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Discrimination and bias and inequities is one of the most important topics of the day today. One of the reasons why is that many, many companies are becoming increasingly diverse. Companies value diversity. They think it’s really important. And yet the way our brain works, we still engage in many different kinds of biases, and they happen outside of our awareness.
Advocacy Gone Wrong
Many, many people continue to think that discrimination is overt, it’s intentional, it’s bad apples, bad people engaging in bad behaviors. And what we now know is that most discrimination is actually quite unintentional. It’s unconscious, and it happens outside of our awareness. A great example of this is letters of recommendation. There winds up being very, very strong gender biases when you write a letter for a woman versus a letter for a man. Letters for men are longer, they use the word brilliant, they use the word genius, and they focus on the person’s qualities. Letters of recommendation for women tend to be shorter. They use the word team player, and they oftentimes incorporate things about women’s personal lives. So even when you’re really trying hard to advocate for someone, these unconscious biases can affect how you’re actually advocating for someone — when you’re actually on their team and advocating on their behalf.
Variation by Group
Bias also varies by group. And what I mean by that, for instance, is that discrimination and bias against lesbians, gay individuals, transgender individuals, and bisexuals is on the decline. It’s not completely gone, but it’s certainly on the decline. However, bias against older employees (and this just means people that are over 50 years old), bias against people who are overweight, and bias against people who have physical limitations have very much not changed over the past, say, 15 years. And in some respects with the inclusion of technology companies, it’s actually on the rise. We need to be careful to think that just because discrimination or bias is declining for some groups, it doesn’t decline for all groups at the same time.
Variation by Situation
Bias varies by the kind of situation that we’re in, and I’ll give you an example of this. In general, people think that older adults are slow and they’re not with it. And this might be the case in a math department; this would be the case in a computer science department. But it’s completely the opposite the case in a philosophy department in a college. Philosophers, the older they are, they’re actually seen as more competent and more scholarly. And this is particularly in comparison to younger women. You also see this same type of flip-flop in the judicial system where judges, when they’re older, are seen as more scholarly than younger people.
It’s important to also think carefully about not only just biased generally, but where are you? Are you in a technology company? Are you in a startup company? Are you in a court system? Are you in a school? Are you a kindergarten teacher? Because it’s going to lead to different kinds of biases as a function of the context that we find ourselves in. The more and more that we hear about this, the more and more we talk about it and have conversations about it, the more it helps us to become just much more powerful and informed leaders — both in the national context and also in the international context, as well.