Do Snap Judgments Amount to Bias in the Workplace?

By Freada Kapor Klein, Jossey-Bass. Posted November 30, 2007.

The following is an excerpt from Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM STAY," by Freada Kapor Klein (Jossey-Bass, 2007).

Stare at these words for a moment.

Did you read: THE CAT? Most people do. Now look again. Notice that the symbols for H and A are not actually letters -- they're identical, nonspecific symbols. This wasn't a problem at first glance. Our brains filled in the information we needed, using pattern recognition based on past experiences. This is an inherent part of being human. At one time, this pattern recognition was a survival mechanism: Red mushrooms make you sick. Red mushrooms make you sick again. Stop eating red mushrooms. In the starkest Darwinian system of natural selection, you either figured it out by recognizing the pattern or you died.

When people consider the patterns they live by, most would deny that they include stereotypes. And it's true -- after hundreds of years of the most egregious racism imaginable, most people in this country today are not overtly biased. It's true in the corporate world too. Ask a group of CEOs, and they'll tell you that they can find genuine talent regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation.

But consider the example (above) when your brain automatically filled in the information that was missing. And then consider this: What information is your brain implicitly providing when you walk into a conference room and see a person dressed a certain way, a person whose skin is darker or lighter, a person whose hair or size or style or age is different than what you are used to?

On a cool fall day, after spending the weekend in the office wrapping up an intense but creative project, Eric Johnson shrugged off his coat as he stepped into his manager's office to talk about his next assignment. He was hoping to be given a lead role with a new initiative that looked like a sure money maker. He was more than hoping, really.

Eric's patterns continued to be influenced by his childhood in Detroit, when his parents, both auto factory workers, taught him to live in shifts. He saw his life in strict time blocks for both his personal and professional goals. He knew life wasn't fair, and he'd seen how the ups and downs of the auto industry -- the epitome of big business -- impacted his own day-to-day existence while growing up.

But now he was playing that corporate game, fueled by career ambitions, working to understand it, tame it and win it. Eric knew that his success on his prior project, coupled with his track record for hard work and creativity, put him at the top of a small heap to head the new assignment. So he was stunned when his manager told him he had already decided that leadership spot should go to Eric's straight, white male colleague -- a man with slightly lower productivity and accomplishments than Eric, but a chipper man, a good worker, and a positive and friendly person.

Eric's manager, when he made this decision, wasn't blatantly thinking: "Eric's black and gay, so I can't put him in charge." In fact, he considered Eric to be a talented and motivated team player; it's just that he wasn't all that comfortable with Eric. There wasn't any perceptible tension or discomfort. Indeed, Eric's manager prided himself on his open-mindedness. He made sure that Eric was given assignments he could handle, and that if they slipped a day, it wasn't mission critical. Yet Eric's manager never stopped to reflect that Eric had never missed a deadline and was often completing assignments early and offering to help out his colleagues. Completely unconsciously, Eric's manager assumed that Eric had been an "affirmative action hire" (someone who wasn't as qualified as his peers), and acted accordingly.

"It's nothing against you at all, Eric. You're doing great. Just stay focused on your current projects. Mark is a better fit: He's worked with many of these business units before and went to the same school as Chip, the big boss. Since they're both such loyal alums, I thought it would actually help all of us," his manager explained.

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Freada Kapor Klein is the author of "Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and HOW YOU CAN HELP THEM STAY" (Jossey-Bass, 2007) and founder and board director of the Level Playing Field Institute, which promotes innovative programs focused on revealing and removing barriers to fairness from the classroom to the boardroom. She has worked on issues of diversity for 30 years, having co-founded the first group on sexual harassment in the United States.