The Good News About Unconscious Bias

Neuroscience tells us that if you have a brain, you have biases. And that is a good thing.

 That’s because our brains make 40,000 decisions every day. Biases let us recognize objects and concepts to take the right action quickly, seemingly automatically. Imagine you’re in a new neighborhood and you come to a four-way stop; you bring the car to a halt despite having never seen the intersection. Or, your child cries out and you know immediately it’s just a bump and not a broken bone.

Biases help us make our way through the world. The problem is when we rely on them to unknowingly deny people opportunities. Women comprise about half of the professional workforce, but when you get to the top it trickles down to single digits. I’m convinced that unconscious bias plays a role in creating this gap and it’s one of the reasons I founded UPWARD.

It’s also why I convened a panel to discuss the topic in April at the headquarters of GE Ventures. What I heard excites me. There is a growing array of companies working hard to flag unconscious bias, remove it from their hiring and retention practices, and create technologies to mitigate its effects it on a wider scale.

 Given this stubborn and persistent problem, it’s all good news.

 Missing An Opportunity, Then Seizing It

 Nine years ago, Tom Burns was in Paris to brief his company on his activities. Speaking before a dozen of his peers, he put up an organization chart and photos of his team. Suddenly, a consultant in the room ordered him to stop.

 “You have one of the most white, middle-aged, male organizations that I have ever seen,” the consultant said. “And you need to do something about it.”

 That experience shocked Tom, but also made him rethink his approach to hiring. Two years later, he had one of the most diverse teams in the company. What’s more, he saw first hand how diversity made for better collaboration — and a stronger bottom line.

Tom is now a vice president and general manager at Dell and he is using the experience that began in Paris to build a more diverse culture. With the support of CEO Michael Dell, the company has trained more than 900 people to recognize unconscious behavior in the Men Advocating Real Change (MARC) program. Tom has an action plan for his direct reports to prioritize diversity in hiring — and holds them accountable during their performance reviews.

Yet all this begs a question. Tom is a strong leader and a smart one. So why did it take being called out in front of his peers to change his hiring practices? Why did he have to miss the opportunity to seize it?

That’s the unconscious part of bias, said fellow panelist Marilyn Nagel. Marilyn has spent a lifetime in diversity efforts at companies such as Cisco Systems and at her private firm, nQuotient. Unconscious bias happens, she said, when things do, or do not, fit the images we have in our heads.

For instance, many of us grew up in families where the father sat at the head of the table, and that chair was the seat of power. So when we go into a boardroom or a meeting room, the person we expect to see at the head of the table is a male. And if she’s female?

“We think, ‘Wait a minute, you can’t be the leader. You don’t fit the picture we have in our heads’,” Marilyn said. “This is unconscious bias."

That’s exactly what happened to Tom. “I didn’t recognize that I had this bias because I was comfortable with this team and we were achieving what I thought was success. Then I had someone shake me up and since then I’ve been an advocate for greater diversity.”

What Change Can Look Like

Imagine for a moment that your company has embraced the need to confront unconscious bias in its hiring practices. What would that change look like?

It could look something like that of GE Ventures. The company is a relatively new to Silicon Valley. Five years ago, it had an empty building in San Ramon; today it has 1,400 employees located there. Deb Brovich, the company’s organization and talent development leader, spearheaded a different kind of hiring effort.

“When we went out to recruit we really drove everything from the standpoint of capabilities,” Deb said. “An outcome of that effort is that we’ve threaded the focus on capabilities through everything we do.”

What that means in practical terms is that if the company wants to hire a software engineer, there is a pre-defined list of capabilities a candidate must meet. Having this list moves the conversation from are you qualified, which is subject to bias — a Latina Java coder may not fit the image in the head of a hiring manager — to can you do the work, which is far easier to demonstrate.

GE Ventures has integrated this focus on capabilities into how it attracts, interviews, retains, and compensates employees. It proactively asks managers to consider the positive impact of greater diversity, and think about places where biases might lurk. And it actively encourages employees to speak up when they see biases that are weighing the company down.

In some respects, this is the advantage of being a 140 year-old company that understands it must change to keep up with changing times. “The only way that can happen is by transformation,” Deb said. “As the mix of the workface has changed, the company has had to follow suit. Having that mix is so powerful for the bottom line.”

Getting Change To Scale

The realization that diversity is crucial to the bottom line keeps Laura Mather busy these days. She’s the founder and CEO of Unitive, a software startup focused on systematically removing unconscious employment bias on a large scale.

Unitive software attacks the problem in part through truly blind resume reviews. Gone are potential triggers for unconscious bias, such as the names of fraternities, colleges, and hometowns. Instead, hiring managers rate the skills and experiences of the people applying. The interview process is also highly structured and all interview feedback is shared, as public reviews tend to reduce bias.

As a result, senior Fortune 100 executives are coming to call on Laura and Unitive. “They say, ‘I know diversity is important but I don’t know what to do tomorrow. We need to do something beyond training. Can you help us operationalize this?’”

Change at that kind of scale is incredibly exciting.

All Good…But Keep Pushing

As I said, this is all good news. But as Marilyn wisely reminded the gathering, real change doesn’t happen without the appropriate policies. It’s good to have awareness, but you have to couple that with policy and process change. Laura may have put it best.

“We all have to push hard on the place we can push the hardest.”

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With only word-of-mouth support UPWARD has soared from 50 members to more than 2,900 in under three years – and is adding 80-100 members each month. This growth rate underscores the desire of professional women to break down the structural barriers to their success: a lack of access to informal networks, a lack of female role models, and a lack of sponsors who can help move us into the careers we want.

In addition to founding UPWARD, I am a vice-president of Intel Capital, Intel’s venture capital arm, the managing director of software & services investments and the newly formed Diversity Fund, and a voting member of Intel Capital’s investment committee.

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