Oh hey, this is not a normal episode. This is a bit of a bonus episode this week. Obviously we have Foraging Ecology with the a Lexus Nicole Nelson is up. You can go back and listen to this Cicadology episode if you are inundated with cicadas. But I wanted to also in this feed this week, we're going to do something a little different. We wanted to share an episode of a podcast called Real Good. If you're like, What's Real Good? Never heard of it?
You're about to if you like so.
Real Good is a show that started last year at the beginning of COVID to highlight nonprofits doing work on the ground to help with the pandemic. But the big message of that whole first season was that most of the problems people are facing in COVID were not new when the pandemic hit. Their intersectional problems concerning race and
class and gender and a lot more so. The second season just came out and it's broadening out a bit to focus on the people fighting systemic issues that COVID highlighted, and guests this season talk about critical issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion, including recognizing implicit bias and the need for affordable health housing and equal access to mental health services, all stuff that we care about. This episode is called just Admitting it Isn't Enough with Linden Negron, who was
a product director at Bias Sync. I think you're gonna like it. More information on her in the intro. So, yes, you're about to hear an episode of that podcast in our feed and it is with Linda Negron, a program director at an anti implicit bias training organization. So if you like what you hear, you can listen and subscribe to Real Good the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, enjoy. This is Real Good by us Bank, a podcast about helpers.
It's okay to say that you've made mistakes in the past, like it's okay to accept someone else's feedback and be better. It would involve you acknowledging the fact that you are not perfect, that you are human.
I'm faith Dally. This show was born out of the coronavirus crisis. In our efforts to understand where work needed to be done to help communities in need during the pandemic, we learned that the issues they were struggling with didn't crop up during COVID. They are long standing concerns with roots in racial disparity, socioeconomic opportunity gaps, and so much more. We're here to give you a chance to meet those
who are fighting against inequality. They're people who span a wide range of fields and enact very different missions, but one thing remains the same for everyone you're going to meet. They're helpers. They're doing real good. This week, our guest is Linda Negron, product director at Bias SYNC. It's an uncomfortable thing to talk about, but people tend to favor
people like them. When we can see part of ourselves, whether it's physically represented or a part of their lived experience that we recognize, we often see people like us favorably. And when I say we, I don't just mean you listening and meet talking. I mean everyone human beings in general. But when structures put in place favor one type of person over another, what happens then? Well, just look at
the workplaces all across America. Structures favoring predominantly white and predominantly male workers have created boardrooms over represented by white men, and there's a trickle down effect from there. Those people tend to put employees like them in position to be the next crop of leaders keeping the wheel turning in
the corporate landscape. Today, three point two percent of senior management jobs are held by Black Americans as opposed to the thirteen point two percent of the population as a whole. Women make up more than half of our population and forty seven percent of support positions, but only occupy twenty three percent of management roles. There are certainly more stats we could throw at you, but I think you get it.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Linda Negron's work recognizing how our brains are wired and how to scientifically approach our own biases is training business leaders how to create offices that look more like the world around us. Linda, when people ask you what you do, what do you say, Well.
It depends on who it is, because if it's a stranger on the street, I say I'm in tech, and you know, the eyes glaze over and they stop asking questions. But normally I say I'm I'm a director of product or head of product at a social enterprise startup.
So what we're trying so all of that avoids the juicy word, though, I mean, do you ever think of saying you know what I work in bias.
Yes, I do that when we jump into the actual details around it. But I find that unconscious bias has created so many like triggers for a lot of people, whether it's on the far left or the far right,
and myself being far left. It is very funny seeing how people that I agree with politically even get very riled up about unconscious bias training in corporations where you know, it's this idea of it's either unconscious virus training or the full blown anti racism, anti sexism training that actually gets into the nitty gritty details of the history and
the knowledge of institutional oppression and all of that. Whereas a lot of people tend to write a lot of activists I've heard say that unconscious bias can be a cop out because it's this fluffy Oh everyone has it, so you know, just be cognizant of it and don't get too hard on yourself for it, And they don't think it's going far enough. My argument is if we don't start unconscious bias, we're never going to get anywhere.
So it so before we I mean, there's so much to dig into here I and I want to find out how you came to this. But first, because we're going to be using these words, can you tell me what how you define bias and how you define unconscious bias exactly?
Okay, so bias is in Layman's terms, it's this. So the brain process is something like five I don't want to actually say incorrect stats, but let's give it five hundred bits of data per second. But consciously we can only process about ten of them. And so if the brain is processing, you know, let's say five hundred bits a second, and you can only consciously handle ten bits a second, the other, you know, four hundred and ninety
is happening unconsciously in the back of your brain. So the human prefrontal cortex can only handle so much much stimulus that's coming in at once, or stimuli there's you know, if I'm just looking at this screen, I'm thinking about what I'm saying, I'm looking at your facial expression, I'm you know, hearing sounds in the background. I can hear my boyfriend making breakfast in the kitchen. But all of these things, some of them are getting process unconsciously because
it's not at the forefront of my mind. What I'm specifically focusing on is my conversation with you, so consciously I'm able to handle this conversation. Everything else that's coming in is being processed unconsciously in the back of the brain,
so I actually don't know how it's being processed. My brain is just storing it away because that's how biologically we have developed to handle as much process because imagine if you try to process every little thing that you were seeing or hearing all at once, it's impossible shorts So this is an evolutionary tactic to avoid short circuiting pretty much.
So that's the unconscious part. What's the bias part. How does that manage it?
So your brain automatically starts creating shortcuts to not short circuit. So if an example from you know, primordial times, like back in the day historic if I knew that a specific kind of plant wasn't good for me, if I would eat it, and I would, you know, either get poisoned or get really sick. I would just know that, So every time I would see it, I would think that's not a good plant, that I should not eat
that plant. Over time, you start to develop unconscious by like unconscious bias to actually say Okay, well I should avoid that plant because it looks exactly like the other plant, so therefore I shouldn't have that plant. And it's just this shorts. It's just like what we call mental shortcuts. Again, so much of it is unconscious that we're not even cognitive like doing it cognitively. We're just doing it. Our brain is doing it for us. We just know certain
things like there. It's a lot of people call it like the gut feeling. Why did you avoid one option versus another? You just say, well, that one I don't know why I avoided it, but I'm assuming it's because it reminded me of this other thing, which I know isn't good for me. And that's just how evolutionary, evolutionarily
we developed to again, not short circuit. If there's so much stimulus coming, it's sufficient exactly, So you just it's again mental shortcuts to avoid things that you know aren't good for you, or to go to things that are good for you and are or are familiar are familiary. Yeah, But again, like good and bad is money, because it's
all relative. So what you think is good or bad is actually just based off of either prior experiences or experiences, people you know have told you it's not necessarily good or bad.
And so how would you define the difference between bias and preference.
So a lot of preference is bias. You if it's unconscious or you're not really thinking about it, it is bias. Like for me, I unconsciously always go towards chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream before I go to anything else. I like, that's a that's a bias. But a preference is me saying I'm actively choosing to not have that like very cool new ice cream flavor and just going to chocolate cookie dough because chocolate chip cookie dough is
what I like. I know it. I don't really love pistachio as a flavor, so I'm just not going to go with it.
And so that's it's interesting when you sort of break it down that way, because I think when we all hear bias, it sounds very negative. Oh I don't I don't want to be biased. I'm not biased. Of course, we'll we'll talk about with you how we're all biased. But in some ways bias is a is a neutral term. It's how we apply it right, And and in the definition or the example you just gave about ice cream. Preference has a kind of consciousness to it. Yes, is bias always unconscious?
No? I think that bias can both be conscious and unconscious. So bias is just this idea that you're veering. You're taking a mental shortcut to choose one thing over another, or preference one thing over another based off of other information that you know. You're not you're working off of
limited information, if that makes sense. So again, like what we were talking about the plants, theoretically, if you want it to be truly unbiased, you would eat every single plant to determine if you could eat all of them. Is that possible? No, there's way too You wouldn't use the plants, So you're going to use mental shortcuts to say that plant looks like the other one that made
me really sick. I'm not going to do it. So then you go towards berries and you know, wheat, grass and all of the other things you know you can eat and things that look like things you know you can eat. So it's bias is, to put it succinctly, is as a mental shortcut based off of limited information that you already have to make a quick decision in a true scientific method. Fully, I guess if you had all the time in the world, you would find all
of the information for every possible item. But again, as we've talked about, that's impossible for the human brain. We don't have the cognitive ability to do that.
Okay, So armed with these kind of working definitions for this conversation, let's talk about you. Where are you from?
Where did you grow up? I grew up in New York. I was born in New York. Lived in Puerto Rico for two years as a child, so between the ages of two and four, and then came back to New York. And then I was a proud New Yorker ever since. So my mother's got a mom and my father's Puerto rican So we spent two years there with my family on his side, and I was in que originally. Then we went out to Long Island after we came back, and I was, you know, joking around because everyone always
asked New York, So you're from Manhattan? No, In fact, most of Manhattan is actually transplants. I grew up where the real New Yorkers grow up, which is right outside of Manhattan. So oh, let me get so much.
Flat for that man So I got to tell you. I'm in Manhattan for the last seventeen years, and my husband always tells me you're You're not a real new Yorker. He says, I won't be a real New Yorker until I walk over syringes in Central Park in the seventies, so I'll never get there. But I defer to you, you're a real New Yorker. Having lived an itinerant life, at least in your early youth. What kind of perspective did that give you with bias? What was your experience with bias.
Growing definitely so I. As I said before, I was living in Puerto Rico up until the age of four. I don't really have memories of before the age of two, so when we came back, it was just me and my mom living with two of my aunts that are also Guatemalan, and I from a really young age, I was very aware of what bias looked like and an example of that. Like my I don't know what the most severe case of bias I experienced as a kid or my mom did, but I'd remember the earliest and
it was when I was in kindergarten. Since I had just come from Puerto Rico, I didn't speak English, or if I did, it was not good. So my mom had heard that at the school district I was going to, if you couldn't speak English, they would automatically put you in ESL, which would mean that you were off track for the advanced classes. And they had known that I was at the risk of sounding like every millennial mom. I was gifted, and I had you know, I was testing really well, as much as you can test as
a four year old. But the teachers in Puerto Rico were telling my mom that like I was, I should be fast tracked into like a special program. But when we moved to New York, she just knew that if I was put in an ESL class, that wouldn't be the case because all of the ESL classes are taught
remedial content. Even if these children are really bright, just the sole fact that they don't speak English means that they're not set up for success, and they're set up with way less resources, way less content, you know, like, and so much of those early years is whatever you can fit in a kid's head is going to set them up for the rest of their life. So my mom just told me don't speak to anyone until you learn English.
Let them know.
And I knew that I just couldn't speak to my teachers. So my teacher thought I was just like super shy, and I could kind of you know, kids learn languages really fast, so it only took me like less than a year to really pick up enough English to really understand what the other kids were saying and doing. So by first grade I was fine. But I remember I only knew like two family friends in my class, so I would really only speak to them in Spanish, and I was just trying to figure out how to parse
everything together and figure out where we were going. But it was a secret. I couldn't tell anyone that I didn't really know English well because if I got put in the other class, or you know, I got put in ESL, I wouldn't. They would just automatically pigeonhole me as someone who was quote unquote remedial, even though other kids that were in the ESL classes should have been allowed to experience the same amount of learning, but they
weren't given those resources or those opportunities. So from a really young age, how do.
You think, Yeah, how do you think that early experience shaped you.
It made me really aware of the fact that I had certain characteristics that other people look down on, and I became aware of the fact that that was how life was just going to be for me a little bit for a while. It gave me a lot of drive, which I think that a lot of people tend to glorify this idea of grit that you know, here she is like uphill battle, like showing the world that they're wrong.
But I don't necessarily. I think the psychological effects of it are things that I'm still coping with, you know,
in therapy. And it was really fascinating reflecting on this in recent years while I've been, you know, trying to write more and write more of a blog, and just really acknowledging the fact that it's from a really young age, I knew that I had certain characteristics that other people made other people think that I wasn't as equipped or capable, or as intelligent or as valuable as other people.
You know, that's such an interesting perspective, Linda, because what you're describing is this almost a I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but almost a fair justified resentment towards having to be resilient. You know, people could applaud you for that, but you're kind of like, why should I have had to work harder?
Yeah?
All right, So your teachers in Puerto Rico were right, you are gifted. You You end up at Harvard, and what was that like?
It was the best of times in the worst of times, for sure, just the traditional Harvard experience of having grown up as kind of a big fish in a little pond and having the very harsh reality check of oh, I'm not the smartest person in the room anymore. That's awkward, and you know, being surrounded by so many people who are just so brilliant, and if you're ever playing the comparison game, there will always be someone smarter, more well adjusted,
more social, more anything. So very early on in my college career, I had to rectify that comparison game of trying to just use everyone else's barometer for my own success and happiness. So it catapults me into a level of emotional intelligence that I had definitely never thought possible for myself earlier on because I was a very like
STEM person. So, you know, bias and stereotypes about STEM people where we're a little emotionally everyone thinks that we're a little like unemotional or emotionally unavailable, but I promise some of us are very emotionally intelligent. Uh. You know.
It was a Harvard graduate called Theodore Roosevelt who said about comparison. He says, comparison is the thief of joy. Yeah, so it sounds like an important lesson that you were wise enough to teach.
Yourself as a college exactly.
I mean, sixty seven percent of Harvard students come from the top twenty percent of wealth owning households. And it's also a school I think it has like less than an eight percent LATINX population. Yeah, so how isolated did you feel and did you feel kind of like a hello, I'm the model minority.
Yeah. It was really isolating in the sense that a lot of people can't understand your experiences no matter how much they want to. They like, they'll listen, they'll sympathize, but there is a certain point in which you know, in the same way that you can talk to one of your girlfriends going through a breakup because you've understood it and you've been there yourself. I wasn't able to do that for certain like life events that were going that I was going through at the time, and.
Can you give me an example.
Yeah, so I remember my freshman year, I really wanted to study abroad in Nairobi. That summer. I was taking Swahili, which is an African language my freshman year, and that summer the Swahili professor was conducting a study of broad trip and I really wanted to go, but you know, I couldn't afford it. I was on full financial aid and it was extra money, so I was trying to figure out how to get a grant or anything like that.
So I was pretty convinced I was going to get one specific grant and then it fell through, and I remember just being really upset, you know, just like rightfully emotional at home, just like talking to one of my college roommates, just you know, being upset that I wasn't going to be able to go, which also sidebar, I actually ended up being able to go because I got a separate grant, so it ended up being a happy story.
But I remember just talking to a friend who just goes, oh, well, like, I'm sure that your parents will be able to cover it if you just talked to them that you lost the grant and I go what, and she goes, no, I mean, it's really not that much money. It's only like a little under ten thousand dollars. And I just look at her and go, oh, my mom makes thirty thousand dollars a year. I don't know how you think a third of her annual salary or wage will actually
be able to cover this trip. And it was one of those very harsh realities for her where she realized, oh wow, I did not realize that people make that little And it was one of those moments where I actually had to sit there and explain that to her, explain that not everyone has ten thousand dollars lying around.
In fact, most people in America don't. And I think that it was it's just little things like that, where like in ways that I would be able to talk to someone at home or even just someone in the real world here in LA where I am able to tell them, oh, yeah, you know, like I couldn't afford this. You know, when you're an adult and you're working, you understand more that not people don't have ten thousand dollars
lying around a lot, especially if they have kids. But in that environment of just privilege, a lot of those people had never been exposed to individuals who didn't have just that excess wealth.
Yeah, it's a very interesting and complicated experience at a place like Harvard or other Ivy League schools or places like that, because there is this very privileged community that is also very for the most part of generalizing, that
is also very progressive. Yeah, and there are a lot of light bulbs that still need to get turned on for people who mean well but have literal They may be very very smart, but have literal ignorance, right, like in the neutral sense of the word ignorance about other people's experiences. Yeah, switching switching gears from Harvard to Tinder. So what did you do at Tinder? And we should
say Tender is a dating app? Right? And is it is Tinder the one that coined sort of swipe lefts wipe right, like put that into our cultural left.
Yeah, they were the first of their kind. They were the first dating app. Well, I think dating websites had existed before Match, dot Comedy, Harmony had were already in existence, but they were the first app to casualize the online dating experience and make it more accessible and take away the stigma.
So you decided to take the plunge a little leap of faith. Yeah, and you started Tinder. And was it part of your job to look for bias at Tinder or was it something you just couldn't miss.
It's something you just can't miss. So I started as an engineer. I was working on at first, I worked a bit on the spam project, and then I went on to work on features like the group dating feature, so like you could actually create groups and swap on
other groups. I worked on one of the features called boost, which was like the top revenue grossing feature of Tinder in the year, and it started off I want to say, like maybe my last couple, my first big push about unconscious bias at Tinder was actually just getting unconscious biased training in the company.
That's interesting. So, so your work with bias at Tinder started uh as an employee and the experience you had as an employee, but you also identified bias in Tinder's users in how they chose to swipe.
Is that right? So once we started talking about unconscious bias and then it became a prominent conversation that was happening, I started talking to and I moved from back in engineering to data engineering. I remember talking to some of the individuals building the algorithm about, you know, things that they were finding, and the sociologists that had worked there. She was a staff sociologist. Some of her research had showed that specifically the people that got matched the least
were black women and Asian men. And I remember asking, is that user preference? Or is that our fault? And you go, what are you talking about? I go, well, is it user bias where this is happening on like a user level, and or is this actually something that our recommendation algorithm is perpetuating? And I remember just the look of confusion on the engineer spaces, like, wait, we could possibly be perpetuating this. And it ended up not
being the case. It ended up like looking like it was more of like a user issue, like on a global scale. But I remember just even asking the question, oh, is this actually like a user problem or an engineer problem. It was the first time they'd even asked that, and it became this question of oh, wait, us we could be perpetuating a problem and I, uh so, talking to the engineer.
That's such a powerful question. Yeah right, I mean, I mean that's part of your life's work now is helping companies ask wait us could we be part of the problem and not knowing it exactly?
And so we talked about it, and you know, I know people that still work there now and it's definitely been a question that they continue to ask themselves like, oh, here's the problem? Is this our problem or is this someone like? Is this something that we can't control or is this something that we can control for?
And what do you what do you say about that? As as someone you know, you're you're a computer scientist, how do companies need to look at this question about whether it's the responsibility of platforms or businesses to counteract bias versus personal responsibility of their users.
Really, so, I think that corporate responsibility can't happen before personal responsibility because corporations are the results of personal decisions. However, so all it takes is a group of individuals at a corporation, especially the C suite, to say we should review this, we should look into it. We should just ask ourselves if, like, if we have a problem and put in the resources to bring in some experts to
figure out if there's a problem. That's the first step, and from there it is corporate responsibility to fix their problems in the sense that you know, it's kind of this idea of like, if we all do our part, eventually, like the wave will be big enough where we'll be able to combat anything. But corporations and institutions they amplify existing human flaws because yeah, like it is corporate responsibility over personal responsibility in my opinion, to actually make the
most impact. But it starts with personal responsibility. That's right.
Why why don't people ask themselves that? Like that question you just asked? And my part of the problem is this my fault. If every single person started asking that, it would change everything. Yeah, why do you think people don't ask themselves that?
A variety of reasons. I think that well, first and foremost specifically in America, and I can speak to this on the American stance. We have this very deeply ingraded, puritanical culture of being the city upon a hill, being like outside looking in, we have to be perfect, we like, there is just no room for flaws, there's no room for imperfection. It's you know, you are what you say, you say what you are, you hold strong and that
is what is good. And we really need to move past that, and we really need to push forward with this idea of it's okay to be wrong, It's okay to say that you've made mistakes in the past, like it's okay to accept someone else's feedback and be better. But I feel like we kind of get stuck in this.
I couldn't possibly be wrong, I couldn't possibly have made this mistake, And I feel like a lot of it tends to be to accept that you've made a mistake, to accept that you have potentially perpetuated, you know, oppressive institutions or have been biased yourself, it would involve you acknowledging the fact that you are not perfect, that you are human.
So when someone is faced with the breaking news that he, she, or they have have made a mistake, have caused pain, or are biased, is the justification or the defensiveness Sometimes well, it's unconscious, I'm not how can I I'm not in charge of that. What do you do with that response?
Definitely? So that is I think why we've seen a lot of activists be against the idea of unconscious bias as a solution is because some people just go, well, it's unconscious, so it's not my fault and I'm good to go, and that's not what we're looking for. I'm good to go, and so that's not what we that's not what we're looking for when it comes to uncounterous bias.
What we're looking for is this. It's twofold. It's the idea of catching yourself in the act and then also being able to accept the feedback for when you don't. And so if you catch yourself, like when you if you're being mindful and you make let's say you're thinking about who to promote or something like that, you automatically think, well, this person's clearly the obvious choice of who I'm going to promote on my team, and you start to think, well,
why do I think that? And it's just like finding new ways to ask yourself the question of why do I think that. Another example that people really like is we call it the network mapping activity. It's one of
our micro learnings. It's this idea of reflecting on who you interact with, like physically, well not now because it's COVID, but I reflecting on who you interact with on a day to day basis, and on a week to week basis, and on a month to month basis and seeing what the actual breakdown of people is and seeing, oh wow, if I'm not getting exposed to people who are different than me, then of course I'm gonna have bias thoughts because I never see those other people and like, I
don't have you know, I'm not de stereo typing in my mind. And it's just like going, you know, taking the active route of like removing the stereotypes of other you know, ethnicities, other genders, other sexual orientations from your mind. And I'm a really easy way to do this that one of our subject matter experts loves talking about is uh, specifically, let's use the let's focus on racial bias specifically for
black people. Why don't you research black scientists and black professionals who have made incredible impacts and long standing legacies in the world. Like if you know, you ask anyone like, please give me an example of like a black individual who has made a tremendous social impact. Everyone says, I'm okay, They go, okay, anyone but MLKA or Malcolm X name one, right.
And then you say name a scientist and they say Neil deGrasse Tyson exactly. There's there's just a whole.
You know, there's a whole long list exactly, so go through the list and actually just start researching it. And this exposure actually helps. It's not a me it's not long lasting, but it will get you in the practice of Okay, I actually need to start thinking of look at like finding the people who are antithetical to the stereotypes that I've been told my whole life exists.
And seeking you have to become a six.
So it's becomes it's this whole process of seeking and making, seeking information and seeking knowledge, seeking the knowledge of the other people's experiences, part of your daily life, and a habit. And it sounds overwhelming, but it really isn't once it becomes habit.
You're now at a company called Bias Sinc. So Bias Sinc Is a science based assessment to combat unconscious bias. What does that mean? How can you be science spased?
So we're science based through and through. So what we're actually giving companies is the first way to figure out the state of the state when it comes to diversity
and inclusion. So before there hasn't been many ways to you know, measure unconscious bias or you know, have a data driven approach to it outside of something like headcount and promotions, which are very long feedback cycles that make it very difficult to actually assess how productive certain initiatives are because it's taking a really long you know, like a headcount is something that like it takes a very long time to increase or make better.
Or by headcount, you mean literally account how many quote unquote diverse employees.
The company has.
Yeah, because that doesn't you can have a bunch of people of different colors, But that doesn't mean there's no bias.
Right, And it doesn't mean that it's an inclusive environment, and it doesn't mean that it's actually that people are actually given the space to voice their opinions, that their voices are equally heard.
So, so how does science science help and what do we mean by science here? Is is this a lot of math, a lot of a lot of sort of algorithms.
So our actual lms, so are we call it the baseline course that actually walks users through the introduction to unconscious bias and you know, describes two specific forms of bias that arise in the workplace, one of which is gender bias, the other which is racial bias. We specifically focused on black bias in the future, will address other you know, the myriad of biases like agism, bias against
LGBTQ individuals, bias against pregnant women specifically. So like, there's so many different kinds of biases that we want to address that we're going to address. It's just a matter of not overloading our users with all of the information.
But in it, we also have a variety of assessments that we conduct, two of which are unconscious biased assessments that actually measure how much unconscious bias roughly speaking, that you have towards specific demographic From there the actual corporation, depending on whether or not they can sent into the data, certain corporations do, others don't. We actually show an aggregate level of bias in the company to actually see where their gaps are. And let me say, how how do
you do that? Really? So, how much do you know about the implicit association test?
Nothing? Okay?
So the implicit association test is actually developed by a few psychologists at our alma mater. It started in the nineties and it's been you know, put through the ringer
in terms of actual validation and does this work? Does this not for decades, And what we find out is that the group of academics that have worked on this, like the general body of academics that have worked on unconscious bias, have for the most part, agreed that the unconscious bias assessment is valid in terms of understanding how much bias exists for that person for a specific demographic of people.
And so a is this a test someone takes online?
You can, yes, you can take it online. So it's basically idea is that we look at one like two categories of people and two attributes. So the example that I'll give is flowers and insects. So we're looking at flowers and insects, and we're using good words and bad words. So the idea is to see whether or not you have an unconscious bias towards insects or flowers. And so I'll show you images of insects and flowers, and you're supposed to rapidly match. At first, you go flowers good,
insects bad. So you match flowers to the good words and insects to bad words. And then you flip it and then you do insects to good words and flowers to bad words. And it's actually in a variety. So we measure unconscious bias based on how much longer it took you to correctly match good like the good attributes with a specific image versus the bad attributes with a specific image. Because if you're as we said before, our bias is shortcuts.
So if you're yeah, it's you're quick to say a cockroach is creepy, but it's hard to say that the flower is stinky exactly right or creepy.
And so again, what we're showing you here is just what you're the ninety five percent of your subconsciousness things. And it's not measuring racism, it's not measuring prejudice, it's not measuring sexism. We're not telling you that this is how prejudice you are, because again, prejudice is pretty conscious.
Prejudice is saying I actively just like this group of people, or I'm actively going to go out of my way to make sure that this other group of people does not have the opportunities that other people have, that this group of people like is not, like, don't interact with people that look like me. That's prejudice, and that's not what we're measuring. What we're measuring is unconscious bias to show you that you are human. We have been taught
these things since birth. These are institutionalized in the media. We consume to the places that we're allowed to live, and so.
So does Biasink go into a company and help it engage its employees and taking these empirical kinds of tests, so.
They're embedded in the baseline assessment. So it's a baseline course. So it's an introduction to unconscious bias with the actual assessments integrated into it. And so then from there every month we are apt following it. It's about a two year contract. We give users micro learnings, so little tips and tricks like what I was telling you earlier, to help mitigate the negative impact of unconscious bias. So we're human. We're never actually going to fully get rid of bias.
And actually like bias. We show companies where their pain points are and where they need to focus on, but we can mitigate its negative effects, and we can work to create processes that prevent bias from affecting others so that we can talk.
About those Let's tell me about those negative effects. It's easy to say, oh, yeah, gosh, let's combat implicit bias, but what role does bias have in in corporate hierarchy, and then in a sort of corporate culture, and then in culture at large.
So the easiest way to slow it down is that you both hire and promote people that remind you of you. If all things even all things like no processes in place.
Yeah yeah, And why is that bad?
If what you're looking for is someone who's like you in the sense that you know you're hardworking, so you want someone who's hardworking. If you know you're a really good team player and you want someone else as a
good team player, there's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong than having someone who matches your personality in the sense that like you know that you've had the skill sets to be a great employee, to get to the point where you've been promoted, so you want to hire other people that are like you to also match those attributes. The issue falls when you automatically assign unconsciously your attributes to people that look like you. And you know, if you yourself.
And assume that someone who doesn't look like it doesn't have us actually have exactly right.
So it's not the issue that you know faith, you're intelligent, you are you know a powerhouse in the podcast world, you want to hire someone else who reminds you of you in that sense. The issue is if you have a team, you're managing a team, and you automatically only veer towards the people that remind you of you in the sense that, like, unconsciously, do they remind you of you because you look the same, or do they remind
you of you because they're familiar. It's a familiar face, like a face that you grew up with, and like, she reminds me exactly of my best friend from childhood. But did you grow up in an environment that only had a specific kind of person?
So wouldn't another deleterious effect of unconscious bias be a lack of growth for a company because you're not getting all sorts of new experiences and ideas that come from having diversity.
A lot of people tend to think that the negative impacts of unconscious bias are you know, quote unquote purely ethical, but they actually have financial and monetary consequences as well. We're talking there are a lot of estimates, I think Gallup estimates that we lose billions a year based off of I might this might be a wrong statistic. Actually I should look that up. But Galou estimates we lose a lot of money a year based off of unconscious bias because we actually it's this idea of you know,
that whole joke or not joke. You've probably experienced this as well. Of like you'll say something in a boardroom, no one hears it. A man says it because he thought he thought it, but like you had said it literally five minutes frive. Well, he's brilliant, and he's brilliant,
and that's his idea. And that's amazing the problem of female like of people's voices not being heard or being appreciated, Like these very credible and talented individuals that you're clearly hiring for your company, we're not listedstening to their perspectives or their opinions, and so that loss of idea, that loss of creativity, actually creates a negative financial impact because then you're literally just paying people that you're not listening to.
It's wow, when you put it that way, that's kind of amazing.
And we're also looking at like people who don't feel included or don't feel heard much less likely to work hard.
So yeah, you're actually talking about at that point, loss of productivity, and then at another layer, we're talking about just a complete loss of professional develompine, Like what if the woman that you're not listening to in the meeting could have been the next Elon Musk, but you weren't listening to her, and therefore she wasn't given the opportunity, and therefore she wasn't allowed to prove herself, and therefore she wasn't able to get the financial backing of her company,
and then she wasn't able to create gas free emission cars. Like we were talking about loss of productivity, loss of creativity, loss of innovation because people just aren't listening to good ideas because of their bias. Your inability to mitigate your bias and quiet that voice actually leads to a loss of productivity and financial success for you.
I am you. This is one of those amazing conversations that has taught me so much but has also left me with more questions. And I mean the good kinds of questions, like the questions to ask, to ask myself and to ask the people around me. And I'm really really grateful and you're great at what you do.
In you try my best.
The makeup of our workforces often starts at human resources. In order to create a more diverse workforce, we need a more diverse pool of applicants. HR is often at the top of that funnel and the which our team at US Bank is constantly looking to give more people more opportunities to get a better sense of how they're confronting systemic and individual bias. We spoke to US Banks Greg Cunningham and LCO Barcelos right at the outset of
Lco's tenure at the bank. We learned a lot about why confronting bias matters, and we also get a sense of what it really looks like to be on the receiving end of it. What is the mission of your job at human resources?
You know, it's there's so many ways to look at this faith.
I think first and foremost, we are here to help the business achieve its priorities and its strategy through talent. Right, So that's the first element of how do we enable the business through talent? And in parallel to that, it's being the voice of the employee. It's understanding the culture, being the voice of the culture. So I often tell my team we are stewarts of the culture, right, Stuart's of the team, but with a purpose of enabling business success through people or through talent.
You know, well, you know why you're here. We're going to talk about diversity and we're going to talk about implicit bias, which I love this topic. It's so fascinating. There's there's so much to understand. And with that in mind, would you say that being an HR is more challenging than ever before? When these I mean, I imagine that you know, HR personnel, HR officers of forty years ago, we're not having these discussions, right.
That's right, hard to say that was way before my time, Faith, But I would say it is a challenging time to be ahead of HR or as I said, the steward of culture suit of talent. And really, but it's challenging, but it's exciting, right, It's a really it's a fantastic time for someone that has aspired to be an HR leader or be in human resources. Such an exciting time because talent really matters and culture really matters, and we see this now more than ever.
What would you say as the state and I invite I invite both of you to chime in, what would you say as a state of diversity in corporate America.
Oh boy, that's that's a loaded question, right. I mean, it's Greg Out, you're the expert here as well. But I would say it's in some ways, it's it's in discovery because I think companies who thought that they had it, had it figured out, are figuring out that they actually
didn't have it figured out. It's evolving because a voice is being found and I find that absolutely beautiful, right where there's a voice that's now growing across our workforces, across corporate America, and we have to listen and we have to pay attention to that voice. And so it's it's ever evolving.
So, Greg, you've written that so many organizations hire for diversity but manage to assimilation. So I think that speaks to what LCO was just saying. Right, Yes, it's this is not just hiring people of different colors. It's more than that.
Every organization has diversity. Faith, diversity are multiple dimensions of identity that we all have. And so diversity is not where the real opportunity is. The opportunities around inclusion inclusions. The verb and you know that statement I made is one that I've carried with me for a really long
time because of my own experiences in previous organizations. You know, companies do hire for diversity, and I think every organization has diversity statements or some commitment around diversity, but oftentimes what happens is, you know, people once in the organization, they aren't always in an environment that truly understands how to get the best out of their talents, how to cultivate the skills and as I like to say, they're
superpower in the organization. We all want to be part of a team where we're contributing and adding value to our full capacity. And that's how teams and organizations win when every single person on the team, when the entire organization is sort of moving together around common objectives and everybody's contributing in meaningful ways. That's what inclusion looks like.
And so this notion of assimilation, I think has been something that has really hampered diversity and inclusion efforts from making real change in corporate America that we've all wanted to see.
And when you don't have that real change, do you all have personal experiences with companies not performing at their best, not even knowing how.
Good they could be.
If they truly had diversity and inclusion and took a look at bias.
You see it every day. I mean, you know, I think this, this awakening that companies have had over the last six months is too long in coming, you know. I think more often we've seen examples of you know, certain industries and individual organizations who have who have valued
and certainly benefited from it. But more importantly, faith there have been studies and there's real empirical data that has been studied over a series of years by McKenzie and others that have shown that diverse organizations, those companies that are more diverse at the board and the senior executive level, actually perform better financially in terms of you know, earnings before interests in taxes, and those companies that have gender
diversity perform anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent better. Those companies that have ethnic diversity perform anywhere from twenty five to thirty percent better. There's real data in studies that have been done on it, and so I think this notion of companies that don't embrace it are doing it at their own peril and are missing out on real opportunities to grow overall.
So both of you.
Are dedicated to making sure people feel included and that their voices matter. So would you say that becoming aware of implicit bias and having anti bias training within your company is a tool to achieve those goals of having people feel included and that their voices matter. Is that where implicit bias awareness comes in.
Yeah, I think it's yes. The short answer is yes, which is why we've made anti bias training mandatory for every single employee in our organization. Every employee in our organization takes anti bias training. But not only do they take anti bias training, they take cultural identity training. And so we go a step further with our mandatory training to make sure that there's not just It's not just.
It's not enough to just be aware of the importance of anti bias, but you have to understand the importance that identity plays into the question you asked before about why women and minorities have been shut out of many of the leadership opportunities. But what's also critical in this conversation faith around bias is the notion that we have to have different, different expectations around what leadership looks like
in our organization. The awareness is one thing, but to take action on it is vitally important because we're missing out on opportunities to grow the pie for everybody in the organization, and leaders have to have new definitions around what leadership looks like. That's why people of color and women have been shut out of C suites and organizations for so long is because they weren't viewed as leaders.
They weren't viewed as having leadership qualities, and the ways in which they demonstrated skills and talents weren't valued in the same way. Back to the point Elsio was making about everybody's voice matters, and so I think what's happening is we're having different conversations now around how people contribute in differential ways and what leadership looks like. And there's
not one way to lead. There's multiple ways of leading that actually drive better outcomes even than what we've seen to this point.
Els I have to ask you your ten weeks on the job, have you had your implicit BIOS training?
Was it recent? I have.
I've gone through my training.
And did you do okay?
I'm crossing I.
Did okay, I did okay. But it's it's an ever evolving story faith.
I mean honestly, did you did you learn something like when you went through did you have an uncomfortable moment or or realization that you didn't know before?
There is you know, with implicit advice.
To me, it is always a learning opportunity, right, So for sure, as I went through the training, you learn two or three new things. I can story a brief story with you because it's implicit bias is so near and dear to me. I went through a personal experience with this in my career. I grew up in Brazil, went to school in Brazil, and after college came to the US and along my career journey I will mention
the company's name. It would be embarrassing to them. But along my career I decided to make career change and decided to back in the nineties, there needs to be this thing called job fairs that we would all go to and all the employers were there.
And I.
Went to this job fair and passed out likely about fifty resumes across all the different jobs and with a name like Elsia Barcelos. I didn't think anything about it.
I just I.
Didn't think people would think anything differently. For me as a potential candidate, and when it was all said and done, faith I probably had about four or five callbacks at most, out of fifty or so that I had passed out. So then I got the little pamphlet from the job fare and I said, I don't know why I thought about it. I want to say I wasn't aware of any type of complicit a bias at that point, but I thought, what if I were to change my name and my full name? You asked me earlier, I said,
Elsa Barcelos. My full name is actually Elso Robert Thomas Barcelos. So I said, I'm not going to really lie.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop.
I'll drop the LCO, make it an E. I'll drop the Barcelo and go by E. Robert Thomas.
Yeah.
And then what happened but the same resume.
Nothing changed on the resume, but it was now I was E. Robert Thomas.
So I mailed the resume out to all the employees that run on the fair that I had dropped my resume to and I probably got about thirty five or so callbacks from that. Now, interesting enough, I did land a job and the company that I landed the job offered a job to E Robert Thomas, which was a big problem when I got my first paycheck because my account was the day that I was supposed to start.
Literally the day I was supposed to start, I received one of.
Those automatic emails or mess emails right as a letter in the mail at the time that said, thank you also Barselos for applying. You don't have an opportunity for you right now, and but I appreciate your application. But the same day, the same day I was supposed to start, as one, I got a decline from the other.
Right.
So, when you say, is the train a tool that we have, A training is a tool that we have, But it has to be much more than a tool. It has to be a way of life. It has to be something that we are open to adjusting and learning and applying. But it boils down to am I listening? Am I paying attention to my surroundings so I know
what matters to one what matters to the other? Am I able to look through those things and look, you can have the right it's you can have the most impactful experience and then tomorrow you still learn something new.
You know, just on a broader scale, what do you think the consequences are of not addressing bias in the workplace? There are not you know, not every big company in America is doing what you're doing. What are what are the consequences of this?
I you know, it's to ignore it is to ignore the obvious, and unfortunately there are companies that still do ignore it. And uh and a quick summary. I was meeting with the number of h heads of HR recently in a little roundtable session, just talking amongst ourselves trying to figure out how to manage through.
COVID and social unrest and all these things.
And one of my peers said, Wow, it's like we just had this prefecta right, a tough year financially, and we just had this this COVID thing hit us, and how social unrest is heading us. And my reply was, what, social unrest may be active now, but it's not just hitting you. This is something that's been real for a long time. And so to ignore is it's to not be realistic to know that the world is evolving around you.
And that's that voice I mentioned earlier. There is a voice that is growing and strength, and we need to listen to that voice. It really matters to listen to that voice.
Thanks so much for listening to Real Good by us Bank. If you like what you heard, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next week.
So listen to smart podcasts to learn important things. I hope you like that episode of Real Good. And obviously, on Tuesday, we'll be back with a brand new episode. I might even do a little bonus field trip one from the road because I'm going to Cicada Country, Ohio. I'm gonna check out these bugs.
Okay.
Also, I accidentally dyed my hair color I did not intend to, and now it matches my mustard sweater perfectly. I don't know what I'm gonna do about it. Okay, bye bye,