Gender Equality is a Big Idea
In psychology, availability heuristics are mental shortcuts that our minds take when making immediate decisions. They are the result of several small reinforcements of a singular idea that has never been questioned or found to be incorrect by the brain. Because of this, the psychology of gender bias is a ceaselessly evolving conversation—specifically because our biases when it comes to decisions based on gender are mostly unconscious. Think about a married couple whose names are Elliot and Jordan. If I mention that Elliot took the kids to the grocery store while Jordan worked on the car in the garage, how do you image each person? Did you assign a gender to either name?
These little judgements based on gender may seem arbitrary, but they are in fact quite the opposite. When the idea that one gender is better than another gets repeated over and over, it begins to permeate our cognition when it comes to making bigger and more important decisions.