(In fact, it’s good for business.)
Having delivered Cook/Ross Unconscious Bias workshops for international staff, I know how defensive people can get when you state they have biases. I used to be one of them. I think that is because in most people’s mind, the word “bias” is equated with “prejudiced” and to be called that feels like being called a racist.
Websters, though, defines bias simply as a preference, an inclination, or a tendency. That sounds pretty innocuous, doesn’t it? My wife prefers chocolate ice cream; I prefer “Cherry Garcia.” Neither of us were born with those preferences, but over time, we learned what tasted good, and now those are our preferences.
What this means is that biases are learned through life experiences.
(Variety is the Spice of Life)
In fact our mind is hard wired to form biases as a way of dealing the overwhelming amount of sensory stimuli we are bombarded with every moment of our lives (which is 11 million, by the way). With so much information, our mind has to use shortcuts to get us to act at all. For example, at some point you learned that a car bearing down on you is dangerous. An older person might have once grabbed your hand as a toddler to keep you from stepping into a busy street. Nowadays, if you look up and see a car barreling toward you, you don’t stop to think, “Oh a red car. It looks like it’s moving fast. It’s a Honda. I like Honda’s. It looks like a hybrid. They get good gas mileage. I wonder if he’s going to stop…” In fact you have a bias (a preference, a tendency, an inclination) to look both ways before crossing the road.
Biases are often shaped by where we grew up. For example, if you’re from the United States, you learned to greet people by shaking their hands or asking them how they are. In another culture you might instead say hello and ask how the other person’s family is. If you didn’t know that and met that other person for the first time, you might think they were rude or impolite.
So in and of themselves, biases are learned and really in a way arbitrary. Your biases are totally shaped by your own unique experiences which only you have lived.
But in some situations, our biases can have problematic outcomes. For example, in the United States, there seems to be a preference to trust taller people. A Fortune 500 study from the 1980 found that more than half of CEOs were higher than six feet tall. This is odd, because men over 6 feet only make up about 15% of the men in the US. Do tall men make better CEOs? Do they make better business decisions? What is an company missing by not hiring shorter CEOs. Or women for that matter: this year Fortune magazine reports that only 21 companies on its 500 list has a female CEO–that is 4%. Aren’t there more women than men? In 2017, only 16 of the 500 disclosed its diversity profile of executives and when tallied it was revealed that 73% were men, white and women and the rest were “21% Asian, 3% Latino/a, 2% black, 0.6% two or more races, 0.2% Native American and 0.1% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.”
Men are sometimes asked why there seems to be disparity between the number of men and women certain fields, like STEM. The most biased say it’s because women aren’t as smart as men; the more thoughtful might say it’s because the STEM fields are predominantly male dominated and women self-select not to go into those professions. But really the answer is plain old bias.
Unfortunately, it appears that our brains activate our biases before we can even stop it. In a famous study, researcher submitted resumes to job ads in Boston and Chicago using names that were either “black” or “white” sounding. Guess which ethnic group members got called back for interviews more often than the other. White to a tune of 30% more frequently.
Biases are really bad when they form the basis of business decisions, especially regarding hiring, promotion, salary increases and so on. A recent study by McKinsey and company found that organizations that have greater gender equality do 15% better in the market place than their competitors. What’s more, ethnically diverse companies out peform their competition by 35%.
Thus a publicly traded company that does not address unconscious bias is actually not honoring its obligation to maximize profits for its shareholder. Shareholders of the world unite and demand gender and ethnic diversity in the companies you invest in!