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Anon @ 8 March 2019 19:19 - the 'unconscious' part of unconscious bias isn't that someone doesn't know that they are being dsicrinimated against, it thats the people doing the discriminating are not doing so intentionally.

We all have make lots of assumptions or choices based on things we don't consciously think about - not only gender, but assumptions about someone's intellegence or level of education, based on their accent or way or speaking, assumptions about someone based on their appearance or how they are dressed.
It's part of why even if you have people making hiring choices who want and intend to be fair, they can still make desicions which are discriminatory.
It is very hard to eleminate.

The orchestra example a previous cmmenter gave - I don't know if it was the same article, but I rad about an orchestra hich started to conduct auditions blind, with the musicians playing from behind a scren. They realised that they were still hiring more men, and it wasn't until they put down a carpet in the audition space so that the interviewers could not tell, from the footsteps of the candidate coming in, which gender they were, that they started to take on equal numbers of men and women. The people conduting the auditions were not deliberately discriminating, thye didn't even realise that they could work out the gender of the candidates, but they were subconsciously doing so.

Kniowing, and accepting, that you may be showing unconscious bias is the first step towards addressing it, as you can then work towards ways to address it, by trying to identify what your own unconscious assumptions nad baises are , and then addressing them.