can find things to nitpick with, even if the study is completely watertight,” Edmans details. “But then the same critical thinking facilities are suddenly switched off when they see something they like. So intelligence is, unfortunately, something deployed only selectively.” Meanwhile, he views the glut of information and the accompanying glut of polarization as only making confirmation bias more prevalent, and not less. Edmans, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and former Fulbright Scholar, was previously a tenured professor at the Wharton Business School and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. He has spoken to policymakers at the World Economic Forum and UK Parliament, and given the TED talk “ What to Trust in a Post-Truth World ." He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.…

Social Science Bites

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Alison Gopnik on Care 25:11

vor 1 year25:11

25:11

Social Science Bites

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Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict 29:09

vor 1 year29:09

29:09

Consider some of the conflicts bubbling or boiling in the world today, and then plot where education – both schooling and less formal means of learning – fits in. Is it a victim, suffering from the conflict or perhaps a target of violence or repression? Maybe you see it as complicit in the violence, a perpetrator, so to speak. Or perhaps you see it as a liberator, offering a way out a system that is unjust in your opinion. Or just maybe, its role is as a peacebuilder. Those scenarios are the framework in which Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London , researches the intersection of education and conflict. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Pherali discusses the various roles education takes in a world of violence. “We tend to think about education as teaching and learning in mathematics and so forth,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds. “But numeracy and literacy are always about something, so when we talk about the content, then we begin to talk about power, who decides what content is relevant and important, and for what purpose?” Pherali walks us through various cases outlining the above from locales as varied as Gaza, Northern Ireland and his native Nepal, and while seeing education as a perpetrator might seem a sad job, his overall work endorses the value and need for education in peace and in war. He closes with a nod to the real heroes of education in these scenarios. “No matter where you go to, teachers are the most inspirational actors in educational systems. Yet, when we talk about education in conflict and crisis, teachers are not prioritized. Their issues, their lack of incentives, their lack of career progression, their stability in their lives, all of those issues do not feature as the important priorities in these programs. This is my conviction that if we really want to mitigate the adverse effects of conflict and crisis on education of millions of children, we need to invest in teachers.” A fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Higher Education Academy, he is a co-research director of Education Research in Conflict and Crisis and chair of the British Association for International and Comparative Education.…

Social Science Bites

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Safiya Noble on Search Engines 28:24

vor 1 year28:24

28:24

The work of human hands retains evidence of the humans who created the works. While this might seem obvious in the case of something like a painting, where the artist’s touch is the featured aspect, it’s much less obvious in things that aren’t supposed to betray their humanity. Take the algorithms that power search engines, which are expected to produce unvarnished and unbiased results, but which nonetheless reveal the thinking and implicit biases of their programmers. While in an age where things like facial recognition or financial software algorithms are shown to uncannily reproduce the prejudices of their creators, this was much less obvious earlier in the century, when researchers like Safiya Umoja Noble were dissecting search engine results and revealing the sometimes appalling material they were highlighting. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Noble -- the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and professor of gender studies, African American studies, and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles -- explains her findings, insights and recommendations for improvement with host David Edmonds. And while we’ve presented this idea of residual digital bias as something somewhat intuitive, getting here was an uphill struggle, Noble reveals. “It was a bit like pushing a boulder up a mountain -- people really didn't believe that search engines could hold these kinds of really value-laden sensibilities that are programmed into the algorithm by the makers of these technologies. Even getting this idea that the search engine results hold values, and those values are biased or discriminatory or harmful, is probably the thrust of the contribution that I've made in a scholarly way.” But through her academic work, such as directing the Center on Race & Digital Justice and co-directing of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and books like the 2018 title Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, the scale of the problem and the harm it leaves behind are becoming known. Noble’s own contributions have been recognized, too, such as being named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2021 and the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award winner in 2022.…

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