#he has trouble at school. sometimes schools don’t offer correct learning strategies and stuff so he has difficulty

[queen-scribbles]

Charting A Course

for @pillarspromptsweekly #22 Roll for It. I got Adaryc, key, and helplessness

Adaryc was eight when he got his first sword. It was a plain thing, unadorned and rather dull. His father just wanted him to get a feel for the weight of a blade. He expected that, like any good Readceran, his son would serve their country to the best of his ability. And for the Cendmyr men, that service had always taken the form of the military. So his son--his only son--was going to do the family proud, wasn’t he?

He wanted to. Patriotism near the equal of his father’s burned in Adaryc’s chest, even at his tender age. So he took to the family’s vorlas field, swinging his sword fervently at the scarecrow. The dull blade couldn’t so much as nick the fabric, of course, but it got him used to the amount of effort it took to swing a sword, how it felt to hit your target, how much momentum you’d have if you missed.

“Dunno how good you’ll get practicin’ against that,” a voice commented one day, and Adaryc nearly dropped the sword as he spun to face the speaker. She grinned cheerfully at him from the fence that separated their families’ farm.

“Not very, if you insist on distractin’ me,” he grumbled. “Don’t you have chores, Saela? Or anything else to do other than bother me?”

“No,” Saela said brightly, ducking through the fence. “But I could help ya practice. Jara shooed me outta the way for a couple hours. An’ it’s only wood, but I have a practice sword, too.”

Adaryc only hesitated for a moment. Saela’s eternally chipper nature could be a bit wearing, but she was the only kid his age for miles, and he knew she wanted to join the army too when she got older. “Sure, I guess.”

“Great!” She untangled herself from the fence rungs and bolted back to her house, nearly tripping over the hem of her dress. “Be right back!”

Adaryc ducked through the fence once she was gone. He doubted his mother would like it if they tore up the vorlas fields sword fighting. Better to do that in the open. There was a fair chance they’d wind up filthy, but at least they wouldn’t destroy their families’ livelihoods.

Saela was back in just a couple minutes, her hair tied back in a haphazard braid and her skirts tucked up just enough she wouldn’t trip over them. She twirled her wooden sword before leveling it at him in a two-handed grip. “Prepare to be vanquished!”

He grinned and raised his sword. “In your dreams!”

Both of them were laughing hard enough they missed with the first swing. After focusing better, they fought to a dirty, dusty draw. No form or strategy on either part, just two eight year olds having fun.

“Good fight,” Saela panted as they sat in the dirt catching their breath.

“Same to you,” Adaryc nodded. He glanced at the nasty bruise on her arm. “An’ I really am sorry about that.”

She shrugged. “It was an accident, an’ I was sorta askin’ for it, leavin’ a hole like that. I’ll remember to guard better next time.”

“It won’t save you,” he teased, kicking a small puff of dust in her direction.

Saela coughed and kicked one back. “You didn’t win!”

“Yeah, well, neither did you,” Adaryc retorted.

“True,” she conceded cheerfully, rubbing the bruise. “I’m gonna see if Jara knows anything to put on this to make it less obvious. I don’t wanna get you in trouble, ‘specially since this was my idea.”

“Thanks. Has she been workin’ with the healer long enough to know stuff like that?”

“Sure,” Saela shrugged. “It’s not like I want her to reattach a limb, Adaryc, just make a bruise go away. I think four months’ apprenticing is enough to know that.”

“If you say so.” He traced lines in the dirt with his finger. “Thanks for helpin’ me practice.”

“Nat a problem.” She scrambled to her feet and offered him her hand. “It was fun.”

Adaryc accepted the help. “It was fun. Maybe... we can do it again sometime? Not tomorrow, I’m helpin’ my mother take a load of vorlas t’ the dyemaker. But later?”

“That’d be fun,” Saela nodded. “For now we should clean up, or I’m pretty sure both our moms will yell.”

As if to punctuate her words, Adaryc heard his mother calling for him and waved a final hasty goodby as he scrambled toward the house.

<<<>>>

Adaryc was ten when the sickness swept through. It wasn’t a plague, not really, just an illness that claimed many victims among vorlas farmers. Almost as if it held a particular malevolence toward them. But that was just superstition, like Watchers or bîaŵics, this was just an illness, even if it was one that settled in drained your strength. Most who caught it only lasted a week or two before even breathing was too hard and they just... stopped.

Adaryc didn’t catch it. His mother, however, did. And a few days later, so did Saela. Father was serving guard duty along the border, so caring for Mother fell solely to Adaryc. He was so busy with that and tending the fields that he didn’t even realize Saela was sick until he went to ask Jara if she had any tips for fighting the illness.

She did, but cautioned that even with the help of the herbs she told him about, odds for survival were low. “But I’ll pray for your mother if you pray for my sister?” she added with a tired smile. This far from larger towns, her two years’ training with the healer was the most anyone had.

Adaryc wondered if Jara wished her master hadn’t flitted off on some errand a few months ago even as he nodded. “Of course.” He didn’t mention that Saela was one of his only friends, or that obviously he cared about her.

But he did pray. Eothas, Hylea, any of the gods he thought would listen. Spare my mother, spare my friend. And it seemed to work. His mother, hardy as she was, recovered.

Saela did not. Adaryc spent the week between his mother’s recovery and Saela’s death helping Jara, feeling as helpless as he ever had in his life. Nothing they tried, nothing Jara concocted, worked, and he watched the desperation and exhaustion grown in tandem on her face.

“I don’t know enough,” she finally admitted one day when Saela coughed up blood. “Master Hendyr promised to come back and teach me more, but for now... I can’t do anything, and my sister’s going to die.”

Adaryc didn’t know what to say, and that was almost as bad as not being able to help. “....I”m sorry.”

“I’m still going to try,” she said determinedly. “It might work. Never discount pure, dumb luck. But our chances aren’t good.”

Try as she did, her prediction proved correct, and Saela died just a couple days later.

<<<>>>

Adaryc was eleven when word of Waidwen started to spread. His parents were initially skeptical of the claims a vorlas farmer, of all people, had seen Eothas, let alone been incarnated or possessed or whatever by Him. But as word kept spreading, Waidwen’s power kept growing, they began to wonder.  Finally, when they heard Waidwen had deposed the colonial governor and been crowned Divine King, Father left to go see if this man was everything he was said to be.

“For emergencies,” he said, pressing the key to the weapon cabinet into Adaryc’s hand. “Help your mother, do your part, and be good.” He smiled fondly and ruffled Adaryc’s hair. “I won’t be gone long, gods willing.”

He never came home. Instead, they got a letter, full of effusive praise for St. Waidwen, who was definitely what he claimed to be. Father had pledged his service right there in the throne room and now served as a royal guard. The letter was accompanied by enough silver Mother actually swore, which Adaryc had never heard her do.  He wished he could go serve with Father, but ‘his part’ was to stay and protect the farm, so that’s what he would do. That and ‘be good’, which he did by sharing some of the money with Jara. In the year since Saela died, her mother had struggled with melancholy and her father had turned to drink. Fortunately, he was a sullen and withdrawn drunk rather than abusive and violent(small blessings), but this still meant them living off what what little Jara could make as a healer. At least until her parents began to recover from their grieving process.

Jara thanked him with a tired smile and took the money gratefully. “There’s no insult in charity kindly given,” she said, one hand pressed against her growling stomach.

Adaryc and his mother received many letters over the next months. All of them came with money. Mother figured it was a portion of Father’s wages. Adaryc had no reason to believe she was wrong. With her permission, he gave some of the coin to Jara each time. Until finally, one day Jara told him her father had gone back to work. She insisted he keep the money.

It was good timing on her part. A few weeks later, Mother got a letter with a black border and a fancy seal that made her cry when she read it. Adaryc didn’t need to ask. Father wouldn’t be coming home.

<<<>>>

Adaryc was sixteen when the former armsmaster came to town. Like every other boy-and a few girls--his age, he barely gave the man time to settle in before asking(begging, practically) to be taught. It would be nice to learn how to fight without going far away from home. He tried not to think of Saela, how she would’ve raced him into town and probably won, eager to learn martial skill as well. There were so many potential students, the Armsmaster--and that’s all he’ll let them call him--started a school. Mother heard before Adaryc could tell her, and insisted he attend. “I know you want to follow your father’s footsteps,” she said. “While I’ll miss your help, this is what you’re supposed to do.”

It wasn’t long before he was one of the top students in class. As they got better, became more cohesive as a fighting force and worked together, the class decided to form a militia. They called themselves the Iron Flail.

<<<>>>

Adaryc was twenty one the first time he saw a person’s soul. It was an accident; caused by a solid collision with Alene during a sparring match. They knocked heads, and shortly after seeing stars, Adaryc was overwhelmed by feelings not his own. I have to prove myself and a flashed glimpse of unfamiliar, disapproving faces. It was all gone just as fast as it came, and he did his best to convince himself it was a weird, one time thing as a result of being concussed. Alene and all the spectators probably thought him shaky for the same reason.

But he knew what was said about soul-seers. Watchers. They were almost as reviled and mistrusted in Readceras as worshipers of Magran. He couldn’t be one. He wasn’t.

And then it happened again a few days later with Mother. And he couldn’t deny it any longer. Or make it go away, badly as he wished. He could hide it, though. Which he did, successfully. for quite a while. A few people knew, of course. Mother. Alene and his other close friends in the Flail. But he did his best to bury his abilities and use them as sparsely as possible. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was the best he could do. And it worked. For now.

<<<>>>

Adaryc was twenty six when he saw the army in his dreams. A vague but definite threat rolling down from the White March like an avalanche to crush Readceras to dust. He woke breathing hard and with a newfound burning desperation to protect his still-weakened homeland from the obvious Dyrwood threat.

He had recently taken over leadership of the Iron Flail, which gave him resources. Assuming he could find a way to convince them of the urgency without sounding crazy. I saw it in a vision was hardly iron-clad proof, but he’d proved himself as a soldier and a leader well enough that hopefully his word would be sufficient.

It was for his lieutenants. Alene not only believed him but started offering plans. All of which Adaryc nodded along to--they were fine but not stellar--until she mentioned the White Forge. That was a plan; claim the Forge and its cannons, be in a prime position to handle the threat when it emerged. The White Forge was the key to protecting everything he cared about. And sure, the village of Stalwart clung tenaciously to their prize, but he could deal with them. He would not be left helpless again. With that decided, he resolved to tell his men and depart in the morning. Their course was set.

------------------------------------------------------

Disclaimer: been a while since I played WM2, so I maaay have forgotten something. But I really like Adaryc, so I wanted to write about him. I know the game describes him as a younger man(I did watch a LP of the confrontation with him for a few details, but not everything), but humans in Eora can live to 180, so I think 26 still counts as young. :P

[ramonlindsay050]

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is ��� I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free, once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization

Transcript of Fighting Unconscious Bias in Your Organization written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

John Jantsch: It seems to me that, in our current political climate, culture climate, blatant bias, unfortunately, seems to be everywhere. However, there’s a whole lot of really good people that participate in unconscious bias, not meaning to. It just is unconscious. In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I speak with Dolly Chugh, and she’s the author of a book called, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. This is a great leadership, great culture, great workplace discussion, and I think it’s an important topic for today. Check it out.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s why I switched to Gusto. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive, limited time deal. If you sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free, once you run you first payroll. Just go to gusto.com/tape.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Dolly Chugh. She’s a psychologist and Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. Dolly, thanks for joining me.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s an honor.

John Jantsch: I think you’re my first Dolly ever.

Dolly Chugh: Oh, I love it.

John Jantsch: Quite often, I will ask an author to unpack the title a little bit, and so I’ll ask them, “What do you mean?” I’m having trouble how to ask this question, but what do you mean by being the person you mean to be?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, this title … We went through so many to get to this title. This title gets at the heart of what I think this book is about, which is I’m not an expert on telling people what they should believe or what they should care about. What I’m an expert in is helping people see ways in which what they believe and care about may not align with what’s actually happening in their behavior and in their mind.

This title refers to that, that whoever it is you mean to be, particularly when it comes to how you treat other people, particularly if they’re from a different race or gender or ethnicity or religion or ability level than you. If there are, perhaps, gaps in what you mean to be and how you mean to treat them and what’s actually happening, this is a book that helps people reflect and learn and improve.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think the main point is, I mean, we all know people that are just not nice people.

Dolly Chugh: Right.

John Jantsch: They’re sort of overt about it. What you’re getting at is the people that, they’d be appalled that somebody might actually interpret that, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, that’s right. I actually say, early in the book, those people … This book’s not for you. I’m not going to be able to offer much. This book is for people who are trying, who really are.

John Jantsch: It’s interesting. I have a black friend who, a long time ago, told me that … This gets into different parts of the country, where racism, in particular, is … I don’t want to say it’s accepted, but it seems to be more blatant or more overt. Then there are places where it’s actually very subtle. I live in Kansas City. I think most people in Kansas City would say, “Well, no, I’m not racist.” Yet, it’s very segregated. He actually said that that was worse, that he’d rather know somebody was racist, rather than somebody just sort of subtly be it. Does that make sense?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yeah, absolutely. In fact, I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but there is data out there that says, from a physiological standpoint, when people face ambiguous racism, it has a greater stress impact. Their physiology actually spikes in more severe ways than when they face overt, explicit racism, because it’s not just a matter of dealing with whatever you’re dealing with. It’s also a matter of trying to decode it and unpack it and figure out, is it you? Is everyone seeing this, or is it just me? There’s a lot more going on in those situations.

John Jantsch: Obviously, so far, we’ve talked about race, but certainly gender is a giant part of this, as well, isn’t it?

Dolly Chugh: Absolutely. In fact, in the book, I don’t focus on any one particular dimension of our identity. I have examples and interviews and research that centers on race, as well as sexual orientation, as well as gender, as well as religion. There’s probably a couple of other dimensions that are slipping my mind now, but the psychology is very similar. The type of mental processes involved are not tremendously different. There are some subtle differences, but the kind of … What I’m offering, in terms of tools and strategies, are similar.

John Jantsch: Talk a little bit about your research for coming to your hypothesis, because I think it’s fascinating, and I’m curious if you got any blow-back for how you did it.

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, well, what I do in this book is curate research from social psychology, as well as social sciences more broadly, some of which is mine, but a lot of which is coming from a whole bunch of different other people, as well. I would say the research that … One of the big foundations of the research here that I share is around unconscious, or sometimes referred to as implicit bias. That’s certainly been a topic that’s gotten a lot of attention and a lot of debate. Another area where I pull in the research is from sociology and economics, talking about systemic bias, which is an area I know less about, as a psychologist, but where I think I personally learned and grew the most through the writing of this book.

That ties very well to your example regarding Kansas City and the segregation. A lot of things, that just look like they are the way they are, actually have more deep-rooted systemic roots. Some of the research I share in this book was eye-opening to me, because I really hadn’t been trained in thinking that way and looking that way. I think it’s very helpful for all of us to be able to start to spot that around us.

John Jantsch: The research I was referring to is what I thought was the starting point. Correct me if I’m wrong, but where you actually went to professors at schools and presented yourself as a candidate for maybe a program, who had a question-

Dolly Chugh: Right, oh sure.

John Jantsch: Then it was like … I’m assuming that’s what maybe started you on this path, or …

Dolly Chugh: It was along the path. I think I started on this path well before that, but yeah, I’d be happy. Sorry that I missed the cue there. That’s a study that was done with Modupe Akinola, at the Columbia Business School, and Katy Milkman, at Wharton. The three of us went to grad school together, and we had a terrific mentor, Max Bazerman, in grad school. We’ve often noted how blessed we were to have that. It occurred to us that not everyone gets that in grad school. In fact, not everyone even gets access to talk to potential mentors before they apply to grad school, which all three of us did do, before we applied to grad school.

The study we put together … It’s methodologically called an audit study. Some people call it a sting operation colloquially. The sting operation was that we constructed identities of potential PhD students, writing a professor, saying, “I’m interested in applying to your program,” which is a subtle way of saying, “I’m looking for a mentor, and I’d like to learn more about your research and your program. Would you be willing to talk to me. I’ll be on your campus on this and this date.” All of our emails were identical, but the identity, as reflected by the name of the person sending the email, varied. We pretested lots of names and, in the end, constructed identities that were perceived as either male or female, using a gender binary and perceived as either white-sounding, black-sounding, Hispanic-sounding, Chinese-sounding, or Indian-sounding, and then we had multiple names within each of those identities, but it was 10 different gender and race/ethnicity combinations.

Each of those “prospective PhD students” sent this email to this potential mentor. To come up with who received the emails, what we did was took the US News and World Report. We randomly picked one professor from every PhD granting department listed in the top 260 schools they list, except for Alaska and Hawaii. That professor was randomly assigned a student, who sent them one of these emails. Each professor got one email.

Then, we had some other nuances to the study that aren’t as relevant to this discussion, so I’ll put those aside for now and say that what we did was we then focused on what responses … Did we get responses? Were the meetings accepted in the war room of research assistants we set up to monitor all of these email accounts that we had set up. What we did find … Our hypothesis was that white men would receive more email responses than the nonwhite men, all those other identities that I described. In fact, that is exactly what we found.

John Jantsch: As a researcher, do you actually want to find something that you weren’t looking for, or I mean, is it like, “Ah, that’s what we thought, and we did all this time to prove what we thought was right”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, especially when you study something like bias, because what you want to find is no bias or nothing egregious. You don’t … I’m a professor in a university. I want to think highly of how we’re doing this, and how we’re operating as an institution.

John Jantsch: These were peers, too, right?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, right, and I should add, all three of us were female, untenured professors when we ran this study. I think maybe now I’m understanding your earlier question better. There was absolutely tons of blow-back on this particular study. We expected a little. We didn’t expect quite as much as we got. Part of it was people don’t like to be deceived, and there was deception in this study, and so we understood that.

Of course, we canceled all the meetings. That’s why we had the war room of research assistants. As soon as someone wrote back, we canceled the meeting, which was … At least, no one should’ve been waiting for a student, who never showed up.

As a researcher, while we would love to believe there isn’t bias in the world, there’s lots of evidence that there is. What we were trying to do is show that it’s closer to home than a lot of us realize. In fact, that is what we found. To make it even more complicated, we were able to break down the data by discipline and private versus public universities. All three of us work in business schools that are in private universities. Private showed more bias than public, and business was the discipline that showed the most amount of bias.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I guess none of that’s really surprising. Let me ask you this. This would just be … I’m guessing this would just be your opinion, but do you believe a very similar bias shows up in, say, resumes in people applying for jobs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, so there have been studies, Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand, economists. They ran a study that actually, largely, was the inspiration for ours, where they did that. They changed the resume names, the names at the top of the resume. I don’t have the results right on the top of my head, but it was something like, roughly, a black applicant had to apply to two and a half as many jobs to get the same number of callbacks as a white applicant, with everything else being the same on the resumes.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if, in your business, all you had to do was the stuff you love, the reason you started the business, and not all that administrative stuff, like payroll and benefits? That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll, for years, to one of those big, corporate companies, and I always felt like a little, tiny fish. Now, there is a much better way. I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service, to take care of your team.

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Again, I think we know that bias, blatant bias, is a part of reality. I’m more interested in knowing, when you talk about unconscious bias, any thoughts on why that occurs?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I mean, and let me, in answering that question, clarify one belief we have about our professor study. We didn’t measure whether it was a conscious or unconscious bias. We have no way of knowing, but our belief, based off of other data out in the world, is that unconscious bias played a huge role, that it was good people trying to do the right thing. Even there, it’s not evident that it’s just blatant bias, in the sense of being deliberate or conscious. I said that to set up my answer to your question, and I now have lost your question.

John Jantsch: The main thing I was saying is why does unconscious bias exist?

Dolly Chugh: Yes, yes, thank you so much! Yeah, so what we know is that the brain does not have unlimited computing power. Three Nobel prizes have been won in the last 40 years that basically sit on this premise that there’s limitations to how much information the brain can process at once, particularly consciously. Eleven million bits of information come into our brain at any given moment. Only 40 of them are processed consciously at any given moment.

If that’s true, if so much of the mental processing that’s going on is in the background, low power mode, like when your phone’s on low power mode and doing all sorts of stuff that we don’t even know what it’s doing, the same thing’s happening in our brain. What our brain is doing, to cut through the 11 million bits of information, is using lots of shortcuts. It’s using categories to put things together, to keep track of it. It’s using heuristics. One result of this is that we do form associations between ideas. If I say peanut butter, you say jelly. Those ideas are sitting in your brain together. You weren’t born with that, but at some point you learned it.

That same mental architecture that creates those shortcuts, that creates categories, also then creates some associations that maybe were not what we quite meant to have imprinted in our brains. Beverly Daniel Tatum calls it the smog we breathe from the moment we’re born. Some of those associations include we’re associating African-Americans with violence, or with not smart, or women with the home and not the workplace. These associations, which may or may not reflect our conscious beliefs, are sitting in our brain in that low power mode, churning away, and filtering into things that we don’t intend. This is the part where it gets in the way of us being the person we mean to be.

John Jantsch: Maybe think about how’s this show up every day in the workplace? I’ll start with one. I get probably 10 LinkedIn requests a day. I’m wondering how much unconscious bias goes into my accepting or not accepting LinkedIn requests. I mean, that’s probably an everyday example of where somebody might actually think about that. Would you agree?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do, too, by the way. I absolutely think we have very reason to believe it is filtering in, especially behaviors where we aren’t giving a lot of deliberate thought. We’re moving quickly. We’re moving through our inbox. That’s why we actually did … For the study I just described, that’s why we did emails, because everyone’s just moving at lightning speed through their inboxes and trying to filter stuff out, particularly those cold call type emails. These are cold call type LinkedIn requests you’re receiving.

One person I interviewed for my book, Rick Klau, who’s a very senior person at Google Ventures and who takes a lot of pride in his track record in promoting women and hiring women … One of the things that he came to realize, when he did a bit of a self-audit on his social media, was he realized that he was heavily tilted, 80% plus, in LinkedIn and Twitter and every sort of medium that he values and where he is an influential voice … He was 80% tilted towards male voices, in terms of who he was following. I think these things, even for people like him, who found himself inadvertently creating a real skew, and then he went and has actively tried to change that. He said it’s really been eye-opening to realize how many important ideas and voices he didn’t even have access to, because he wasn’t following the right people.

John Jantsch: That brings a little bit of a point, too, that that’s an active choice and decision that you have to make, maybe as a sort of override to some unconscious bias. How much does a lack of exposure to diversity contribute to this?

Dolly Chugh: It definitely must contribute to it. If we don’t have in-person exposure, and we’re going, for example, off of media exposure, the studies that are being done … Dr. Stacy Smith, who has a terrific TED Talk and a number of research reports, has analyzed our movies and our TV shows and our advertising and shown that if martians came to earth, they would completely misunderstand who we were, as a planet, and who lived here, based off of what you see in our TV shows and movies. Absolutely, if we don’t have direct exposure, and all we’re getting is this indirect media level exposure, we are not setting ourselves up for success. We’re breathing in a smog that’s really, really packing it into our brain with associations that may not represent what we’re after.

John Jantsch: What do you want to accomplish with this book? Is this an activist movement, or is this a, “Hey, wake up, good people, and be a little better”?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, I think it’s closer to the second. I certainly wrote the book, hoping activists would find it useful, but I don’t think of myself as an activist. I describe myself as a smart, semi-bold person, who is trying to do the right thing, but is kind of timid, and probably isn’t brave enough to go get arrested and be an Activist with a capital A. I think that’s a lot of people out there, but I think we care a lot about being good people, and there are ways that we, as semi-bold people, can still act.

The alternative is not inaction or silence. Maybe we’re not ready to do the big, daring thing. I tell a story at the beginning of the book, in the prologue, about me attending a Black Lives Matter protest and passionately wanting to support their work and, at the same time, just feeling completely out of place, like I just don’t know that this is my role. I’m just such a wimp, but maybe there are other forms of little “a” activism that are for people like me, where it’s the conversations we have at our dinner tables. It’s the books we read our children. It’s the questions we ask in meetings. It’s the thought we give to which LinkedIn profiles we accept. I think these are ways in which we don’t have to be activists to act.

John Jantsch: If I’m the leader of a company, and obviously, I’m going to set a lot of the tone for what the culture is, what are some things that you would suggest I do to make this … not to dictate, as you said, how people should think, but to make this a priority, in terms of at least recognition?

Dolly Chugh: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you’re the leader of the company, you have two really big leverage points. One is make yourself vulnerable as a learner in this area. What I mean by that is a CEO that stands up and says, “The rest of you need to stop being so racist and sexist,” is, A, obviously just not going to be effective but, B, it’s also dishonest, because there’s no … None of us are immune from how the mind works.

The first leverage point a CEO has is to really be willing to be candid that they are also learning, and they are doing the work that they’re asking their employees to do, as well. Part of that means that there could’ve been mistakes in the past. There could be bias that they need to overcome, that’s unconscious or was outside of their awareness in the past. That’s one really powerful thing. We see examples. For example, at Salesforce, where the CEO there has really been powerful in his willingness to do that.

The second leverage point, which is also a Salesforce example, is I asked the Chief Equality Officer there, which is a new role they’ve created … Tony Prophet came from Microsoft to join them. I asked him, “So tell me, what’s the big thing that organizations should be doing?” I was expecting this really thunderous idea or initiative.

What he said was thunderous in its ordinariness. It was, “Run better meetings.”

I was like, “Run better meetings.”

He said, “Well, now, think about it. Whatever’s happening in your organization is happening in your meetings. The same people are being included or excluded, being interrupted, being credited, being under-credited, over-credited, sitting at the table, not sitting at the table. All those dynamics are replicating in your meetings.”

We all know that meetings are notoriously ineffective and bad uses of time, and really boring, and really frustrating. This is a double-edged approach because, A, if you run better meetings, you’ll just run better meetings, and that’s good business practice, and you’ll use your employees’ time better but, B, if you run better meetings, what you’re probably doing is something like balancing airtime. You’re probably encouraging more constructive disagreement. You’re probably seeking input widely, as opposed to dictating how things are going to happen. These are all the things that you are seeking in a more diverse and inclusive workplace to begin with, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think one of the real keys to that, too, is that, over time, that’s going to let that younger person say, “Oh, I can speak up here.”

Dolly Chugh: Exactly, so a lot of … If you talk to people about times in their organization where they felt the real diminishing of who they were, the marginalization of who they are, it..

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