Speaker 1: Oh hey, this is not a normal episode. This is
Speaker 1: a bit of a bonus episode this week. Obviously we
Speaker 1: have Foraging Ecology with the a Lexus Nicole Nelson is up.
Speaker 1: You can go back and listen to this Cicadology episode
Speaker 1: if you are inundated with cicadas. But I wanted to
Speaker 1: also in this feed this week, we're going to do
Speaker 1: something a little different. We wanted to share an episode
Speaker 1: of a podcast called Real Good. If you're like, What's
Speaker 1: Real Good? Never heard of it?
Speaker 2: You're about to if you like so.
Speaker 1: Real Good is a show that started last year at
Speaker 1: the beginning of COVID to highlight nonprofits doing work on
Speaker 1: the ground to help with the pandemic. But the big
Speaker 1: message of that whole first season was that most of
Speaker 1: the problems people are facing in COVID were not new
Speaker 1: when the pandemic hit. Their intersectional problems concerning race and
Speaker 1: class and gender and a lot more so. The second
Speaker 1: season just came out and it's broadening out a bit
Speaker 1: to focus on the people fighting systemic issues that COVID highlighted,
Speaker 1: and guests this season talk about critical issues in diversity, equity,
Speaker 1: and inclusion, including recognizing implicit bias and the need for
Speaker 1: affordable health housing and equal access to mental health services,
Speaker 1: all stuff that we care about. This episode is called
Speaker 1: just Admitting it Isn't Enough with Linden Negron, who was
Speaker 1: a product director at Bias Sync. I think you're gonna
Speaker 1: like it. More information on her in the intro. So, yes,
Speaker 1: you're about to hear an episode of that podcast in
Speaker 1: our feed and it is with Linda Negron, a program
Speaker 1: director at an anti implicit bias training organization. So if
Speaker 1: you like what you hear, you can listen and subscribe
Speaker 1: to Real Good the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Okay, enjoy. This is Real Good by us Bank, a
Speaker 2: podcast about helpers.
Speaker 3: It's okay to say that you've made mistakes in the past,
Speaker 3: like it's okay to accept someone else's feedback and be better.
Speaker 3: It would involve you acknowledging the fact that you are
Speaker 3: not perfect, that you are human.
Speaker 2: I'm faith Dally. This show was born out of the
Speaker 2: coronavirus crisis. In our efforts to understand where work needed
Speaker 2: to be done to help communities in need during the pandemic,
Speaker 2: we learned that the issues they were struggling with didn't
Speaker 2: crop up during COVID. They are long standing concerns with
Speaker 2: roots in racial disparity, socioeconomic opportunity gaps, and so much more.
Speaker 2: We're here to give you a chance to meet those
Speaker 2: who are fighting against inequality. They're people who span a
Speaker 2: wide range of fields and enact very different missions, but
Speaker 2: one thing remains the same for everyone you're going to meet.
Speaker 2: They're helpers. They're doing real good. This week, our guest
Speaker 2: is Linda Negron, product director at Bias SYNC. It's an
Speaker 2: uncomfortable thing to talk about, but people tend to favor
Speaker 2: people like them. When we can see part of ourselves,
Speaker 2: whether it's physically represented or a part of their lived
Speaker 2: experience that we recognize, we often see people like us favorably.
Speaker 2: And when I say we, I don't just mean you
Speaker 2: listening and meet talking. I mean everyone human beings in general.
Speaker 2: But when structures put in place favor one type of
Speaker 2: person over another, what happens then? Well, just look at
Speaker 2: the workplaces all across America. Structures favoring predominantly white and
Speaker 2: predominantly male workers have created boardrooms over represented by white men,
Speaker 2: and there's a trickle down effect from there. Those people
Speaker 2: tend to put employees like them in position to be
Speaker 2: the next crop of leaders keeping the wheel turning in
Speaker 2: the corporate landscape. Today, three point two percent of senior
Speaker 2: management jobs are held by Black Americans as opposed to
Speaker 2: the thirteen point two percent of the population as a whole.
Speaker 2: Women make up more than half of our population and
Speaker 2: forty seven percent of support positions, but only occupy twenty
Speaker 2: three percent of management roles. There are certainly more stats
Speaker 2: we could throw at you, but I think you get it.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't have to be this way. Linda Negron's
Speaker 2: work recognizing how our brains are wired and how to
Speaker 2: scientifically approach our own biases is training business leaders how
Speaker 2: to create offices that look more like the world around us. Linda,
Speaker 2: when people ask you what you do, what do you say, Well.
Speaker 3: It depends on who it is, because if it's a
Speaker 3: stranger on the street, I say I'm in tech, and
Speaker 3: you know, the eyes glaze over and they stop asking questions.
Speaker 3: But normally I say I'm I'm a director of product
Speaker 3: or head of product at a social enterprise startup.
Speaker 2: So what we're trying so all of that avoids the
Speaker 2: juicy word, though, I mean, do you ever think of
Speaker 2: saying you know what I work in bias.
Speaker 3: Yes, I do that when we jump into the actual
Speaker 3: details around it. But I find that unconscious bias has
Speaker 3: created so many like triggers for a lot of people,
Speaker 3: whether it's on the far left or the far right,
Speaker 3: and myself being far left. It is very funny seeing
Speaker 3: how people that I agree with politically even get very
Speaker 3: riled up about unconscious bias training in corporations where you know,
Speaker 3: it's this idea of it's either unconscious virus training or
Speaker 3: the full blown anti racism, anti sexism training that actually
Speaker 3: gets into the nitty gritty details of the history and
Speaker 3: the knowledge of institutional oppression and all of that. Whereas
Speaker 3: a lot of people tend to write a lot of
Speaker 3: activists I've heard say that unconscious bias can be a
Speaker 3: cop out because it's this fluffy Oh everyone has it,
Speaker 3: so you know, just be cognizant of it and don't
Speaker 3: get too hard on yourself for it, And they don't
Speaker 3: think it's going far enough. My argument is if we
Speaker 3: don't start unconscious bias, we're never going to get anywhere.
Speaker 2: So it so before we I mean, there's so much
Speaker 2: to dig into here I and I want to find
Speaker 2: out how you came to this. But first, because we're
Speaker 2: going to be using these words, can you tell me
Speaker 2: what how you define bias and how you define unconscious
Speaker 2: bias exactly?
Speaker 3: Okay, so bias is in Layman's terms, it's this. So
Speaker 3: the brain process is something like five I don't want
Speaker 3: to actually say incorrect stats, but let's give it five
Speaker 3: hundred bits of data per second. But consciously we can
Speaker 3: only process about ten of them. And so if the
Speaker 3: brain is processing, you know, let's say five hundred bits
Speaker 3: a second, and you can only consciously handle ten bits
Speaker 3: a second, the other, you know, four hundred and ninety
Speaker 3: is happening unconsciously in the back of your brain. So
Speaker 3: the human prefrontal cortex can only handle so much much
Speaker 3: stimulus that's coming in at once, or stimuli there's you know,
Speaker 3: if I'm just looking at this screen, I'm thinking about
Speaker 3: what I'm saying, I'm looking at your facial expression, I'm
Speaker 3: you know, hearing sounds in the background. I can hear
Speaker 3: my boyfriend making breakfast in the kitchen. But all of
Speaker 3: these things, some of them are getting process unconsciously because
Speaker 3: it's not at the forefront of my mind. What I'm
Speaker 3: specifically focusing on is my conversation with you, so consciously
Speaker 3: I'm able to handle this conversation. Everything else that's coming
Speaker 3: in is being processed unconsciously in the back of the brain,
Speaker 3: so I actually don't know how it's being processed. My
Speaker 3: brain is just storing it away because that's how biologically
Speaker 3: we have developed to handle as much process because imagine
Speaker 3: if you try to process every little thing that you
Speaker 3: were seeing or hearing all at once, it's impossible shorts
Speaker 3: So this is an evolutionary tactic to avoid short circuiting
Speaker 3: pretty much.
Speaker 2: So that's the unconscious part. What's the bias part. How
Speaker 2: does that manage it?
Speaker 3: So your brain automatically starts creating shortcuts to not short circuit.
Speaker 3: So if an example from you know, primordial times, like
Speaker 3: back in the day historic if I knew that a
Speaker 3: specific kind of plant wasn't good for me, if I
Speaker 3: would eat it, and I would, you know, either get
Speaker 3: poisoned or get really sick. I would just know that,
Speaker 3: So every time I would see it, I would think
Speaker 3: that's not a good plant, that I should not eat
Speaker 3: that plant. Over time, you start to develop unconscious by
Speaker 3: like unconscious bias to actually say Okay, well I should
Speaker 3: avoid that plant because it looks exactly like the other plant,
Speaker 3: so therefore I shouldn't have that plant. And it's just
Speaker 3: this shorts. It's just like what we call mental shortcuts. Again,
Speaker 3: so much of it is unconscious that we're not even
Speaker 3: cognitive like doing it cognitively. We're just doing it. Our
Speaker 3: brain is doing it for us. We just know certain
Speaker 3: things like there. It's a lot of people call it
Speaker 3: like the gut feeling. Why did you avoid one option
Speaker 3: versus another? You just say, well, that one I don't
Speaker 3: know why I avoided it, but I'm assuming it's because
Speaker 3: it reminded me of this other thing, which I know
Speaker 3: isn't good for me. And that's just how evolutionary, evolutionarily
Speaker 3: we developed to again, not short circuit. If there's so
Speaker 3: much stimulus coming, it's sufficient exactly, So you just it's
Speaker 3: again mental shortcuts to avoid things that you know aren't
Speaker 3: good for you, or to go to things that are
Speaker 3: good for you and are or are familiar are familiary. Yeah,
Speaker 3: But again, like good and bad is money, because it's
Speaker 3: all relative. So what you think is good or bad
Speaker 3: is actually just based off of either prior experiences or experiences,
Speaker 3: people you know have told you it's not necessarily good
Speaker 3: or bad.
Speaker 2: And so how would you define the difference between bias
Speaker 2: and preference.
Speaker 3: So a lot of preference is bias. You if it's
Speaker 3: unconscious or you're not really thinking about it, it is bias.
Speaker 3: Like for me, I unconsciously always go towards chocolate chip
Speaker 3: cookie dough ice cream before I go to anything else.
Speaker 3: I like, that's a that's a bias. But a preference
Speaker 3: is me saying I'm actively choosing to not have that
Speaker 3: like very cool new ice cream flavor and just going
Speaker 3: to chocolate cookie dough because chocolate chip cookie dough is
Speaker 3: what I like. I know it. I don't really love
Speaker 3: pistachio as a flavor, so I'm just not going to
Speaker 3: go with it.
Speaker 2: And so that's it's interesting when you sort of break
Speaker 2: it down that way, because I think when we all
Speaker 2: hear bias, it sounds very negative. Oh I don't I
Speaker 2: don't want to be biased. I'm not biased. Of course,
Speaker 2: we'll we'll talk about with you how we're all biased.
Speaker 2: But in some ways bias is a is a neutral term.
Speaker 2: It's how we apply it right, And and in the
Speaker 2: definition or the example you just gave about ice cream.
Speaker 2: Preference has a kind of consciousness to it. Yes, is
Speaker 2: bias always unconscious?
Speaker 3: No? I think that bias can both be conscious and unconscious.
Speaker 3: So bias is just this idea that you're veering. You're
Speaker 3: taking a mental shortcut to choose one thing over another,
Speaker 3: or preference one thing over another based off of other
Speaker 3: information that you know. You're not you're working off of
Speaker 3: limited information, if that makes sense. So again, like what
Speaker 3: we were talking about the plants, theoretically, if you want
Speaker 3: it to be truly unbiased, you would eat every single
Speaker 3: plant to determine if you could eat all of them.
Speaker 3: Is that possible? No, there's way too You wouldn't use
Speaker 3: the plants, So you're going to use mental shortcuts to
Speaker 3: say that plant looks like the other one that made
Speaker 3: me really sick. I'm not going to do it. So
Speaker 3: then you go towards berries and you know, wheat, grass
Speaker 3: and all of the other things you know you can
Speaker 3: eat and things that look like things you know you
Speaker 3: can eat. So it's bias is, to put it succinctly,
Speaker 3: is as a mental shortcut based off of limited information
Speaker 3: that you already have to make a quick decision in
Speaker 3: a true scientific method. Fully, I guess if you had
Speaker 3: all the time in the world, you would find all
Speaker 3: of the information for every possible item. But again, as
Speaker 3: we've talked about, that's impossible for the human brain. We
Speaker 3: don't have the cognitive ability to do that.
Speaker 2: Okay, So armed with these kind of working definitions for
Speaker 2: this conversation, let's talk about you. Where are you from?
Speaker 3: Where did you grow up? I grew up in New York.
Speaker 3: I was born in New York. Lived in Puerto Rico
Speaker 3: for two years as a child, so between the ages
Speaker 3: of two and four, and then came back to New York.
Speaker 3: And then I was a proud New Yorker ever since.
Speaker 3: So my mother's got a mom and my father's Puerto
Speaker 3: rican So we spent two years there with my family
Speaker 3: on his side, and I was in que originally. Then
Speaker 3: we went out to Long Island after we came back,
Speaker 3: and I was, you know, joking around because everyone always
Speaker 3: asked New York, So you're from Manhattan? No, In fact,
Speaker 3: most of Manhattan is actually transplants. I grew up where
Speaker 3: the real New Yorkers grow up, which is right outside
Speaker 3: of Manhattan. So oh, let me get so much.
Speaker 2: Flat for that man So I got to tell you.
Speaker 2: I'm in Manhattan for the last seventeen years, and my
Speaker 2: husband always tells me you're You're not a real new Yorker.
Speaker 2: He says, I won't be a real New Yorker until
Speaker 2: I walk over syringes in Central Park in the seventies,
Speaker 2: so I'll never get there. But I defer to you,
Speaker 2: you're a real New Yorker. Having lived an itinerant life,
Speaker 2: at least in your early youth. What kind of perspective
Speaker 2: did that give you with bias? What was your experience
Speaker 2: with bias.
Speaker 3: Growing definitely so I. As I said before, I was
Speaker 3: living in Puerto Rico up until the age of four.
Speaker 3: I don't really have memories of before the age of two,
Speaker 3: so when we came back, it was just me and
Speaker 3: my mom living with two of my aunts that are
Speaker 3: also Guatemalan, and I from a really young age, I
Speaker 3: was very aware of what bias looked like and an
Speaker 3: example of that. Like my I don't know what the
Speaker 3: most severe case of bias I experienced as a kid
Speaker 3: or my mom did, but I'd remember the earliest and
Speaker 3: it was when I was in kindergarten. Since I had
Speaker 3: just come from Puerto Rico, I didn't speak English, or
Speaker 3: if I did, it was not good. So my mom
Speaker 3: had heard that at the school district I was going to,
Speaker 3: if you couldn't speak English, they would automatically put you
Speaker 3: in ESL, which would mean that you were off track
Speaker 3: for the advanced classes. And they had known that I
Speaker 3: was at the risk of sounding like every millennial mom.
Speaker 3: I was gifted, and I had you know, I was
Speaker 3: testing really well, as much as you can test as
Speaker 3: a four year old. But the teachers in Puerto Rico
Speaker 3: were telling my mom that like I was, I should
Speaker 3: be fast tracked into like a special program. But when
Speaker 3: we moved to New York, she just knew that if
Speaker 3: I was put in an ESL class, that wouldn't be
Speaker 3: the case because all of the ESL classes are taught
Speaker 3: remedial content. Even if these children are really bright, just
Speaker 3: the sole fact that they don't speak English means that
Speaker 3: they're not set up for success, and they're set up
Speaker 3: with way less resources, way less content, you know, like,
Speaker 3: and so much of those early years is whatever you
Speaker 3: can fit in a kid's head is going to set
Speaker 3: them up for the rest of their life. So my
Speaker 3: mom just told me don't speak to anyone until you
Speaker 3: learn English.
Speaker 2: Let them know.
Speaker 3: And I knew that I just couldn't speak to my teachers.
Speaker 3: So my teacher thought I was just like super shy,
Speaker 3: and I could kind of you know, kids learn languages
Speaker 3: really fast, so it only took me like less than
Speaker 3: a year to really pick up enough English to really
Speaker 3: understand what the other kids were saying and doing. So
Speaker 3: by first grade I was fine. But I remember I
Speaker 3: only knew like two family friends in my class, so
Speaker 3: I would really only speak to them in Spanish, and
Speaker 3: I was just trying to figure out how to parse
Speaker 3: everything together and figure out where we were going. But
Speaker 3: it was a secret. I couldn't tell anyone that I
Speaker 3: didn't really know English well because if I got put
Speaker 3: in the other class, or you know, I got put
Speaker 3: in ESL, I wouldn't. They would just automatically pigeonhole me
Speaker 3: as someone who was quote unquote remedial, even though other
Speaker 3: kids that were in the ESL classes should have been
Speaker 3: allowed to experience the same amount of learning, but they
Speaker 3: weren't given those resources or those opportunities. So from a
Speaker 3: really young age, how do.
Speaker 2: You think, Yeah, how do you think that early experience
Speaker 2: shaped you.
Speaker 3: It made me really aware of the fact that I
Speaker 3: had certain characteristics that other people look down on, and
Speaker 3: I became aware of the fact that that was how
Speaker 3: life was just going to be for me a little
Speaker 3: bit for a while. It gave me a lot of drive,
Speaker 3: which I think that a lot of people tend to
Speaker 3: glorify this idea of grit that you know, here she
Speaker 3: is like uphill battle, like showing the world that they're wrong.
Speaker 3: But I don't necessarily. I think the psychological effects of
Speaker 3: it are things that I'm still coping with, you know,
Speaker 3: in therapy. And it was really fascinating reflecting on this
Speaker 3: in recent years while I've been, you know, trying to
Speaker 3: write more and write more of a blog, and just
Speaker 3: really acknowledging the fact that it's from a really young age,
Speaker 3: I knew that I had certain characteristics that other people
Speaker 3: made other people think that I wasn't as equipped or capable,
Speaker 3: or as intelligent or as valuable as other people.
Speaker 2: You know, that's such an interesting perspective, Linda, because what
Speaker 2: you're describing is this almost a I don't mean to
Speaker 2: put words in your mouth, but almost a fair justified
Speaker 2: resentment towards having to be resilient. You know, people could
Speaker 2: applaud you for that, but you're kind of like, why
Speaker 2: should I have had to work harder?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: All right, So your teachers in Puerto Rico were right,
Speaker 2: you are gifted. You You end up at Harvard, and
Speaker 2: what was that like?
Speaker 3: It was the best of times in the worst of times,
Speaker 3: for sure, just the traditional Harvard experience of having grown
Speaker 3: up as kind of a big fish in a little
Speaker 3: pond and having the very harsh reality check of oh,
Speaker 3: I'm not the smartest person in the room anymore. That's awkward,
Speaker 3: and you know, being surrounded by so many people who
Speaker 3: are just so brilliant, and if you're ever playing the
Speaker 3: comparison game, there will always be someone smarter, more well adjusted,
Speaker 3: more social, more anything. So very early on in my
Speaker 3: college career, I had to rectify that comparison game of
Speaker 3: trying to just use everyone else's barometer for my own
Speaker 3: success and happiness. So it catapults me into a level
Speaker 3: of emotional intelligence that I had definitely never thought possible
Speaker 3: for myself earlier on because I was a very like
Speaker 3: STEM person. So, you know, bias and stereotypes about STEM
Speaker 3: people where we're a little emotionally everyone thinks that we're
Speaker 3: a little like unemotional or emotionally unavailable, but I promise
Speaker 3: some of us are very emotionally intelligent. Uh. You know.
Speaker 2: It was a Harvard graduate called Theodore Roosevelt who said
Speaker 2: about comparison. He says, comparison is the thief of joy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so it sounds like an important lesson that you were
Speaker 2: wise enough to teach.
Speaker 3: Yourself as a college exactly.
Speaker 2: I mean, sixty seven percent of Harvard students come from
Speaker 2: the top twenty percent of wealth owning households. And it's
Speaker 2: also a school I think it has like less than
Speaker 2: an eight percent LATINX population. Yeah, so how isolated did
Speaker 2: you feel and did you feel kind of like a hello,
Speaker 2: I'm the model minority.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It was really isolating in the sense that a
Speaker 3: lot of people can't understand your experiences no matter how
Speaker 3: much they want to. They like, they'll listen, they'll sympathize,
Speaker 3: but there is a certain point in which you know,
Speaker 3: in the same way that you can talk to one
Speaker 3: of your girlfriends going through a breakup because you've understood
Speaker 3: it and you've been there yourself. I wasn't able to
Speaker 3: do that for certain like life events that were going
Speaker 3: that I was going through at the time, and.
Speaker 2: Can you give me an example.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I remember my freshman year, I really wanted
Speaker 3: to study abroad in Nairobi. That summer. I was taking Swahili,
Speaker 3: which is an African language my freshman year, and that
Speaker 3: summer the Swahili professor was conducting a study of broad
Speaker 3: trip and I really wanted to go, but you know,
Speaker 3: I couldn't afford it. I was on full financial aid
Speaker 3: and it was extra money, so I was trying to
Speaker 3: figure out how to get a grant or anything like that.
Speaker 3: So I was pretty convinced I was going to get
Speaker 3: one specific grant and then it fell through, and I
Speaker 3: remember just being really upset, you know, just like rightfully
Speaker 3: emotional at home, just like talking to one of my
Speaker 3: college roommates, just you know, being upset that I wasn't
Speaker 3: going to be able to go, which also sidebar, I
Speaker 3: actually ended up being able to go because I got
Speaker 3: a separate grant, so it ended up being a happy story.
Speaker 3: But I remember just talking to a friend who just goes, oh, well, like,
Speaker 3: I'm sure that your parents will be able to cover
Speaker 3: it if you just talked to them that you lost
Speaker 3: the grant and I go what, and she goes, no,
Speaker 3: I mean, it's really not that much money. It's only
Speaker 3: like a little under ten thousand dollars. And I just
Speaker 3: look at her and go, oh, my mom makes thirty
Speaker 3: thousand dollars a year. I don't know how you think
Speaker 3: a third of her annual salary or wage will actually
Speaker 3: be able to cover this trip. And it was one
Speaker 3: of those very harsh realities for her where she realized,
Speaker 3: oh wow, I did not realize that people make that
Speaker 3: little And it was one of those moments where I
Speaker 3: actually had to sit there and explain that to her,
Speaker 3: explain that not everyone has ten thousand dollars lying around.
Speaker 3: In fact, most people in America don't. And I think
Speaker 3: that it was it's just little things like that, where
Speaker 3: like in ways that I would be able to talk
Speaker 3: to someone at home or even just someone in the
Speaker 3: real world here in LA where I am able to
Speaker 3: tell them, oh, yeah, you know, like I couldn't afford this.
Speaker 3: You know, when you're an adult and you're working, you
Speaker 3: understand more that not people don't have ten thousand dollars
Speaker 3: lying around a lot, especially if they have kids. But
Speaker 3: in that environment of just privilege, a lot of those
Speaker 3: people had never been exposed to individuals who didn't have
Speaker 3: just that excess wealth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very interesting and complicated experience at a
Speaker 2: place like Harvard or other Ivy League schools or places
Speaker 2: like that, because there is this very privileged community that
Speaker 2: is also very for the most part of generalizing, that
Speaker 2: is also very progressive. Yeah, and there are a lot
Speaker 2: of light bulbs that still need to get turned on
Speaker 2: for people who mean well but have literal They may
Speaker 2: be very very smart, but have literal ignorance, right, like
Speaker 2: in the neutral sense of the word ignorance about other
Speaker 2: people's experiences. Yeah, switching switching gears from Harvard to Tinder.
Speaker 2: So what did you do at Tinder? And we should
Speaker 2: say Tender is a dating app? Right? And is it
Speaker 2: is Tinder the one that coined sort of swipe lefts
Speaker 2: wipe right, like put that into our cultural left.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were the first of their kind. They were
Speaker 3: the first dating app. Well, I think dating websites had
Speaker 3: existed before Match, dot Comedy, Harmony had were already in existence,
Speaker 3: but they were the first app to casualize the online
Speaker 3: dating experience and make it more accessible and take away
Speaker 3: the stigma.
Speaker 2: So you decided to take the plunge a little leap
Speaker 2: of faith. Yeah, and you started Tinder. And was it
Speaker 2: part of your job to look for bias at Tinder
Speaker 2: or was it something you just couldn't miss.
Speaker 3: It's something you just can't miss. So I started as
Speaker 3: an engineer. I was working on at first, I worked
Speaker 3: a bit on the spam project, and then I went
Speaker 3: on to work on features like the group dating feature,
Speaker 3: so like you could actually create groups and swap on
Speaker 3: other groups. I worked on one of the features called boost,
Speaker 3: which was like the top revenue grossing feature of Tinder
Speaker 3: in the year, and it started off I want to say,
Speaker 3: like maybe my last couple, my first big push about
Speaker 3: unconscious bias at Tinder was actually just getting unconscious biased
Speaker 3: training in the company.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. So, so your work with bias at Tinder
Speaker 2: started uh as an employee and the experience you had
Speaker 2: as an employee, but you also identified bias in Tinder's
Speaker 2: users in how they chose to swipe.
Speaker 3: Is that right? So once we started talking about unconscious
Speaker 3: bias and then it became a prominent conversation that was happening,
Speaker 3: I started talking to and I moved from back in
Speaker 3: engineering to data engineering. I remember talking to some of
Speaker 3: the individuals building the algorithm about, you know, things that
Speaker 3: they were finding, and the sociologists that had worked there.
Speaker 3: She was a staff sociologist. Some of her research had
Speaker 3: showed that specifically the people that got matched the least
Speaker 3: were black women and Asian men. And I remember asking,
Speaker 3: is that user preference? Or is that our fault? And
Speaker 3: you go, what are you talking about? I go, well,
Speaker 3: is it user bias where this is happening on like
Speaker 3: a user level, and or is this actually something that
Speaker 3: our recommendation algorithm is perpetuating? And I remember just the
Speaker 3: look of confusion on the engineer spaces, like, wait, we
Speaker 3: could possibly be perpetuating this. And it ended up not
Speaker 3: being the case. It ended up like looking like it
Speaker 3: was more of like a user issue, like on a
Speaker 3: global scale. But I remember just even asking the question, oh,
Speaker 3: is this actually like a user problem or an engineer problem.
Speaker 3: It was the first time they'd even asked that, and
Speaker 3: it became this question of oh, wait, us we could
Speaker 3: be perpetuating a problem and I, uh so, talking to
Speaker 3: the engineer.
Speaker 2: That's such a powerful question. Yeah right, I mean, I
Speaker 2: mean that's part of your life's work now is helping
Speaker 2: companies ask wait us could we be part of the
Speaker 2: problem and not knowing it exactly?
Speaker 3: And so we talked about it, and you know, I
Speaker 3: know people that still work there now and it's definitely
Speaker 3: been a question that they continue to ask themselves like, oh,
Speaker 3: here's the problem? Is this our problem or is this
Speaker 3: someone like? Is this something that we can't control or
Speaker 3: is this something that we can control for?
Speaker 2: And what do you what do you say about that?
Speaker 2: As as someone you know, you're you're a computer scientist,
Speaker 2: how do companies need to look at this question about
Speaker 2: whether it's the responsibility of platforms or businesses to counteract
Speaker 2: bias versus personal responsibility of their users.
Speaker 3: Really, so, I think that corporate responsibility can't happen before
Speaker 3: personal responsibility because corporations are the results of personal decisions. However,
Speaker 3: so all it takes is a group of individuals at
Speaker 3: a corporation, especially the C suite, to say we should
Speaker 3: review this, we should look into it. We should just
Speaker 3: ask ourselves if, like, if we have a problem and
Speaker 3: put in the resources to bring in some experts to
Speaker 3: figure out if there's a problem. That's the first step,
Speaker 3: and from there it is corporate responsibility to fix their
Speaker 3: problems in the sense that you know, it's kind of
Speaker 3: this idea of like, if we all do our part, eventually,
Speaker 3: like the wave will be big enough where we'll be
Speaker 3: able to combat anything. But corporations and institutions they amplify
Speaker 3: existing human flaws because yeah, like it is corporate responsibility
Speaker 3: over personal responsibility in my opinion, to actually make the
Speaker 3: most impact. But it starts with personal responsibility. That's right.
Speaker 2: Why why don't people ask themselves that? Like that question
Speaker 2: you just asked? And my part of the problem is
Speaker 2: this my fault. If every single person started asking that,
Speaker 2: it would change everything. Yeah, why do you think people
Speaker 2: don't ask themselves that?
Speaker 3: A variety of reasons. I think that well, first and
Speaker 3: foremost specifically in America, and I can speak to this
Speaker 3: on the American stance. We have this very deeply ingraded,
Speaker 3: puritanical culture of being the city upon a hill, being
Speaker 3: like outside looking in, we have to be perfect, we like,
Speaker 3: there is just no room for flaws, there's no room
Speaker 3: for imperfection. It's you know, you are what you say,
Speaker 3: you say what you are, you hold strong and that
Speaker 3: is what is good. And we really need to move
Speaker 3: past that, and we really need to push forward with
Speaker 3: this idea of it's okay to be wrong, It's okay
Speaker 3: to say that you've made mistakes in the past, like
Speaker 3: it's okay to accept someone else's feedback and be better.
Speaker 3: But I feel like we kind of get stuck in this.
Speaker 3: I couldn't possibly be wrong, I couldn't possibly have made
Speaker 3: this mistake, And I feel like a lot of it
Speaker 3: tends to be to accept that you've made a mistake,
Speaker 3: to accept that you have potentially perpetuated, you know, oppressive
Speaker 3: institutions or have been biased yourself, it would involve you
Speaker 3: acknowledging the fact that you are not perfect, that you
Speaker 3: are human.
Speaker 2: So when someone is faced with the breaking news that he, she,
Speaker 2: or they have have made a mistake, have caused pain,
Speaker 2: or are biased, is the justification or the defensiveness Sometimes well,
Speaker 2: it's unconscious, I'm not how can I I'm not in
Speaker 2: charge of that. What do you do with that response?
Speaker 3: Definitely? So that is I think why we've seen a
Speaker 3: lot of activists be against the idea of unconscious bias
Speaker 3: as a solution is because some people just go, well,
Speaker 3: it's unconscious, so it's not my fault and I'm good
Speaker 3: to go, and that's not what we're looking for. I'm
Speaker 3: good to go, and so that's not what we that's
Speaker 3: not what we're looking for when it comes to uncounterous bias.
Speaker 3: What we're looking for is this. It's twofold. It's the
Speaker 3: idea of catching yourself in the act and then also
Speaker 3: being able to accept the feedback for when you don't.
Speaker 3: And so if you catch yourself, like when you if
Speaker 3: you're being mindful and you make let's say you're thinking
Speaker 3: about who to promote or something like that, you automatically think, well,
Speaker 3: this person's clearly the obvious choice of who I'm going
Speaker 3: to promote on my team, and you start to think, well,
Speaker 3: why do I think that? And it's just like finding
Speaker 3: new ways to ask yourself the question of why do
Speaker 3: I think that. Another example that people really like is
Speaker 3: we call it the network mapping activity. It's one of
Speaker 3: our micro learnings. It's this idea of reflecting on who
Speaker 3: you interact with, like physically, well not now because it's COVID,
Speaker 3: but I reflecting on who you interact with on a
Speaker 3: day to day basis, and on a week to week basis,
Speaker 3: and on a month to month basis and seeing what
Speaker 3: the actual breakdown of people is and seeing, oh wow,
Speaker 3: if I'm not getting exposed to people who are different
Speaker 3: than me, then of course I'm gonna have bias thoughts
Speaker 3: because I never see those other people and like, I
Speaker 3: don't have you know, I'm not de stereo typing in
Speaker 3: my mind. And it's just like going, you know, taking
Speaker 3: the active route of like removing the stereotypes of other
Speaker 3: you know, ethnicities, other genders, other sexual orientations from your mind.
Speaker 3: And I'm a really easy way to do this that
Speaker 3: one of our subject matter experts loves talking about is uh, specifically,
Speaker 3: let's use the let's focus on racial bias specifically for
Speaker 3: black people. Why don't you research black scientists and black
Speaker 3: professionals who have made incredible impacts and long standing legacies
Speaker 3: in the world. Like if you know, you ask anyone like,
Speaker 3: please give me an example of like a black individual
Speaker 3: who has made a tremendous social impact. Everyone says, I'm okay,
Speaker 3: They go, okay, anyone but MLKA or Malcolm X name one, right.
Speaker 2: And then you say name a scientist and they say
Speaker 2: Neil deGrasse Tyson exactly. There's there's just a whole.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a whole long list exactly, so go
Speaker 3: through the list and actually just start researching it. And
Speaker 3: this exposure actually helps. It's not a me it's not
Speaker 3: long lasting, but it will get you in the practice
Speaker 3: of Okay, I actually need to start thinking of look
Speaker 3: at like finding the people who are antithetical to the
Speaker 3: stereotypes that I've been told my whole life exists.
Speaker 2: And seeking you have to become a six.
Speaker 3: So it's becomes it's this whole process of seeking and making,
Speaker 3: seeking information and seeking knowledge, seeking the knowledge of the
Speaker 3: other people's experiences, part of your daily life, and a habit.
Speaker 3: And it sounds overwhelming, but it really isn't once it
Speaker 3: becomes habit.
Speaker 2: You're now at a company called Bias Sinc. So Bias
Speaker 2: Sinc Is a science based assessment to combat unconscious bias.
Speaker 2: What does that mean? How can you be science spased?
Speaker 3: So we're science based through and through. So what we're
Speaker 3: actually giving companies is the first way to figure out
Speaker 3: the state of the state when it comes to diversity
Speaker 3: and inclusion. So before there hasn't been many ways to
Speaker 3: you know, measure unconscious bias or you know, have a
Speaker 3: data driven approach to it outside of something like headcount
Speaker 3: and promotions, which are very long feedback cycles that make
Speaker 3: it very difficult to actually assess how productive certain initiatives
Speaker 3: are because it's taking a really long you know, like
Speaker 3: a headcount is something that like it takes a very
Speaker 3: long time to increase or make better.
Speaker 2: Or by headcount, you mean literally account how many quote
Speaker 2: unquote diverse employees.
Speaker 3: The company has.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that doesn't you can have a bunch of
Speaker 2: people of different colors, But that doesn't mean there's no bias.
Speaker 3: Right, And it doesn't mean that it's an inclusive environment,
Speaker 3: and it doesn't mean that it's actually that people are
Speaker 3: actually given the space to voice their opinions, that their
Speaker 3: voices are equally heard.
Speaker 2: So, so how does science science help and what do
Speaker 2: we mean by science here? Is is this a lot
Speaker 2: of math, a lot of a lot of sort of algorithms.
Speaker 3: So our actual lms, so are we call it the
Speaker 3: baseline course that actually walks users through the introduction to
Speaker 3: unconscious bias and you know, describes two specific forms of
Speaker 3: bias that arise in the workplace, one of which is
Speaker 3: gender bias, the other which is racial bias. We specifically
Speaker 3: focused on black bias in the future, will address other
Speaker 3: you know, the myriad of biases like agism, bias against
Speaker 3: LGBTQ individuals, bias against pregnant women specifically. So like, there's
Speaker 3: so many different kinds of biases that we want to
Speaker 3: address that we're going to address. It's just a matter
Speaker 3: of not overloading our users with all of the information.
Speaker 3: But in it, we also have a variety of assessments
Speaker 3: that we conduct, two of which are unconscious biased assessments
Speaker 3: that actually measure how much unconscious bias roughly speaking, that
Speaker 3: you have towards specific demographic From there the actual corporation,
Speaker 3: depending on whether or not they can sent into the data,
Speaker 3: certain corporations do, others don't. We actually show an aggregate
Speaker 3: level of bias in the company to actually see where
Speaker 3: their gaps are. And let me say, how how do
Speaker 3: you do that? Really? So, how much do you know
Speaker 3: about the implicit association test?
Speaker 2: Nothing? Okay?
Speaker 3: So the implicit association test is actually developed by a
Speaker 3: few psychologists at our alma mater. It started in the
Speaker 3: nineties and it's been you know, put through the ringer
Speaker 3: in terms of actual validation and does this work? Does
Speaker 3: this not for decades, And what we find out is
Speaker 3: that the group of academics that have worked on this,
Speaker 3: like the general body of academics that have worked on
Speaker 3: unconscious bias, have for the most part, agreed that the
Speaker 3: unconscious bias assessment is valid in terms of understanding how
Speaker 3: much bias exists for that person for a specific demographic
Speaker 3: of people.
Speaker 2: And so a is this a test someone takes online?
Speaker 3: You can, yes, you can take it online. So it's
Speaker 3: basically idea is that we look at one like two
Speaker 3: categories of people and two attributes. So the example that
Speaker 3: I'll give is flowers and insects. So we're looking at
Speaker 3: flowers and insects, and we're using good words and bad words.
Speaker 3: So the idea is to see whether or not you
Speaker 3: have an unconscious bias towards insects or flowers. And so
Speaker 3: I'll show you images of insects and flowers, and you're
Speaker 3: supposed to rapidly match. At first, you go flowers good,
Speaker 3: insects bad. So you match flowers to the good words
Speaker 3: and insects to bad words. And then you flip it
Speaker 3: and then you do insects to good words and flowers
Speaker 3: to bad words. And it's actually in a variety. So
Speaker 3: we measure unconscious bias based on how much longer it
Speaker 3: took you to correctly match good like the good attributes
Speaker 3: with a specific image versus the bad attributes with a
Speaker 3: specific image. Because if you're as we said before, our
Speaker 3: bias is shortcuts.
Speaker 2: So if you're yeah, it's you're quick to say a
Speaker 2: cockroach is creepy, but it's hard to say that the
Speaker 2: flower is stinky exactly right or creepy.
Speaker 3: And so again, what we're showing you here is just
Speaker 3: what you're the ninety five percent of your subconsciousness things.
Speaker 3: And it's not measuring racism, it's not measuring prejudice, it's
Speaker 3: not measuring sexism. We're not telling you that this is
Speaker 3: how prejudice you are, because again, prejudice is pretty conscious.
Speaker 3: Prejudice is saying I actively just like this group of people,
Speaker 3: or I'm actively going to go out of my way
Speaker 3: to make sure that this other group of people does
Speaker 3: not have the opportunities that other people have, that this
Speaker 3: group of people like is not, like, don't interact with
Speaker 3: people that look like me. That's prejudice, and that's not
Speaker 3: what we're measuring. What we're measuring is unconscious bias to
Speaker 3: show you that you are human. We have been taught
Speaker 3: these things since birth. These are institutionalized in the media.
Speaker 3: We consume to the places that we're allowed to live,
Speaker 3: and so.
Speaker 2: So does Biasink go into a company and help it
Speaker 2: engage its employees and taking these empirical kinds of tests, so.
Speaker 3: They're embedded in the baseline assessment. So it's a baseline course.
Speaker 3: So it's an introduction to unconscious bias with the actual
Speaker 3: assessments integrated into it. And so then from there every
Speaker 3: month we are apt following it. It's about a two
Speaker 3: year contract. We give users micro learnings, so little tips
Speaker 3: and tricks like what I was telling you earlier, to
Speaker 3: help mitigate the negative impact of unconscious bias. So we're human.
Speaker 3: We're never actually going to fully get rid of bias.
Speaker 3: And actually like bias. We show companies where their pain
Speaker 3: points are and where they need to focus on, but
Speaker 3: we can mitigate its negative effects, and we can work
Speaker 3: to create processes that prevent bias from affecting others so
Speaker 3: that we can talk.
Speaker 2: About those Let's tell me about those negative effects. It's
Speaker 2: easy to say, oh, yeah, gosh, let's combat implicit bias,
Speaker 2: but what role does bias have in in corporate hierarchy,
Speaker 2: and then in a sort of corporate culture, and then
Speaker 2: in culture at large.
Speaker 3: So the easiest way to slow it down is that
Speaker 3: you both hire and promote people that remind you of you.
Speaker 3: If all things even all things like no processes in place.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And why is that bad?
Speaker 3: If what you're looking for is someone who's like you
Speaker 3: in the sense that you know you're hardworking, so you
Speaker 3: want someone who's hardworking. If you know you're a really
Speaker 3: good team player and you want someone else as a
Speaker 3: good team player, there's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing
Speaker 3: wrong than having someone who matches your personality in the
Speaker 3: sense that like you know that you've had the skill
Speaker 3: sets to be a great employee, to get to the
Speaker 3: point where you've been promoted, so you want to hire
Speaker 3: other people that are like you to also match those attributes.
Speaker 3: The issue falls when you automatically assign unconsciously your attributes
Speaker 3: to people that look like you. And you know, if
Speaker 3: you yourself.
Speaker 2: And assume that someone who doesn't look like it doesn't
Speaker 2: have us actually have exactly right.
Speaker 3: So it's not the issue that you know faith, you're intelligent,
Speaker 3: you are you know a powerhouse in the podcast world,
Speaker 3: you want to hire someone else who reminds you of
Speaker 3: you in that sense. The issue is if you have
Speaker 3: a team, you're managing a team, and you automatically only
Speaker 3: veer towards the people that remind you of you in
Speaker 3: the sense that, like, unconsciously, do they remind you of
Speaker 3: you because you look the same, or do they remind
Speaker 3: you of you because they're familiar. It's a familiar face,
Speaker 3: like a face that you grew up with, and like,
Speaker 3: she reminds me exactly of my best friend from childhood.
Speaker 3: But did you grow up in an environment that only
Speaker 3: had a specific kind of person?
Speaker 2: So wouldn't another deleterious effect of unconscious bias be a
Speaker 2: lack of growth for a company because you're not getting
Speaker 2: all sorts of new experiences and ideas that come from
Speaker 2: having diversity.
Speaker 3: A lot of people tend to think that the negative
Speaker 3: impacts of unconscious bias are you know, quote unquote purely ethical,
Speaker 3: but they actually have financial and monetary consequences as well.
Speaker 3: We're talking there are a lot of estimates, I think
Speaker 3: Gallup estimates that we lose billions a year based off
Speaker 3: of I might this might be a wrong statistic. Actually
Speaker 3: I should look that up. But Galou estimates we lose
Speaker 3: a lot of money a year based off of unconscious
Speaker 3: bias because we actually it's this idea of you know,
Speaker 3: that whole joke or not joke. You've probably experienced this
Speaker 3: as well. Of like you'll say something in a boardroom,
Speaker 3: no one hears it. A man says it because he
Speaker 3: thought he thought it, but like you had said it
Speaker 3: literally five minutes frive. Well, he's brilliant, and he's brilliant,
Speaker 3: and that's his idea. And that's amazing the problem of
Speaker 3: female like of people's voices not being heard or being appreciated,
Speaker 3: Like these very credible and talented individuals that you're clearly
Speaker 3: hiring for your company, we're not listedstening to their perspectives
Speaker 3: or their opinions, and so that loss of idea, that
Speaker 3: loss of creativity, actually creates a negative financial impact because
Speaker 3: then you're literally just paying people that you're not listening to.
Speaker 2: It's wow, when you put it that way, that's kind
Speaker 2: of amazing.
Speaker 3: And we're also looking at like people who don't feel
Speaker 3: included or don't feel heard much less likely to work hard.
Speaker 3: So yeah, you're actually talking about at that point, loss
Speaker 3: of productivity, and then at another layer, we're talking about
Speaker 3: just a complete loss of professional develompine, Like what if
Speaker 3: the woman that you're not listening to in the meeting
Speaker 3: could have been the next Elon Musk, but you weren't
Speaker 3: listening to her, and therefore she wasn't given the opportunity,
Speaker 3: and therefore she wasn't allowed to prove herself, and therefore
Speaker 3: she wasn't able to get the financial backing of her company,
Speaker 3: and then she wasn't able to create gas free emission cars.
Speaker 3: Like we were talking about loss of productivity, loss of creativity,
Speaker 3: loss of innovation because people just aren't listening to good
Speaker 3: ideas because of their bias. Your inability to mitigate your
Speaker 3: bias and quiet that voice actually leads to a loss
Speaker 3: of productivity and financial success for you.
Speaker 2: I am you. This is one of those amazing conversations
Speaker 2: that has taught me so much but has also left
Speaker 2: me with more questions. And I mean the good kinds
Speaker 2: of questions, like the questions to ask, to ask myself
Speaker 2: and to ask the people around me. And I'm really
Speaker 2: really grateful and you're great at what you do.
Speaker 3: In you try my best.
Speaker 2: The makeup of our workforces often starts at human resources.
Speaker 2: In order to create a more diverse workforce, we need
Speaker 2: a more diverse pool of applicants. HR is often at
Speaker 2: the top of that funnel and the which our team
Speaker 2: at US Bank is constantly looking to give more people
Speaker 2: more opportunities to get a better sense of how they're
Speaker 2: confronting systemic and individual bias. We spoke to US Banks
Speaker 2: Greg Cunningham and LCO Barcelos right at the outset of
Speaker 2: Lco's tenure at the bank. We learned a lot about
Speaker 2: why confronting bias matters, and we also get a sense
Speaker 2: of what it really looks like to be on the
Speaker 2: receiving end of it. What is the mission of your
Speaker 2: job at human resources?
Speaker 4: You know, it's there's so many ways to look at
Speaker 4: this faith.
Speaker 5: I think first and foremost, we are here to help
Speaker 5: the business achieve its priorities and its strategy through talent. Right,
Speaker 5: So that's the first element of how do we enable
Speaker 5: the business through talent? And in parallel to that, it's
Speaker 5: being the voice of the employee. It's understanding the culture,
Speaker 5: being the voice of the culture. So I often tell
Speaker 5: my team we are stewarts of the culture, right, Stuart's
Speaker 5: of the team, but with a purpose of enabling business
Speaker 5: success through people or through talent.
Speaker 2: You know, well, you know why you're here. We're going
Speaker 2: to talk about diversity and we're going to talk about
Speaker 2: implicit bias, which I love this topic. It's so fascinating.
Speaker 2: There's there's so much to understand. And with that in mind,
Speaker 2: would you say that being an HR is more challenging
Speaker 2: than ever before? When these I mean, I imagine that
Speaker 2: you know, HR personnel, HR officers of forty years ago,
Speaker 2: we're not having these discussions, right.
Speaker 5: That's right, hard to say that was way before my time, Faith,
Speaker 5: But I would say it is a challenging time to
Speaker 5: be ahead of HR or as I said, the steward
Speaker 5: of culture suit of talent. And really, but it's challenging,
Speaker 5: but it's exciting, right, It's a really it's a fantastic
Speaker 5: time for someone that has aspired to be an HR
Speaker 5: leader or be in human resources. Such an exciting time
Speaker 5: because talent really matters and culture really matters, and we
Speaker 5: see this now more than ever.
Speaker 2: What would you say as the state and I invite
Speaker 2: I invite both of you to chime in, what would
Speaker 2: you say as a state of diversity in corporate America.
Speaker 5: Oh boy, that's that's a loaded question, right. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's Greg Out, you're the expert here as well. But
Speaker 5: I would say it's in some ways, it's it's in
Speaker 5: discovery because I think companies who thought that they had it,
Speaker 5: had it figured out, are figuring out that they actually
Speaker 5: didn't have it figured out. It's evolving because a voice
Speaker 5: is being found and I find that absolutely beautiful, right
Speaker 5: where there's a voice that's now growing across our workforces,
Speaker 5: across corporate America, and we have to listen and we
Speaker 5: have to pay attention to that voice. And so it's
Speaker 5: it's ever evolving.
Speaker 2: So, Greg, you've written that so many organizations hire for
Speaker 2: diversity but manage to assimilation. So I think that speaks
Speaker 2: to what LCO was just saying. Right, Yes, it's this
Speaker 2: is not just hiring people of different colors. It's more
Speaker 2: than that.
Speaker 6: Every organization has diversity. Faith, diversity are multiple dimensions of
Speaker 6: identity that we all have. And so diversity is not
Speaker 6: where the real opportunity is. The opportunities around inclusion inclusions.
Speaker 6: The verb and you know that statement I made is
Speaker 6: one that I've carried with me for a really long
Speaker 6: time because of my own experiences in previous organizations. You know,
Speaker 6: companies do hire for diversity, and I think every organization
Speaker 6: has diversity statements or some commitment around diversity, but oftentimes
Speaker 6: what happens is, you know, people once in the organization,
Speaker 6: they aren't always in an environment that truly understands how
Speaker 6: to get the best out of their talents, how to
Speaker 6: cultivate the skills and as I like to say, they're
Speaker 6: superpower in the organization. We all want to be part
Speaker 6: of a team where we're contributing and adding value to
Speaker 6: our full capacity. And that's how teams and organizations win
Speaker 6: when every single person on the team, when the entire
Speaker 6: organization is sort of moving together around common objectives and
Speaker 6: everybody's contributing in meaningful ways. That's what inclusion looks like.
Speaker 6: And so this notion of assimilation, I think has been
Speaker 6: something that has really hampered diversity and inclusion efforts from
Speaker 6: making real change in corporate America that we've all wanted
Speaker 6: to see.
Speaker 2: And when you don't have that real change, do you
Speaker 2: all have personal experiences with companies not performing at their best,
Speaker 2: not even knowing how.
Speaker 3: Good they could be.
Speaker 2: If they truly had diversity and inclusion and took a
Speaker 2: look at bias.
Speaker 6: You see it every day. I mean, you know, I
Speaker 6: think this, this awakening that companies have had over the
Speaker 6: last six months is too long in coming, you know.
Speaker 6: I think more often we've seen examples of you know,
Speaker 6: certain industries and individual organizations who have who have valued
Speaker 6: and certainly benefited from it. But more importantly, faith there
Speaker 6: have been studies and there's real empirical data that has
Speaker 6: been studied over a series of years by McKenzie and
Speaker 6: others that have shown that diverse organizations, those companies that
Speaker 6: are more diverse at the board and the senior executive level,
Speaker 6: actually perform better financially in terms of you know, earnings
Speaker 6: before interests in taxes, and those companies that have gender
Speaker 6: diversity perform anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent better. Those
Speaker 6: companies that have ethnic diversity perform anywhere from twenty five
Speaker 6: to thirty percent better. There's real data in studies that
Speaker 6: have been done on it, and so I think this
Speaker 6: notion of companies that don't embrace it are doing it
Speaker 6: at their own peril and are missing out on real
Speaker 6: opportunities to grow overall.
Speaker 3: So both of you.
Speaker 2: Are dedicated to making sure people feel included and that
Speaker 2: their voices matter. So would you say that becoming aware
Speaker 2: of implicit bias and having anti bias training within your
Speaker 2: company is a tool to achieve those goals of having
Speaker 2: people feel included and that their voices matter. Is that
Speaker 2: where implicit bias awareness comes in.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it's yes. The short answer is yes,
Speaker 6: which is why we've made anti bias training mandatory for
Speaker 6: every single employee in our organization. Every employee in our
Speaker 6: organization takes anti bias training. But not only do they
Speaker 6: take anti bias training, they take cultural identity training. And
Speaker 6: so we go a step further with our mandatory training
Speaker 6: to make sure that there's not just It's not just.
Speaker 6: It's not enough to just be aware of the importance
Speaker 6: of anti bias, but you have to understand the importance
Speaker 6: that identity plays into the question you asked before about
Speaker 6: why women and minorities have been shut out of many
Speaker 6: of the leadership opportunities. But what's also critical in this
Speaker 6: conversation faith around bias is the notion that we have
Speaker 6: to have different, different expectations around what leadership looks like
Speaker 6: in our organization. The awareness is one thing, but to
Speaker 6: take action on it is vitally important because we're missing
Speaker 6: out on opportunities to grow the pie for everybody in
Speaker 6: the organization, and leaders have to have new definitions around
Speaker 6: what leadership looks like. That's why people of color and
Speaker 6: women have been shut out of C suites and organizations
Speaker 6: for so long is because they weren't viewed as leaders.
Speaker 6: They weren't viewed as having leadership qualities, and the ways
Speaker 6: in which they demonstrated skills and talents weren't valued in
Speaker 6: the same way. Back to the point Elsio was making
Speaker 6: about everybody's voice matters, and so I think what's happening
Speaker 6: is we're having different conversations now around how people contribute
Speaker 6: in differential ways and what leadership looks like. And there's
Speaker 6: not one way to lead. There's multiple ways of leading
Speaker 6: that actually drive better outcomes even than what we've seen
Speaker 6: to this point.
Speaker 2: Els I have to ask you your ten weeks on
Speaker 2: the job, have you had your implicit BIOS training?
Speaker 3: Was it recent? I have.
Speaker 4: I've gone through my training.
Speaker 3: And did you do okay?
Speaker 2: I'm crossing I.
Speaker 5: Did okay, I did okay. But it's it's an ever
Speaker 5: evolving story faith.
Speaker 2: I mean honestly, did you did you learn something like
Speaker 2: when you went through did you have an uncomfortable moment
Speaker 2: or or realization that you didn't know before?
Speaker 4: There is you know, with implicit advice.
Speaker 5: To me, it is always a learning opportunity, right, So
Speaker 5: for sure, as I went through the training, you learn
Speaker 5: two or three new things. I can story a brief
Speaker 5: story with you because it's implicit bias is so near
Speaker 5: and dear to me. I went through a personal experience
Speaker 5: with this in my career. I grew up in Brazil,
Speaker 5: went to school in Brazil, and after college came to
Speaker 5: the US and along my career journey I will mention
Speaker 5: the company's name. It would be embarrassing to them. But
Speaker 5: along my career I decided to make career change and
Speaker 5: decided to back in the nineties, there needs to be
Speaker 5: this thing called job fairs that we would all go
Speaker 5: to and all the employers were there.
Speaker 3: And I.
Speaker 5: Went to this job fair and passed out likely about
Speaker 5: fifty resumes across all the different jobs and with a
Speaker 5: name like Elsia Barcelos. I didn't think anything about it.
Speaker 4: I just I.
Speaker 5: Didn't think people would think anything differently. For me as
Speaker 5: a potential candidate, and when it was all said and done,
Speaker 5: faith I probably had about four or five callbacks at most,
Speaker 5: out of fifty or so that I had passed out.
Speaker 5: So then I got the little pamphlet from the job
Speaker 5: fare and I said, I don't know why I thought
Speaker 5: about it. I want to say I wasn't aware of
Speaker 5: any type of complicit a bias at that point, but
Speaker 5: I thought, what if I were to change my name
Speaker 5: and my full name? You asked me earlier, I said,
Speaker 5: Elsa Barcelos. My full name is actually Elso Robert Thomas Barcelos.
Speaker 5: So I said, I'm not going to really lie.
Speaker 4: So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop.
Speaker 5: I'll drop the LCO, make it an E. I'll drop
Speaker 5: the Barcelo and go by E. Robert Thomas.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then what happened but the same resume.
Speaker 4: Nothing changed on the resume, but it was now I
Speaker 4: was E. Robert Thomas.
Speaker 5: So I mailed the resume out to all the employees
Speaker 5: that run on the fair that I had dropped my
Speaker 5: resume to and I probably got about thirty five or
Speaker 5: so callbacks from that. Now, interesting enough, I did land
Speaker 5: a job and the company that I landed the job
Speaker 5: offered a job to E Robert Thomas, which was a
Speaker 5: big problem when I got my first paycheck because my
Speaker 5: account was the day that I was supposed to start.
Speaker 4: Literally the day I was supposed to start, I received
Speaker 4: one of.
Speaker 5: Those automatic emails or mess emails right as a letter
Speaker 5: in the mail at the time that said, thank you
Speaker 5: also Barselos for applying. You don't have an opportunity for
Speaker 5: you right now, and but I appreciate your application. But
Speaker 5: the same day, the same day I was supposed to start,
Speaker 5: as one, I got a decline from the other.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So, when you say, is the train a tool that
Speaker 5: we have, A training is a tool that we have,
Speaker 5: But it has to be much more than a tool.
Speaker 5: It has to be a way of life. It has
Speaker 5: to be something that we are open to adjusting and
Speaker 5: learning and applying. But it boils down to am I listening?
Speaker 5: Am I paying attention to my surroundings so I know
Speaker 5: what matters to one what matters to the other? Am
Speaker 5: I able to look through those things and look, you
Speaker 5: can have the right it's you can have the most
Speaker 5: impactful experience and then tomorrow you still learn something new.
Speaker 2: You know, just on a broader scale, what do you
Speaker 2: think the consequences are of not addressing bias in the workplace?
Speaker 2: There are not you know, not every big company in
Speaker 2: America is doing what you're doing. What are what are
Speaker 2: the consequences of this?
Speaker 5: I you know, it's to ignore it is to ignore
Speaker 5: the obvious, and unfortunately there are companies that still do
Speaker 5: ignore it. And uh and a quick summary. I was
Speaker 5: meeting with the number of h heads of HR recently
Speaker 5: in a little roundtable session, just talking amongst ourselves trying
Speaker 5: to figure out how to manage through.
Speaker 4: COVID and social unrest and all these things.
Speaker 5: And one of my peers said, Wow, it's like we
Speaker 5: just had this prefecta right, a tough year financially, and
Speaker 5: we just had this this COVID thing hit us, and
Speaker 5: how social unrest is heading us. And my reply was, what,
Speaker 5: social unrest may be active now, but it's not just
Speaker 5: hitting you. This is something that's been real for a
Speaker 5: long time. And so to ignore is it's to not
Speaker 5: be realistic to know that the world is evolving around you.
Speaker 5: And that's that voice I mentioned earlier. There is a
Speaker 5: voice that is growing and strength, and we need to
Speaker 5: listen to that voice. It really matters to listen to
Speaker 5: that voice.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much for listening to Real Good by us Bank.
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, listen and subscribe wherever
Speaker 2: you get your podcasts. See you next week.
Speaker 1: So listen to smart podcasts to learn important things. I
Speaker 1: hope you like that episode of Real Good. And obviously,
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, we'll be back with a brand new episode.
Speaker 1: I might even do a little bonus field trip one
Speaker 1: from the road because I'm going to Cicada Country, Ohio.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna check out these bugs.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: Also, I accidentally dyed my hair color I did not
Speaker 1: intend to, and now it matches my mustard sweater perfectly.
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm gonna do about it. Okay,
Speaker 1: bye bye,