How critical thinking can help advance gender equality and why you should ‘test everything you hear’

Critical thinking can help break down gender bias in the workplace, but only if leaders encourage others to feel comfortable to “question everything”.

This was the broad takeaway from an expert panel at this week’s Future Women Leadership Summit 2022.

“Diversity of thought is really good in producing different outcomes. So, the value of critical thinking is – it’s basically what’s often referred to as cognitive discernment,” Vitae co-founder and CEO Shelley Laslett said.

“It allows us to make sense of what’s going on both in our own minds, our internal processes, and also our external processes.”

Laslett said critical thinking is particularly valuable in the workplace because it increases EQ and IQ – at both the individual and group level.

“We know that the most profitable and most successful firms have high levels of diverse thinking because they have high levels of diverse views,” she said.

Amanda Rose, the Founding Director of Western Sydney Women, said the way she described critical thinking, in its simplest form, is “test everything you hear”.

“I think if you want to break any bias in any way, we need to put in the effort and we need to encourage others to feel comfortable to be able to disagree with you, to be able to ask questions,” she said.

“With gender bias, the problem is, and those women who work with men will know this, you sit in a room you have a conversation and things are said and they are taken as word. As gospel – ‘yep, that’s just the way it is’.”

She said women have been conditioned not to ask questions, and not to disagree.

“I had someone say ‘sorry, I don’t agree with that’. I said why are you sorry for having a different opinion? We should be embracing that, and leaders should be embracing that,” she said.

“So, I think we need to encourage our teams, whether male or female, to ask someone in the room ‘what do they think?’”

Aparna Sundararajan, a senior research strategist with ADAPT senior research, agreed.

Amanda Rose (left) Aparna Sundarajan (centre left) Kiera Peacock (centre right) and Tarang Chawla (right) discussed critical thinking at Future Women’s Leadership Summit 2022

“I think we all are conditioned to think in a pre-set way, influenced by our culture and tradition and if we have the curiosity to find objective reasoning then we might be able to get to the back alleys and nooks and crannies and find information that has probably been hidden,” she said.

“So, in that way we can definitely get way ahead in gender equality with a lot of these discussions.”

Kiera Peacock, a partner at Marque Lawyers, said in her experience with critical thinking involved a level of vulnerability.

“In professional services it’s quite an interesting one dealing with critical thinking because clients come to you and they want the answer – and they want one answer,” she said.

“So, there’s a certain vulnerability in applying critical thinking in that context so I think the important thing in the professional services field is to create that sense, by critically thinking I’m trying to get you the best outcome. And while that may not lead you to a yes or no answer, this is the journey you’re coming with me on, and this is where I’m trying to get you to.”

Laslett said it was important to also understand is that critical thinking is inherent to being human.

“When it comes to being too critical – if we’re looking at only the negative or only the risk or only the downside, and we’re not open to possibility and open to ideas, open to difference, open to any form of innovation – that’s when we’re going to get caught in that box of being too critical,” she said.

The expert panel on critical thinking and solving complex problems at Future Women’s Leadership Summit 2022

Rose offered that when people are being overly critical it usually comes from a place of fear.

“They fear change, they fear being wrong, they fear what they’ve been working on or what they believed in is wrong,” she said.

“So, when someone is very critical to you, find out why. What’s the fear behind that? It happens a lot with generational workplaces where someone is younger is the boss of someone who’s older and there’s that resistance and that fear.”

She also pressed while critical thinking “is brilliant”, it’s important to remain true to who you are.

“Don’t budge from your morals. Your core belief system should not change,” she said.

PHOTOGRAPHER: MARK BROOME