Last semester I had the privilege of taking a course focusing on work-life policy and and work-life balance with Professor Caryn Medved. While conducting research for my term project on the positive role that sponsorship (and to a lesser degree, mentorship) can play in advancing women’s careers, I stumbled across the idea of the unconscious bias. The unconscious bias, as defined by Halpern and Cheung in their 2008 book Women at the Top, is a deeply entrenched set of values or norms that reinforces traditional gender stereotypes in the workplace that results in women being promoted at lesser rates than men.

Although the unconscious bias against women has been studied and found to exist in the workplace, I am curious to see how far the bias extends into the public mental schema, and in particular, how an unconscious bias might occur on the Internet. This study will focus on the unconscious bias towards women in the workplace, and how that bias manifests itself within in the anonymity of the public domain of Internet comments. This issue also touches on Lewis’s Law. Helen Lewis, a British journalist and the current Deputy Editor of the New Statesmen, commented on Twitter in 2012 that, “The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism” which has since become known as “Lewis’s Law”. Although the articles and reviews of Lean In and subsequent publications surrounding female leadership may not expound the values of feminism, they appear to touch the same nerves within the Internet’s consciousness. So far, research and observation shows that there is an unconscious bias against women in the workplace, and that Lewis’s Law potentially identifies this unconscious bias within a larger framework.

For this project, I am currently conducting a content analysis, rooted in social constructivism and transformative feminist research theories, on the comments (total: 63) that appear on two articles discussing the merits of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Through coding and deep analysis, I am hoping to understand if the unconscious bias extends beyond the workplace, and if so, how it manifests in anonymous public opinion.