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Implicit Bias

Implicit bias is an uphill battle for those laboring under its burden and for organizations trying to eliminate it.

You may have experienced it yourself. It might even be the reason you started your own business. No matter how hard you worked, no matter how great your ideas, your objective skills, or even your past successes – you’re passed over, you lose out to someone else less qualified and in your gut you know there is some type of bias at work. It may not rise to the level of being illegal and even if it did you might not want to take legal action for a variety of reasons. BUT in your heart you know you’ve been unfairly disadvantaged.

What can you do? How can you turn that adversity into and advantage? Into your super power? Harvard professor and award winning researcher, Dr Laura Huang shares her insights and explains how.

What You’ll Discover About Implicit Bias in the Workplace:

• The difference between implicit bias, unconscious bias, and systemic bias.
• The multiple forms of privilege in the workplace.
• The problem with traditional anti-bias training.
• How the myth of meritocracy muddies the water.
• How management can empower employees to find their strengths and advance the organization
• And much more.

Guest: Dr. Laura Huang

Dr. Laura Huang is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and an expert in interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship and in the workplace.

She is also the creator of #FindYourEdge, an initiative dedicated to addressing inequality and disadvantage through personal empowerment.

Her award-winning research has been featured in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Nature, and she was named one of the 40 Best Business School Professors Under the Age of 40 by Poets & Quants.

She has previously held positions in investment banking, consulting, and management, for organizations as Standard Chartered Bank, IBM Global Services, and Johnson & Johnson.

Laura holds an MS and BSE in electrical engineering Duke University, an MBA from INSEAD, and a PhD from the University of California, Irvine. She is also the author of Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage.

Related Resources:

If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other Communications episodes.

Contact with Dr. Huang and connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

Also be sure to check out Dr. Huang’s book: Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. 

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How to Really Deal with Implicit Bias at Work with Laura Huang

We’ve all experienced it at some time, it might even be the reason you started your own business. No matter how hard you worked, no matter how great your ideas, your objective skills or even past successes, you’re passed over. You lose out to someone less qualified. And in your gut you know, there’s some type of bias at work. Now, it might not rise to the level of being illegal. And even if it did, you might not want to take it to the mat for a variety of reasons. But in your heart you know you’ve been unfairly disadvantaged, that there’s some kind of bias at work. What can you do? How can you turn that adversity into an advantage? Into your superpower? Well, my next guest, yes, a Harvard professor and award-winning researcher will tell us how.

This is Business Confidential Now with Hanna Hasl-Kelchner giving you the inside scoop on how to ignite more business success by doing the right things in the right way.

Welcome to Business Confidential Now. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and today’s topic is implicit bias. It’s one that is really front and center in the social justice movement, and nowhere does that movement hit home more than in the workplace. And here to help us learn more about it is today’s guest, Professor Laura Huang. She’s an associate professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School and an expert in interpersonal relationships and implicit bias in entrepreneurship and in the workplace. She’s also the creator of #FindYourEdge, an initiative dedicated to addressing inequality and disadvantage through personal empowerment.

Now her award-winning research, it’s been featured in Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes and Nature. And she was named one of the 40 best business school professors under the age of 40 by Poets and Quants. Previously, she held positions in investment banking, consulting and management for organizations such as the Standard Chartered Bank, IBM Global Services and Johnson & Johnson. So she sat on both sides of the desk. She holds an MS and an M.S. in electrical engineering, both from my alma mater, Duke University, and an MBA from INSEAD and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. And today we’re going to talk about her first book. It’s called Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. And I Can’t Wait to Dig In. So without further ado, welcome to Business Confidential Now, Laura.

Thanks so much. Such a pleasure.

Well, I’m excited to have you here, because when it comes to biases they come in all shapes and sizes, as you well know, and some of the obvious ones being race, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, even what neighborhood you grew up in or what school you went to, and having been a Duke undergrad, you probably experienced the intense college sports rivalry here on Tobacco Road between Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And even that can impact hiring decisions, promotions and so forth. I’ve seen it. I really have.

Yeah.

So before doing a deeper dive into bias in the workplace, I would really love for you to help me understand something a little better and clarify. Is there a difference between implicit bias, unconscious bias and systematic bias? How interchangeable are they? What’s your what’s your take on that?

Yeah. So these I mean, the three of those it’s such a fascinating question because the three of us, we often use them interchangeably, but they’re actually very, very different. And it’s so funny when you mention, you know, even subtle differences like Duke versus UNC. Right.

What I talk about in a lot of my research and what I study is how these really subtle differences that so much of success and outcomes are determined by these subtle signals and cues and stereotypes and perceptions, even something like I mean, it sounds funny, but the color blue and seeing the difference between Duke Blue versus Carolina blue, right. Immediately, there’s some sort of a reaction that happens.

But if we take that into the business world, for example, Marissa Mayer was famously, when she first started Google, spent a long period of time because she had this hypothesis that people would click through ads at a certain rate for a certain shade of blue. So she spent a week or two just testing blue number 12 versus blue number 15, blue number 15 versus blue number 20 and found that there is one shade of blue that people were more likely to click through, like, I don’t know, two or three percent more likely to click through than others. And it may not sound like a huge percentage, but when you’re selling ads for millions and billions of dollars, that two percent can really make a difference.

So even something like that, these subtle signals and cues. But back to your original question, the ways in which these signals and cues are enacted means the difference between unconscious and implicit and systemic sort of bias.

So if you think about bias from this holistic, sort of this holistic continuum, there’s bias that’s sort of overt, right? We know that you discriminate or you’re biased against someone based on how they look. Right. But there’s also bias that, for example, I give this example of imagine you’re playing this board game and you have no idea that that that every time you roll the dice, you’re rolling a fair set of dice. And your opponent, every time they’re rolling the dice, they’re rolling an unfair pair of dice where they for some reason are always going to roll lower numbers. And you’re playing this game. And the whole time you’re playing this game, you’re winning. And you never sort of see that the dice that you’re rolling are a different set of dice than your opponent. And so when you go at the end of the game and you win, you’re not really aware that there was systemic sort of bias that that you that your success was due to something that was just in the system. Right. So that’s one form of bias.

Another form of bias is that perhaps you unknowingly, one set of dice are red and one set of dice are blue, and the blue sort of dice are the ones that are always going to be the ones that roll the lower number. And so implicitly, you were told or you were taught the red dice are always better. Just try and get those, but you have no idea why. And so every time it’s your opponent’s turn, you hand them the blue dice. Right. So you’re implicitly biased against them, because you somehow think that the red dice are better and so there’s sort of this unfairness built in through what you’ve been taught or through what you’ve sort of known.

And so there’s sort of this implicit and also like subconscious to some extent, the subconscious is much more. You have no idea why you weren’t taught that red was better than blue, but for some reason you realize that red was always going to roll better than blue. And so it’s not that someone told you to always give blue to the opponent, but you just naturally always give the blue to the opponent and make sure that you get the red. So there’s all these different forms of bias that exist. And so sometimes I give that example to kind of illustrate the really small differences that exist between these types of biases.

It’s interesting because it seems like net-net the impact is the same, even though the cause, as you’ve just described and sorted out here for us is somewhat different.

Yeah, the cause is different. But, you know, these different types of biases have different ways of playing out. Right. So, for example, implicit bias, this is one of the reasons why people talk often about implicit bias training, because presumably if you teach someone, or you point out to them, hey, you’re always rolling the red set of dice, maybe you should give the other person a turn in rolling the red side of dice as well, that you can maybe inoculate against these types of biases.

In fact, we actually know that implicit bias training is not quite as successful as we think it is. But to some extent, when we think about it right, it does make sense that certain forms of bias will be easier to address than, for example, systemic bias where you would have no idea, like you keep playing the game. There’s a theory called system justification theory which suggests that you continue to justify the system because if someone told you, hey, you only won because that game was unfair, you would continue saying, no, no, the game was totally fair. I was playing the game. I, I saw it play out, you know, I won fair and square. The game is fair, but that’s also because you never really experienced that counterpart where you didn’t touch that set of dice. You didn’t feel how they felt different. So it’s much harder to kind of change that entire that entire system.

How does the concept of privilege fit into all of this?

Privilege is really there are multiple forms of privilege. Some are that you are born into privilege or some privilege income and lots of different forms. It’s based on who you know, what you look like, the networks you belong to, the people that you know, the people who know the people you know, and it really pervades. Right. And so when we talk about system level change, I mean, I’ve been doing research in in inequality and disadvantage and stereotypes and people who are underestimated for a really long time, more than a decade. And early on a lot of the questions that I got when I presented my research were along the lines of privilege.

And what can we do about this? Like what can we do to level the playing field? And the problem was really similar to what I’ve already talked about. The solutions to these problems were always these system level solutions or these organizational level solutions. People would say things like, you know, we need to be more, we need to have better hiring practices or we need to use algorithms to do our hiring or we need to have more representation in our top management teams, more women and people of color in executive positions and as mentors. And that’s all a step in the right direction.

But the problem is that we all sort of know that there is this myth of meritocracy and that we’ve been talking about these solutions for a really long time, that for years, decades even, we’ve been talking about gender parity and racial equity. And the thing is that either these systems haven’t changed, right, that we haven’t become more meritocratic or that they’ve changed, but far too slowly. Or perhaps they’ve changed, but created unintended consequences. And so it was leaving people really frustrated because essentially what we were saying was, you know, wait around until things get better. Right. We let’s try and make things more meritocratic. But for individuals that we’re facing stereotypes and biases on a day to day basis were getting really frustrated because there wasn’t very much that they could do for themselves as they waited around for things to change.

And so the last couple of years of my research and what really went into this book was understanding and trying to figure out how can individuals empower themselves to gain an advantage or create an edge for themselves, even within imperfect systems. So they’re not waiting around for things to get better. And instead, from the inside out, they can be flipping stereotypes in their favor so that they could be turning adversity and constraints and obstacles around so that they could create their own advantage even within these imperfect systems.

Well, I like to explore that a little bit more because I like the idea of people controlling their destiny more than waiting for things to happen to them. And the other advantage to doing that is the longer you wait around for things to change, the more entrenched the stereotypes become. And it’s a steeper hill to climb. So as I recall, Edge, the title of your book is actually an acronym.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the title of the book is Edge and it’s about how to gain and create an edge for yourself. But you’re right, Edge actually stands for the framework that I’ve developed over the course of my research where the E, D, G and E stand for the pieces of this framework.

So the E stands for enrich. And so the first step about the first part of this is really understanding yourself and knowing how you enrich and provide value in any context that you’re going to be in. And this is much more than just sort of self-awareness, which we hear a lot about. Knowing how you enrich and provide value also entails knowing that based on the situation or the context that you’re going to be in, the perceptions that others have about the value provided is going to differ. And so it’s really important to understand not only what you see as your strengths and weaknesses in any sort of situation, but also understanding how others see your strengths, maybe your underestimated strengths, or underestimated the weaknesses in different circumstances that you’re going to be in.

Now, the D stands for delight and delighting others is really important because the thing about enriching and providing value is that we don’t always have the opportunity to do so because we don’t look the right way or we don’t, as I mentioned, we don’t look the right way, we don’t belong to the right groups, or we just don’t have the opportunities to do so. So the D stands for delight when you’re able to delight your counterpart. That’s the equivalent of cracking open that door a little bit when you don’t have the opportunity so that you can have that opportunity to show how you enrich and provide value. So, you know, a full each of these letters is a full part of my book. So one fourth of my book is about how do you delight others and so that you do have that opportunity.

The G stands for Guide because even after you enrich and delight, it’s so important to be guiding and redirecting those perceptions that others have about you. And this is what I was speaking about a little bit before, what I was talking about, redirecting and flipping those stereotypes in your favor. Right. So knowing how others are perceiving you and taking that in in empowering yourself to flip those perceptions in your favor rather than letting them just write a narrative about who you are.

And the final E stands for effort and hard work effort and hard work. And hard work comes last in this framework. We often think that hard work comes first, that if you put in the hard work, that it’ll speak for itself. But in fact, hard work comes last because when you know how you enrich and delight and guide, that’s when your hard work and effort actually work harder for you.

That’s quite a framework there.

The thing about it is that there is so much nuance embedded in this and a lot of times people have come to me and they’re like, OK, what are the five steps that I need to take to find my edge or to gain an edge? And I wish that I could give them like, OK, step one, you do this. Step two, you do this. Step three, you do this. But in fact, what really is encompassed in this is that it’s not a recipe, it’s a perspective.

And the more you take this perspective and think about how it’s uniquely yours, what/how do you enrich? How do you delight? How do you guide? How does your effort and hard work play into this? The more you’re going to create your unique edge, which is going to be all the more powerful and all the more successful and useful for you in terms of what you’re trying to achieve. So the framework. That’s why the book is divided into four parts, and I devote one part to each of these components because they do fit together, but they are also important to understand how to hone your ability to see the perceptions that others have about you, as well as how to redirect those perceptions. So each of these really goes together into this overall perspective.

Well, I think that’s terrific advice for individuals, for employees who are trying to set themselves apart and trying to overcome what they perceive and may not always be perceived by others as a disadvantage. But still, we live in our own head in our own space. And so if we feel that we’re being unfairly treated because of the way we look or the way our preferences are or what have you, I can see how it affects how we start to behave. So that’s all great advice and nuance. I appreciate that. But let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a second. Let’s say I’m a manager, I’m an executive in an organization, what should I be looking for? Because I’m hearing that, hey, this awareness training – eh, it’s not so great, not as great as you want it to be. So what can I do if I feel that somebody on my team I’m looking for diversity? I, I want to get different points of view, but sometimes people don’t always play nice together. And because we all do carry our own baggage, rightly or wrongly, whether we even appreciate it or not, as you were talking about the different types of biases that are out there. So how do I make sure people put the dice down?

I’m so glad you asked that, because I think it’s such an important piece of this, which is that we think that this is just an individual level thing. Right. That as an individual, you create your own edge, which is which is a large part of this. But what I think organizations don’t understand, what managers don’t understand is that ultimately what managers and organizations are trying to achieve are happier, more productive, more innovative employees. And people in organizations are going to be much more productive and happier and satisfied and innovative when they feel like they’re empowered. So we spend so much time in organizations giving people training, telling them the ways in which we should be either more inclusive or more innovative or training them for this or that instead of teaching that.

So we try. . . and so another way to put this is, we try so hard to give our employees or give our people an advantage, but instead we should be teaching them how to cultivate their own advantage and their own edge, because when they’re able to cultivate their own advantage and their own edge, that’s when they come up with those their own unique, innovative ideas. That’s when they come up with ideas for how to do something differently in the organization or how to be more effective in a certain process, or how to do their job better so that the organization benefits as a whole because people know themselves.

And so when you’re able to teach them and give them this perspective on how they can create their own edge, that’s when they’re able to take the ways in which they enrich and provide value, for example, and apply it in a much better way than you sort of assuming, you know, the ways in which they enrich and provide value. So even with sort of these diversity and inclusion initiatives, a lot of it is we think this person would be good here. We think we need more of this here, or that there, instead of just empowering people to then understand how they themselves, what their strengths are, what their superpowers are, so that they can be like, here’s where I can give more. Here’s where I can contribute more, here’s what I’m better at. And so all of all of those things are all of those things kind of go into really making this important for organizations and managers as well.

So if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s really about having an open, honest conversation between the employee and their supervisor to say, here’s how I can help do more.

It is definitely that piece of it, but it goes beyond just having the honest conversation. It’s also allowing, it’s the manager giving the employee the space to do so, not just a conversation where you sit down, you’re like, what are you good at? What do you want to do? But it’s like allowing that, giving them the space to really recognize here the ways in which I really can provide value that the organization may not have even seen or recognized. Letting the employee sort of direct and within the bounds of what the company is able to do, direct and sort of enable them to show the ways in which they may have strengths or underestimated strengths that may not have been considered previously.

So certainly a part of it is having honest conversations. But another piece of it is, is understanding that people, common people are multifaceted. And what we’re normally seeing from people is where we tend to pigeonhole people into one particular area or one particular strength, rather than allowing for the fact that we are varied and complicated people and there’s lots of different ways that we can provide value.

So giving him the opportunity, not just talking about it, but the chance to explore within certain parameters.

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Because until you you’ve seen what they can do, you don’t even know and they may not know. They may say, well you know, I think I could do something over here, there’s a project. I was talking to someone today who said that, before she had her own business, she was lucky to work with some managers and some executives who did give her that kind of freedom. And it allowed her to learn tremendous things that allowed her to expand her skill set consistent with her existing skills. So it was a win-win for her and the organization, but it wouldn’t have happened if somebody had just pigeonholed her into just a special category and said, well, this is your job, X, Y, Z, stay in your lane type of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That can be problematic. I see. Can you give us a little bit more of a concrete example how someone could harness their stereotype?

You know, these are longer sort of examples, but in my research, I guess, and in my book, I talk about a variety of different ways and they sort of fit into three different categories for how you can redirect and guide people. The first is sort of through traits, right. So what I find is that people, for example, are perceived as being trustworthy or competent or arrogant or what have you. And so there are these traits that we define people as, and we can actually flip those in in a way and redirect and guide people to those in a way that provides us with this ability to create an advantage.

So let me give you an example of this. So let’s take ageism, for example. So I find in my research that that people who are older employees, for example, are less likely to get raises, to get hired into positions, to get promotions, to get funded for their ventures, all sorts of things. And the perception is that it’s because of things like older individuals not being as technologically proficient. Right. We have perceptions of people. But what I find in my research is that there are underlying perceptions that drive those attributions. So in the case of ageism, there’s one perception, one perception only that typically drives these negative attributions. And that’s curiosity that we assume that older employees or older individuals are less curious.

And so before going into an interview situation, for example, I would tell older candidates, I would say to them, the one perception that they have about you is that you’re less curious. And so then they would go into these interviews and I would hear them saying remarkable things. Things like, you know, I’m curious about your company strategy and how it’s evolved over time or I’m curious about the vision that you had and how it’s sort of changed based on the current circumstances. And then what I find is not only are they rated higher in terms of things like curiosity, they’re rated higher in terms of things like technological proficiency, things that they never talked about at all. And in fact based on this, they’re more likely to be hired for the job, more likely to get the promotion, the raise, the funding for their venture than other. Why not only are they more likely than other than other people who are older candidates, but more so even than candidates who are not facing ageism.

And so it’s sort of and this is not just about ageism. I find this for gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, all sorts of things where there are these underlying perceptions that are driving these negative outcomes. But we can actually, sort of, guide once we know what these underlying perceptions are. So that’s sort of one category like how we how we guide traits.

Another is how we guide interactions like interpersonal interactions, questions that we receive, how we give answers. And then the third bucket is. Trajectories, right, that based on who we are, what we look like, we’re typically bucketed into a certain story line, right? Whether it’s, wow, this person has traveled a long distance. Look where they’ve come from or this person has like this second chances narrative that maybe they made some mistakes. And now that they’re trying to redeem themselves or they have a zigzag trajectory where they’ve tried to do lots of different things. So in each of these different buckets, each of the different ways of guiding, I give lots of examples and strategies and tips and how-tos for how you can actually guide and redirect people’s perceptions of you.

Well, I’m curious, Laura, now you have a really unique field of research and the book Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage. Sounds like it is packed full of terrific information that can help employees as well as employers try and get their arms around this to allow employees to shine and help grow a business, which is terrific. But your area of research, how did you get interested in this field?

So, you know, I have been studying disadvantage, inequality, people who are underestimated, all those sorts of things, as I mentioned, for more than a decade. And I think a lot of it goes back to experiences that I had as a child or growing up. I think that that piece of it was definitely. So, for example, like all through growing up I saw time and time again how my parents who were immigrants from Taiwan were getting turned down for promotion after promotion after promotion. And during one of those promotions, the person that my dad, someone who got promoted over my dad, who my dad ended up working for, that person ended up becoming his boss. My dad was actually doing the job, that job, because everyone sort of knew that the person who got promoted over him wasn’t qualified. And so I sort of asked my father, I said, well, why is it that you think you didn’t get that job? And he’s like, I don’t know. It’s probably because of my accent or the way I communicate or something like that. So one of the first things I studied was accent and the negative outcomes or the or the disparities based on how people communicate in their accent.

And then I sort of found it fascinating that something just as simple as somebody’s accent could determine all of these things that would later affect their lives, all of these outcomes and success. And then I started testing it on lots of things like gender and race and ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual orientation. And then I was like, how far can I push this? Could I take somebody who is the epitome of privilege, like a white male, but yet still have perceptions that would lead them to negative outcomes? And so I kept seeing this. And like I mentioned before, I kept getting asked the question as I was presenting this research, what can we do about this?

And so that led me to a lot of these strategies of how can individuals or how can leaders of organizations do something about this even when our systems are imperfect? I never actually intended to write a book about this, but that that kind of came serendipitously  when I saw that there was this thirst for the actual strategies and ways that as individuals we could kind of counteract these dynamics.

Well, I think we all need to have a little bit of how-to help that says do this, do that, and maybe we can’t put it into five steps because it is nuanced., but just knowing that it is complex and how not to make it worse might already be a step in the right direction. So I’m so glad that you were able to encapsulate this between two covers and I’m sure your research is still ongoing. It’s really fascinating. The book, again folks is Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage, and it’s written by the talented Professor Laura Huang.

So before we close. Is there anything that you’d really want your readers to take away from the book? If there was one thing that when they closed the final cover after reading the last page, you want them to remember? What would it be?

I think the main thing is closing the book and be like, I can do this right, because there’s just so much that pushes us down. There’s so much that, you know, it’s really this aspect of hard work alone is not enough. I would never say that hard work is not critical because it absolutely is critical, but hard work alone is not enough. And we hear these things about like work twice as hard for half the rewards. But, you know, that just leaves people frustrated and burnt out and leaving things much sooner.

And so it’s really this this empowerment message of: I can do this. I have these tools in place now where I can make my hard work harder for me because, you know, I do think we have in our society, we have such a love affair these days with hard work and grit, and things. And again, like these things are critical, but it alone is not enough. And so understanding that perceptions and signals and cues really drive these outcomes and success as well gives us a way to make sense of it and really empower ourselves.

Learning the hidden language of implicit bias cues, I love it. Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks so much.

That’s our show for today. Thank you for joining me. If you’d like to learn more about today’s guest, you can go to our Web site at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. It’s got a lot of other powerful information and resources available to help your business grow. So be sure to check that out. The website again is BusinessCconfidentialRadio.com.

I’m Hanna Hasl-Kelchner and you’ve been listening to Business Confidential Now. Have a great rest of the day and an even better tomorrow.

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