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How does a society gain if more and more women are employed as decision makers?

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Essay Contest for UPSC Exam for IAS

Introduction:

Many a time we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much importance to the information that is right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that is just offstage. When we’re offered any information, we find it very easy to take that readily available set of information and start drawing conclusions from it.

The qualities of a good decision maker:

What if we dig deeper and discover that the information that is just offstage? We can’t possibly hope to make a good decision without doing this analysis. Yet developing an opinion is very easy without doing it. Most of the times, the kinds of decisions people make and the outcomes of those decisions don’t have any impressive impact on the humanity. Career choice, for instance, are abandoned or regretted. Business decisions are frequently flawed.

On the personal front, we are not much better, People don’t save enough for retirement, and when they save, they consistently erode their own stock port-folios by buying high and selling low. Young people start relationships with people who are bad for them. Middle-aged people let work interfere with their family lives. The older people wonder why they didn’t take more time to smell the roses when they were younger.

The main problems with our decision-making are the biases, the irrationality. When it comes to making decisions, its clear that our brains are flawed instruments. But less attention has been paid to another compelling question: Given that we’re wired to act foolishly sometimes, how can we do better?

Sometimes, we are given the advice to trust our guts when we make important decisions. Unfortunately, our guts are full of questionable advice. And if we can’t trust our guts, then what can we trust?

How to make a good decision?

Therefore, if we aspire to make better choices, then we must learn how the biases work and how to fight them.

If we think about how to make a normal decision, it usually proceeds in four steps:

Firstly, we encounter a choice.

Secondly, we analyze our options

Thirdly, we make a choice.

Fourthly, we live with it.

And what we can see is that there is a villain that afflicts each of these stages:

  1. We encounter a choice. But, narrow framing makes us miss options.

  2. We analyze our options. But, the confirmation bias leads us to gather self-serving information.

  3. We make a choice. But, short-term emotion will often tempt us to make the wrong one.

  4. Then we live with it. But, we’ll often be over confident about how the future will unfold.

We must understand that we can’t deactivate our biases, but we can counteract them with right discipline. The nature of each villain suggests a strategy for defeating it:

  1. Widen our options. How can we expand our set of choices?

  2. Reality test your assumptions. How can we get outside our head and collect information that we can trust?

  3. Attain distance before deciding. How can we overcome short-term emotion and conflict of interest to make the best choice?

  4. Prepare to be wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed?

Conclusions:

There must be no discrimination against women and men on the ground of sex. On the other hand, discrimination greedily emphasizes more on the power, position and the perpetuity of life rather than focusing on the responsibilities to the society and to the nation.

Therefore, if a good decision has been made by a decision maker the society will always get benefits from it. It may not be, in this regard, meaningful to create any discrimination on the ground of sex that she is a woman of decision or he is a man of decision.

-Babun Chandra Pal

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