A Talk With Your Brain About Workplace Bias

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — You have an amazing brain. It can filter millions of pieces of data per second, selecting a few dozen facts for your conscious self to interpret and act upon. These mental shortcuts keep you alive in a cluttered world, guest speaker Allyson Dylan Robinson said Feb. 22, 2016, at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. “Having bias does not make you a bad person,” said Robinson, a senior consultant at Cook Ross, a global firm focused on workplace diversity and inclusion. “You could not function without it.”

Unfortunately, the same brain betrays you when it comes to discerning reality and making objective, values-based decisions. “We think we see the world as it is,” she said. “The reality is we see the world as we are.” People might not think superficial variables such as skin color influence them when evaluating human potential. But a growing library of brain research shows otherwise. “Our brains are inclined to cause us to make very inequitable decisions without our intention or awareness or control,” Robinson said. “We are wired to see sameness as safety.” She cited studies on the effects of accent, name, gender and race, which all show the same thing.

Accent

In one study, listeners were asked to rate the truthfulness of recorded statements. As accents diverged from the listeners’ own speech patterns, they began to rate more statements as false. “We hear people who speak the way we speak as being more reliable and trustworthy than people who speak differently from us,” Robinson said. This has implications for managers, especially when they screen job candidates over the phone.

Name

In another set of studies, researchers generated resumes for fictional applicants and submitted the documents to real hiring managers at big corporations. When everything else was identical, applicants with Anglo-sounding names such as “Joseph” received callbacks at more than double the rate of applicants with ethnic-sounding names such as “Jose.”

Robinson said overt racism might account for some of the difference, but other factors must account for such a wide discrepancy. “I have a hard time believing that’s all bad actors — and that this is all overt, conscious bias,” she said. “On the basis of some deep background coding, those people who are doing the screening are just seeing that resume differently than the others. It literally looks different to them.”

Gender

To test the effects of gender on career advancement, another set of researchers identified 1,200 married male managers in the United States and United Kingdom. Participants were asked to screen internal candidates for a prestigious leadership development program.

Women received equitable treatment in this study, but only when male managers had wives who worked outside the home. “If the manager was married to a woman who did not work outside the home, they overwhelmingly chose the male over the female for the professional development opportunity,” Robinson said.

Race

Race also affects workplace perceptions. Managers in one study were asked to evaluate business writing samples from supposed “new hires” in the organization. When they believed the authors were white, they scored identical writing samples much more generously than when they believed the authors were African American.

Robinson said some companies wait until they face a lawsuit or other type of financial setback before they address unconscious bias. A better approach is to pause, pay attention to what’s really happening, and learn to separate facts from interpretations. “These situations are real,” she said. “This is affecting the way we build organizations and the way that we create culture right now.” 

The event, titled “Unconscious Bias in Business,” was hosted by the Smith Association of Women MBAs (SAWMBA) in partnership with the school’s Center for Leadership, Innovation & Change (CLIC). Other sponsors included the Latin MBA Student Association, Smith Pride Alliance and the Black MBA Association.