4

STEP 2: DO NO HARM—UNDERSTAND AND CORRECT OUR BIASES

We all harm people without intending to. People have been harmed throughout history due to historical oppression, systemic inequities, and cultural marginalization. Much of this harm continues today, and can surface through our individual words and actions—and our non-actions. As allies, we must learn the ways we might be harming people without realizing it, acknowledge the impact of this harm, and correct our actions.

Correcting Our Biases

Biases are mental patterns or shortcuts that influence our perception about something, someone, or a situation. We learn them from our families, friends, teachers, media, and throughout our culture. While we might not be aware of our biases, they can perpetuate oppression, inequity, and marginalization.

Because they are learned responses, biases can be unlearned. As allies, we must learn to interrupt our unconscious biases by making them visible and becoming deeply conscious of what we say and do. This requires some effort and time to unlearn and unravel what has been ingrained in our consciousness over our lifetimes, but it gets easier over time.

Our biases appear in many ways, from the small nonverbal cues we give through facial expressions and body language, to assumptions we make about people we are hiring or promoting, to the way we design events, physical spaces, reviews, benefits, programs, products, or services. All of these can have real consequences on whether or not someone is hired, promoted, or able to access other opportunities; or whether they feel safe and like they belong in their workplace and in the world.

Due to biases, investors are more likely to invest in attractive men, attractive people are more likely to be employed and earn more, résumés with African American sounding names receive fewer callbacks, people with disabilities are seen as unhirable, a motherhood penalty and fatherhood boost results in compensation disparities, Black women are often “invisible” where their presence and statements are less likely to be remembered than their White peers, leadership roles are seen as masculine, and applicants with women-sounding names are rated lower for competence, hirablity, and mentoring potential.2

Biases can influence how we see and interact with each other in the office and outside the office. Walking into stores and restaurants with my husband who is Black, I see White women holding their purses tighter, security guards following him through the store, cashiers looking harder to be sure he hasn’t stuck anything in his pockets. He’s a successful entrepreneur and leader in his field—though no one should be treated as a criminal because of the color of their skin. He doesn’t get to just walk into a room, he walks into a room and has to take into account how his skin color affects people.

My husband is also my cofounder, and when we’re in important partnership meetings, often people assume he is the CEO because he’s a man, or the inverse: they won’t even talk with him because they see him as my assistant. Our biases can be so quick, and yet they can harm someone’s sense of worth, safety, respect, and belonging.

Table 4.1 provides some examples of biases that show up in the workplace.

TABLE 4.1  Examples of Workplace Biases

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Several other biases can show up and influence DEI in the workplace, including: selection bias (being more aware of something when our attention is called to it), empathy gap (underestimating the influence or strength of your own or someone else’s emotions), time-saving bias (underestimating time that could be saved or lost by doing or not doing something), bias oversight (believing other people are more biased than you), authority bias (attributing greater intelligence or accuracy to an authority figure), social comparison bias (favoring people who don’t compete with your strengths), ambiguity effect (avoiding options where an outcome is unknown), self-serving bias (attributing your successes to internal factors, while attributing failures to external factors like your team or an individual), and automation bias (a bias toward technology and the automation of systems).

Actions You Can Take to Interrupt Your Biases

It takes 0.1 second to make a first impression.6 While this rapid judgment was essential when we were relying on those instincts for survival thousands of years ago, it’s less helpful to us now when often based on incorrect assumptions and biases. The speed is so rapid, we can’t stop them in the moment. But we can do a few things to interrupt our biases:

Pause, humanize, and empathize. Before saying or doing anything, give yourself time to disrupt your response. Then work to humanize and empathize, being fully present with the human in front of you. Be curious about them, and allow your impression of them to unfold as you learn more about them. The more time and real information you have to establish an impression, the more accurate it will become.

Practice this over time, and teach yourself to stop listening to first impressions, stop letting them guide you, stop allowing yourself to judge people. Replace judgment with curiosity.

Prime yourself and your team to be aware of biases before going into a meeting or embarking on a project. For example, if you’re about to interview a candidate, remind everyone beforehand that you value diversity of experience and to be cognizant of your biases. If you’re working on a project together, remind everyone up front that you want to build a truly inclusive and equitable solution and ask everyone to keep this in mind.

Create a culture that values DEI growth, where it’s normal to acknowledge and counter biases. When you catch yourself making a biased statement or decision, talk openly about it, and share how you’ll counter the bias. Develop team or company norms where you and your colleagues hold each other accountable for checking biases, welcome feedback, regularly question how biases are showing up in your projects, and support each other in your growth.

You can also create processes and systems to counter biases and hold yourselves accountable. “Step 4: Advocate for People,” includes systemic interventions you can put into place to interrupt both biases and microaggressions.

Using Self-Regulation

In decision-making, we often rely on our intuition, especially in a time crunch. But as we know, our intuition is built by norms, stereotypes, and heuristics (rules of thumb) that can be inherently biased. To make less biased and more inclusive decisions, we have to go beyond our intuition. Following these steps can help:

1.   Pause. Take a breath and a step back. What have I learned about biases that I can apply to this situation?

2.   Become aware of your intuition. How am I showing up in this moment? What is my intuition telling me right now about how to approach this situation?

3.   Ask yourself why. Why am I thinking about approaching this situation in this way? What assumptions am I making?

4.   Acknowledge any implicit biases and interrupt them. How might biases be influencing my approach to this? If you can, put a name to any biases that are showing up.

5.   Reframe your response in a less biased way. What else do I need to do or learn, so I can develop a less-biased approach? How can data help me make a more informed choice? Can I put together a diverse team to create a more inclusive solution? And once I have what I think is a less-biased solution, how can I test the solution with diverse people?

6.   Then respond in an inclusive way. Am I using inclusive verbal language as well as body language? Am I approaching people and situations with empathy? Am I modeling a growth mindset (we’ll discuss this in “Step 6: Lead the Change”)?

7.   Reflect, forgive, and improve. Embrace any discomfort, forgive yourself for the biases you had, and work to improve. Did the outcome feel more inclusive? Are there ways I can make future decisions like this less biased by improving systems and processes?

Reducing biases in decision-making takes a little time and effort, but it can lead to a powerful result. If you keep practicing this, it can become second nature. Make sure to use this framework for decisions made with or about people with overrepresented identities as well as people with underrepresented identities—our goal is to correct biases so we are not privileging some people while marginalizing others. We’ll discuss how to work with teams to improve decision-making processes in “Step 6: Lead the Change.”

Make sure you also understand and reverse your biases toward yourself. We acquire biases toward ourselves from what people say about us and our own stereotypes of who we are. This can get in the way of our own successes and reduce our ability to show up for other people as allies. Spend some quality time thinking about what biases you hold against yourself. These could be stereotypes you still hold on to, hurtful feedback that doesn’t serve you, a limiting belief or something you tell yourself every day because you always have. Let go of those biases and allow yourself to be your own unique self, ready to surprise you and the people around you.

We all have biases, it’s what we do about them that sets us apart. Biases are more likely to occur when facing time pressure, fatigue, nervousness, discomfort, and other stressors, so ensure you are using interventions especially during these times.7

What About Unconscious Bias Training?

Unconscious or implicit bias training (UBT) can help you learn your individual biases, but it won’t change DEI across your workplace much, if at all. It’s a bit like if I stopped writing the rest of this book. It will help you be a bit of a better human to know about your biases, but to really create the change we all need, we need you to be an advocate and to lead much-needed change too. We have to go beyond learning to action, and UBT doesn’t take us there alone.

About 50 percent of our inbound client inquiries at Change Catalyst are from companies who did UBT and it didn’t create the change they wanted. They’ve usually spent their budget on rolling out UBT across their organization, and now their employees are either angry nothing is changing, or fatigued and ready to move on from DEI because it’s been a lot of work and budget for little gain. Training needs to go further and deeper.

A 2019 meta-analysis study analyzing evidence from 492 studies on UBT interventions, found “little evidence showing that change in implicit measures will result in changes for explicit measures or behavior.”8 Our work and the work of many of my colleagues have confirmed this: while UBT can help people learn, it does not consistently change behavior.

People need the tools to know how to take action once they’ve learned about biases. UBT can be powerful at the right time, with the right trainer—if it is not a “check the box” training but a program that includes UBT, allyship, and specific departmental training. And it must be rolled out in tandem with systemic change.

Additionally, people taking the training have to truly want to learn (they have moved beyond initial awareness and are ready to take action). A very public instance of how UBT can go wrong: in 2017, James Damore attended UBT at Google, and was so turned off by it that he wrote a 10-page manifesto professing UBT and DEI are discriminatory and “compassion for the weak.” He said we should have “respect for the strong” and not “lower the bar,” because women are inherently and biologically inferior to men when it comes to engineering roles. It was circulated throughout the company, causing significant division and trauma. Google fired Damore for advancing harmful stereotypes, and he went on to be a public figure speaking out against DEI on conservative talk shows.

If you do conduct UBT, don’t make it mandatory, accompany it with training that teaches people how to change their behavior, reward and hold people accountable for that behavior, develop processes that help people reduce biases in decision-making, and above all, make sure you are investing more time and resources into reducing systemic inequities.

We want an easy fix, but change takes more work than a one-off training. It also takes more work than a technology fix. . . .

Can Technology “Fix” Biases?

While there are apps available for hiring teams that can remove names, education, and other common indicators that typically provoke bias, these do not fundamentally correct the problem. Humanizing and empathizing are one of the keys to reducing our personal biases, yet when people rely on technology to correct their biases they don’t do the work to correct their own behavior. This normalizes biases, communicating that it’s OK to have biases because technology will just filter them. It can also cause automation bias, and worse, algorithms for job recruitment can be biased themselves—these applications are still new, programmed by humans with biases, and artificial intelligence learns from historical data that can be biased.9

Removing someone’s name and experience in the hiring process also strips away someone’s identity, where we want our teams to recognize their colleagues’ unique identities and work to ensure people with those identities belong. Biases play a role in many workplace decisions beyond looking at résumés: interviews, job offers, performance reviews, promotions, project assignments, and so on. We want to change behaviors, where people correct their own biases, and value and seek out diversity as a culture add.

The problem is that we do not value people with some names the same as others. It’s time to fix that by teaching ourselves to value difference.

EXERCISE

Showing Empathy

The best allies I know listen, learn, and act with empathy. Empathy requires self-awareness of your own presence and perspective, curiosity, openness to someone else’s perspective, and courage to respond and show your empathy for them and their experience. Psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman outline three types of empathy:11

Images   Cognitive empathy is perspective-taking: we intellectually understand someone’s experiences.

Images   Emotional empathy is directly feeling: we emotionally understand someone’s experiences.

Images   Compassionate empathy combines both: we understand, feel, and respond to someone’s experiences. This is so essential as an ally.

Let’s break down what compassionate empathy looks like. Figure 4.1 shows a model we use at Change Catalyst, building on the work of Theresa Wiseman.12

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FIGURE 4.1  The Elements of Empathy

Compassionate empathy is a combination of insight and engagement. Gaining insight includes seeing the other person’s world and understanding their feelings, cognitively and emotionally. Insight is just half of empathy. The other half is engagement: appreciating their unique experience without judgment and communicating this understanding. We often leave out engagement, but it’s not enough to think about someone, you have to interact with them to show empathy.

Begin by seeing the person’s world, which may be quite different from your own. Listen to them with empathy: be fully present and receptive, allowing the other person to fully show up. Your eyes, ears, mind, and heart are open, and you’re not formulating a response until that person has been truly heard. Approach the conversation with open curiosity, and work to see their world as they see it. Listen to understand their unique feelings and experience—it may be quite different from how you might feel in a similar situation. Through self-awareness, recognize when you might be projecting your own ideas onto their experience, and reopen to a new perspective.

When we first meet people, and even when we’ve worked with people for some time, we usually look for what we have in common. But to have empathy—and to be a good ally—we must value and appreciate what we don’t have in common. Our individual experiences are what make us who we are. When we approach each other recognizing and highly valuing both what we share and what we don’t share, we enter a new level of understanding and connection. Figure 4.2 succinctly conveys this concept.

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FIGURE 4.2  Find Commonalities and Value Differences

Then appreciate the person without judgment and communicate understanding. Empathy is different from pity or sympathy. As we build empathy, we build a relationship—we learn what someone is experiencing, then we access our own feelings to connect with them. We will never be able to “walk in their shoes,” but we can appreciate their experience and let them know we see them and hear them, and we care. Showing empathy doesn’t have to be complex—in the medical industry, physicians are taught to show empathy by wincing when their patient feels pain, for example.13

If empathy doesn’t come natural to you, it can take some effort at first. Fortunately, Wiseman and several others have found that the more you practice empathy and put forth “empathic effort,” the better you become at it, and the more it can over time become a way of being.14 Having this compassion, and compassionate action, for each other can make us happier.15 Practice this with your colleagues, your friends, and your family.

Believing Versus Gaslighting

Thinking back to the time I was experiencing microaggressions daily as an executive, there were a few key moments that really struck me. One of them was after a C-suite meeting, where I showed my colleagues our high turnover rates and lower engagement numbers for women in our firm. It was a week after I’d informally brought up the issue to the team for the first time. My goal was to discuss the data together, so we could address it and still become a great firm for women—which was one of our business goals.

As we came out of the meeting, a colleague of mine in the C-suite whisked me over to a corner of the room and said, “You’ve got to stop with this ‘woman thing.’” He told me it was all in my head—even though I had literally just finished showing that it was in the data. He said it was ridiculous, to stop discussing it, and to “suck it up.”

That hit hard. He was telling me it was a problem with me, not with the way I was being treated nor the way other women were being treated. I’d recently had some other negative experiences at the company that had deeply worn me down. So after that moment, I did stop talking about it and started working on solutions on my own to reduce turnover and improve engagement. (See the sidebar in the Introduction: “When All You Can Do Is Create Change Covertly.”)

Gaslighting in the workplace can be either conscious or unconscious, and can take the form of denying or discrediting someone’s experience, minimizing the impact or trauma from inequity, blaming someone for being mistreated or abused, and convincing someone experiencing microaggressions—and/or other people around them—that a person’s experience is all in their head. Over time, this can be very damaging, severely affecting someone’s self-esteem and making them question their reality.

Due to extensive gaslighting of women during the #MeToo movement, people started using the hashtag #believewomen to counter it. Gaslighting can happen in the workplace, in the doctor’s office, at home, in the criminal justice system, and other areas of life. Medical gaslighting, for example, can occur when a doctor minimizes, ignores, mistreats, or misdiagnoses a patient.

If we’re gaslighting unconsciously or unintentionally, it often means we haven’t been listening with empathy, and we haven’t been working to value someone’s unique experiences. Perhaps we’re comparing their experiences to our own, or envisioning how we might act in a similar situation. That’s not compassionate empathy. If we haven’t had a similar experience, it could be because we have been privileged not to have that experience, or we haven’t experienced the trauma of having similar past experiences.

People who are being gaslighted might hear people say they are “difficult,” “overly sensitive,” “dramatic,” “angry,” “insecure,” “just not a good culture fit,” “thin-skinned,” “taking it personally,” “taking it the wrong way,” “irrational,” “too emotional,” “overreacting,” “reading too much into it,” “not really listening or understanding,” “imagining things,” “making it all up,” “the only one who feels this way,” and more.

With compassionate empathy, we believe people when they tell us what they are experiencing, even if it’s different from our own experience. If you find yourself resisting what someone is saying, take a moment to investigate that. What are you resisting, and why? Is there something you need to learn more about to better understand someone’s experience? Or is their experience bringing up an emotion you don’t want to feel? Everyone’s experience is their own; make sure you are not denying their experience.

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