How the Unconscious Mind Can Act Out Our Prejudices

The following is an excerpt from The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives by Shankar Vedantam (Random House, 2010).

Lilly Ledbetter's life followed a clockwork routine. When she worked the night shift at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant in Gadsden, Alabama, she came home from work around nine-thirty in the morning. She took a hot bath, laid out her work clothes for her next shift, and slept until the afternoon. At around five, she set off again for the plant. Her shift did not start until seven, but the route from her home in Jacksonville involved a stretch of about ten miles on a country road, where she sometimes got stuck behind a slow vehicle.

The rubber plant was solid, stolid work. During each shift, managers such as Lilly were given instructions that told them what they needed to get done. If the instructions-which were called a “schedule”-required Lilly's team to make tread belts one night, she had to make sure she had all the components and labor in place before the shift started. The shift ran for twelve hours, but Lilly usually got to the plant early and stayed late. Lilly had once worked for a group of gynecologists, but she felt she was not cut out for medical work. She joined Goodyear when she was forty, straight out of a position with H&R Block. The tire company was a man's world, and Lilly was the only female manager on the night shift. It didn't bother her. If she kept her head down and worked hard, she knew she would be treated the same as everyone else.

One evening in 1998, Lilly reached work around six o'clock. She went to an upper floor where the managers had their mailboxes. There were a number of documents in her mailbox, and inserted among them was a torn sheet of paper. On the fragment were four names-first names. One was hers. The others were area managers who worked with her, doing identical work. The four managers supervised identical crews, worked the same hours, handled the same responsibilities, and had the same level of experience. Lilly was the only woman in the quartet.

Next to the names were numbers. Lilly instantly recognized the number next to her name. It was her salary: $3,727 a month. She looked at the other numbers and instantly felt sick. The other managers' salaries ranged between $4,286 and $5,236 a month. Lilly made $44,724 a year. Her co-workers made $51,432 to $62,832 a year.

Lilly's cheeks flushed. She looked up to see if anyone was watching her. No one seemed to be taking any notice. Lilly rushed to the women's room and collapsed on a sofa. She stared at the paper. She did not feel angry; she felt ashamed, small, and humiliated. “What am I going to do?” she asked herself. “How do I do anything?”

She slipped the paper into her pocket, determined not to show her feelings, but all through her shift the realization that her company valued her so much less than her co-workers gnawed at her. She crossed paths with another manager, a man who was being paid much more to do the same work. Lilly said nothing, but she ached inside.

Lilly did not want to think of herself as a victim of discrimination. Over the years at the Gadsden plant, there had been people who'd been nasty to her, but there had also been plenty of people who'd been friendly. There had been times, for example, when her supervisors had failed to tell her what her team needed to get done during a shift, even as her colleagues received their schedules. She would fall back on personal relationships to get out of the jam-friends in the scheduling department would pass along the instructions. When she had run-ins with supervisors, she put it down to individual chemistry. When a department foreman told her, “God damnit, Lilly, your department looks like a whorehouse!” Lilly coolly told her supervisor, “I don't know. I have never been in one.”