A Note About Bias

Stop saying your bias is unconscious. That’s it. That’s the post.

I am not a Kindle girlie. Call me old school but I like to read actual books. I like the ones you hold with two hands, the ones where you can write in the margins, highlight key phrases and quotes, dog-ear the pages while drinking a coffee that will undoubtedly spill on the outside margins.

During the pandemic, my need for books coupled with a desire to make sense of the world I could only experience through a screen led me to the work of Robin DiAngelo. The best-selling author and scholar of white studies wrote an immensely popular and widely referenced “White Fragility” ( Side note: If you have not read it and are interested in being an inclusive leader who can make changes within your organization around inequities of race, gender, and their intersections, I highly suggest investing in a copy).

More recently I read DiAngelo’s book on racial bias – “Nice Racism” – also a noteworthy read for inclusive leaders. DiAngelo speaks to how many are taught to be nice, rather than kind. And the nice thing to do is ignore our complicity in maintaining systems of injustice and inequity. A focus on niceness allows space for inequality to fester because systemic oppressions become the result of other people’s behavior, not our own.

Often organizational challenges are positioned in a way that disempowers those of us at the center of their output, using our bias and stereotypes to belittle the power we hold as a collective. Yet, as Margaret Mead would say, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has."

Which is why we individually all have a responsibility to understand, address, and unpack our individual biases. Calling out our bias is essential to being an inclusive leader in an equity-focused organization. It is education that leads to change, however so much of that education positions bias as being unconscious. It’s not.

Bias can be seen, felt, and understood when we express a preference based on stereotypes and prejudgment. The seemingly insignificant things we assume about how a woman will lead, comments about the ability of a junior colleague, are used to inform our behaviors interpersonally and on teams. As inclusive leaders we aim to make our bias conscious, illuminating the judgements that are unspoken nicely.

So, what can be done to make bias collectively conscious?

There are three areas to address bias collectively and consciously: individual awareness, building inclusive leadership, and hiring and promotion practices.

Individual Awareness

• Education and Self-reflection: Understanding how bias works, the first step is to mitigate bias. Encourage employees to reflect on their own biases. There are online tests or journaling prompts to help with this.

Leadership and Culture

• Build Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Programs: Set clear goals for building a diverse and inclusive workplace. Build Inclusive Decision-Making by training leaders on how to make decisions that are data-informed and consider diverse perspectives.
• Spark a Speak Up Culture: Create a safe space for employees to call out bias when they see it. This could involve bystander intervention training but can be as simple as asking those quietly in meetings their opinions – allowing them to express disagreement safely.

Hiring and Promotion Practices

• Standardized Frameworks: Use standardized interview processes, blind evaluations, and rubrics to evaluate candidates while also assembling interview panels with a variety of backgrounds to reduce the influence of individual biases.

The key is building environments where inclusion is at the forefront and bias is understood to exist but not dismissed. Short story long: Stop saying your bias is unconscious. That’s it. That’s the post.

Photo by Google DeepMind on Unsplash