TEDxMileHigh 2021

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In 2018, two black men were in Starbucks waiting for a business associate—but when they asked to use the bathroom the store manager ordered them to leave. They refused, he called the police, and the video went viral. In an avalanche of bad publicity, Starbucks closed all their U.S. stores for four hours of diversity training. Baristas handed workbooks to complete prompts like “What makes me, me? And you, you?” and “Understanding our bias: from color blind to color brave.” The closure was front page news nationwide and you could argue that was the goal. “Look everybody, we’re fixing our diversity problem!” The assumption was that systemic racism could be remedied by a deep and earnest conversation about our feelings. My take: give me a break. To address systemic racism, you need to change systems.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, companies are finally feeling the pressure to actually do something real but they’re often baffled about what that might look like. 

Close to $1 billion has been spent on diversity efforts with remarkably little to show for it. Why? The basic tools of the diversity-industrial complex haven’t worked. A one-shot bias training is ineffective because you can’t change a culture by doing anything once. And the other most common tools—things like employee resource groups and women’s initiatives—are fine if the problem is with women and people of color. But it’s not. If a company faces diversity challenges, typically it’s because bias is constantly being transmitted, day after day, through its basic business systems – through hiring, through performance evaluations, through access to opportunities. We need to stop trying to fix women and people of color. We need to fix the business systems.

Think about it – if your company had a problem with sales, you would not hold deep, sincere conversations about how much everyone values sales, put on programming for Celebrate Sales Month, and expect sales to improve.

We need to tackle diversity using the same tools we’d use for any business problem: evidence and metrics. I suspect this will come as a relief to many CEOs who feel more comfortable using tools they use daily than leading earnest conversations to plumb the inner workings of social inequality in America. 

The first step is to understand what bias looks like. For the past 15 years, I’ve studied how implicit bias plays out in everyday workplace interactions. Here’s what the evidence shows: five basic patterns emerge again and again.

The first pattern I call “prove it again” bias” because it reflects that some groups have to prove themselves more than others. It’s triggered by a lot of different things – race, gender, age, disability, LGTBTQ+ status, even social class. One study compared callbacks for an elite law firm offered to two white men with identical qualifications but different hobbies: 

one listed polo and sailing; the other listed counseling first generation students and country music. Surprise, surprise: 

Mr. Polo got 12 times the number of callbacks as Mr. First-Gen. Too often we forget about social class when we talk about privilege.

The second pattern of bias I call the tightrope. Office politics are more difficult for some groups than others. Basically, the white male in-group just needs to be authoritative and ambitious to succeed. But women walk a tightrope between being seen as abrasive if they’re assertive and unqualified if they aren’t. For People of color, assertiveness can be written off as “hotheaded” in Latinos, as “angry” in Black professionals, or “untrustworthy” in Asian-Americans. 

The third pattern of bias I call of “the tug-of-war:” when bias against a group fuels conflict within the group. For example, if there’s room for only one woman or person of color, women will be competing with other women, and people of color will be competing with each other.

The fourth pattern is gender bias triggered by motherhood, which triggers very strong assumptions that mothers aren’t committed to their jobs, probably shouldn’t be, and that mothers aren’t competent – think “pregnancy brain.” So mothers often feel they have to prove themselves all over again when they return for maternity leave, and when they do so they’re seen as bad mothers and so disliked. 

Racial stereotypes are the final pattern. Asian-Americans often are seen as having technical skills but not as leadership material. African-American professionals report breathtaking levels of disrespect. Latinx professionals may be seen as “too emotional” in a discussion where a white man behaving the same way would be seen as showing career-enhancing passion for the business.

In total, white women professionals encounter four patterns of bias. 

Men of color encounter four, too. 

Women of color encounter all five and, among women of color, Black women – we find again and again and again in our studies – encounter the bias as a group. The experience of white men differs from that of every other group. They may encounter bias if they’re first-generation professionals, or LGBTQ. But most aren’t. 

These biases, if unchecked, can have serious negative effects. There’s tons of research but here’s an example that says it all. A woman engineer found a mistake in one of her colleague’s calculations and told him so. In doing this, she was breaking an unwritten rule: that women be modest, self-effacing, and nice team players, not authoritative mission-driven experts. That’s why male experts exert more influence in meetings, while female experts actually exert less influence. So when this woman pointed out the mistake, the reaction was so massively negative that, she told us, “Now I’m just smiling a lot and bringing in cupcakes.” Her company, by allowing gender bias to run rampant, was literally putting its mission at risk. 

The solution is to use bias interrupters—new tools my team has developed that use evidence and metrics. I’ve just described the evidence. Metrics are important, too. As a mentor of mine once told me, “If you’re not keeping score, you’re only practicing.” Many organizations are only practicing. 

Metrics are important to pinpoint where bias is playing out. For example, if a company has a problem with diversity in hiring, it should be keeping metrics on what the pool of candidates looks like, who survives resume review, who gets selected for interviews, who survives the interview. 

This is important because the fix for diversifying the initial pool is very different from the fix if no woman survives the interview because every one is written off as either “too abrasive” or “too meek.” Metrics also are important to establish baselines and measure progress.

If you use evidence and metrics, we’ve found that small tweaks can have big effects. For example, at one company we found that the evaluations of people of color only mentioned leadership 9.5% of the time. 

Of course leadership mentions predicted advancement. We worked with the firm to redesign the performance evaluation form. They also gave a one-hour workshop where employees were asked to identify the five basic patterns of bias in actual comments from the year prior. 

Those two simple changes had a big effect: in year two, leadership was mentioned in 100% of the evaluations people of color. 

White women at this company had a different problem: almost 20% of their evaluations commented that they didn’t want to make partner. We suspected that these women had not said they didn’t want to make partner. People just assumed they didn’t. The next year, we told them only to comment that a woman didn’t want to make partner if she explicitly said that. Not surprisingly, only one woman got that comment in year two. 

Over the past 10 years, we’ve helped more than 100 companies make progress on DEI. There’s growing evidence that bias interrupters work. And the best thing about them is that they help every group. In the company where we did the performance evaluations work, not only did people of color get dramatically more constructive feedback. So did white women – and white men. 

Here’s the bottom line: your business systems and climate reflect the people you’ve already hired. If you want to replicate that workforce in the future, keep doing what you’re doing. But if you really want to make progress towards your DEI goals, my reassuring message to CEOs is that you already know what to do. All you need is to use the same tools you use to solve any business problems: start from the evidence, use metrics to establish baselines and measure progress, and keep at it, using an iterative process until you achieve your goals. That’s the new DEI playbook—and it works.

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