Ologies with Alie Ward - Bonus Feed Drop: Implicit Bias on the REAL GOOD podcast

Episode Date: May 22, 2021

Ohulloh! This is not your regular Ologies episode (which will come on Tuesday per usual.) It’s actually not an Ologies episode! This is a fun little bonus GUEST podcast we're dropping in our feed. Real Good is a show that started during the beginning of COVID to highlight different non-profits helping with the pandemic — but soon revealed that many problems that became so acute during quarantine had existed in people's lives for a long time prior. We care a lot about the issues they address (race, class, gender, mental health, affordable housing, etc.) so we were down to partner up with Real Good and share an episode of theirs with the always thoughtful, kind, and generous Ologies audience in our own feed. This is the second episode of their second season entitled "Just Admitting It Isn't Enough with Lynda Negron.” Lynda served as program director of an anti-implicit bias training organization. If you dig the show you can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.stitcher.com/show/real-good And this Tuesday, get ready for the usual Ologies fare, as we deep dive with the most boopable aquatic beasts. Burbye. Support the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh, hey, this is not a normal episode. This is a bit of a bonus episode. This week, obviously, we have Foraging Ecology with Alexis Nicole Nelson is up. You can go back and listen to the Cicadology episode if you are inundated with cicadas, but I wanted to also, in this feed this week, we're gonna do something a little different.

We wanted to share an episode of a podcast called Real Good. If you're like, what's real good? Never heard of it. You're about to, if you like. So Real Good is a show that started last year at the beginning of COVID to highlight nonprofits doing work on the ground to help with the pandemic.

But the big message of that whole first season was that most of the problems people are facing in COVID were not new when the pandemic hit. They're intersectional problems concerning race, and class, and gender, and a lot more. So the second season just came out and it's broadening out a bit to focus on the people fighting systemic issues

that COVID highlighted. And guests this season talk about critical issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion, including recognizing implicit bias and the need for affordable housing and equal access to mental health services, all stuff that we care about. This episode is called Just Admitting It

Isn't Enough with Linda Negron, who was a product director at Biasync. I think you're gonna like it. More information on her in the intro. So yes, you're about to hear an episode of that podcast in our feed. And it is with Linda Negron, a program director at an anti-implicit bias training organization.

So if you like what you hear, you can listen and subscribe to Real Good, the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, enjoy. This is Real Good by US Bank, a podcast about helpers. It's okay to say that you've made mistakes in the past. Like it's okay to accept someone else's feedback

and be better. It would involve you acknowledging the fact that you are not perfect, but you are human. I'm Faith Staley. This show was born out of the coronavirus crisis. In our efforts to understand where work needed to be done to help communities in need during the pandemic, we learned that the issues they were struggling with

didn't crop up during COVID. They're longstanding concerns with roots in racial disparity, socioeconomic opportunity gaps, and so much more. We're here to give you a chance to meet those who are fighting against inequality. They're people who span a wide range of fields and enact very different missions,

but one thing remains the same for everyone you're gonna meet. They're helpers. They're doing real good. This week, our guest is Linda Negron, product director at Biasync. It's an uncomfortable thing to talk about, but people tend to favor people like them.

When we can see part of ourselves, whether it's physically represented or part of their lived experience that we recognize, we often see people like us favorably. And when I say we, I don't just mean you listening and me talking. I mean everyone, human beings in general. But when structures put in place

favor one type of person over another, what happens then? Well, just look at the workplaces all across America. Structures favoring predominantly white and predominantly male workers have created boardrooms overrepresented by white men. And there's a trickle down effect from there. Those people tend to put employees like them

in position to be the next crop of leaders keeping the wheel turning. In the corporate landscape today, 3.2% of senior management jobs are held by black Americans, as opposed to the 13.2% of the population as a whole. Women make up more than half of our population and 47% of support positions,

but only occupy 23% of management roles. There are certainly more stats we could throw at you, but I think you get it. But it doesn't have to be this way. Linda Negron's work recognizing how our brains are wired and how to scientifically approach our own biases is training business leaders how to create offices that look more like the world around us.

Linda, when people ask you what you do, what do you say? Well, it depends on who it is because if it's a stranger on the street, I say I'm in tech and they know the eyes glaze over and they stop asking questions. But normally I say I'm a director of product or head of product at a social enterprise startup.

So what we're trying... So all of that avoids the juicy word though. I mean, do you ever think of saying, you know what? I work in bias. Yes, I do that when we jump into the actual details around it, but I find that unconscious bias has created so many triggers for a lot of people, whether it's on the far left or the far right,

and myself being far left. It is very funny seeing how people that I agree with politically even get very riled up about unconscious bias training and corporations where it's this idea of it's either unconscious bias training or the full blown anti-racism, anti-sexism training that actually gets into the nitty gritty details of the history and the knowledge

of institutional oppression and all of that. Whereas a lot of people tend to write, a lot of activists I've heard say that unconscious bias can be a cop out because it's this fluffy, oh, everyone has it. So, you know, just be cognizant of it and don't get too hard on yourself for it. And they don't think it's going far enough.

My argument is if we don't start with unconscious bias, we're never gonna get anywhere. So it... So, before we... I mean, there's so much to dig into here. And I wanna find out how you came to this. But first, because we're gonna be using these words, can you tell me how you define bias

and how you define unconscious bias? Exactly, okay. So, bias is in layman's terms, it's this... So, the brain process is something like five... Five, I don't wanna actually say incorrect stats, but let's give it 500 bits of data per second. But consciously, we can only process about 10 of them. And so, if the brain is processing, you know,

let's say 500 bits a second and you can only consciously handle 10 bits a second, the other, you know, 490 is happening unconsciously in the back of your brain. So, the human prefrontal cortex can only handle so much stimulus that's coming in at once or stimuli. There's, you know, if I'm just looking at this screen,

I'm thinking about what I'm saying, I'm looking at your facial expression, I'm, you know, hearing sounds in the background, I can hear my boyfriend making breakfast in the kitchen. But all of these things, some of them are getting processed unconsciously because it's not at the forefront of my mind. What I'm specifically focusing on

is my conversation with you. So, consciously, I'm able to handle this conversation. Everything else that's coming in is being processed unconsciously in the back of the brain. So, I actually don't know how it's being processed. My brain is just storing it away because that's how biologically we have developed to handle as much process.

Because imagine if you tried to process every little thing that you were seeing or hearing all at once, it's impossible. You'd short circuit. Yeah, you would short circuit. So, this is an evolutionary tactic to avoid short circuiting, pretty much. So... So, that's the unconscious part.

What's the bias part? How does that manifest? So, your brain automatically starts creating shortcuts to not short circuit. So, an example from, you know, primordial times, like back in the day historic, if I knew that a specific kind of plant wasn't good for me, if I would eat it and I would, you know,

either get poisoned or get really sick, I would just know that. So, every time I would see it, I would think that's not a good plant, that I should not eat that plant. Over time, you start to develop unconscious by, like unconscious bias to actually say, okay, well, I should avoid that plant

because it looks exactly like the other plant. So, therefore, I shouldn't have that plant. And it's just this short, it's just like what we call mental shortcuts. Again, so much of it is unconscious that we're not even cognizant, like doing it cognitively. We're just doing it, our brain is doing it for us. We just know certain things.

Like, there, it's, a lot of people call it like the gut feeling like, why did you avoid one option versus another? You just say, well, that one, I don't know why I avoided it, but I'm assuming it's because it reminded me of this other thing, which I know isn't good for me. And that's just how evolutionary,

we developed to, again, not short circuit, if there's so much stimulus coming out. Yeah, it's efficient. Exactly. So you just, it's, again, mental shortcuts to avoid things that you know aren't good for you or to go to things that are good for you and aren't. Or are familiar.

Are familiar, yeah. But again, like good and bad is funny because it's all relative. So what you think is good or bad is actually just based off of either prior experiences or experiences people you know have told you. It's not necessarily good or bad. And so how would you define the difference

between bias and preference? So a lot of preference is bias. You, if it's unconscious or you're not really thinking about it, it is bias. Like for me, I unconsciously always go towards chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream before I go to anything else.

I like, that's a, that's a bias. But a preference is me saying, I'm actively choosing to not have that like very cool new ice cream flavor and just going to chocolate chip cookie dough because chocolate chip cookie dough is what I like. I know it. I don't really love pistachio as a flavor.

So I'm just not going to go with it. And. So that's, it's interesting when you sort of break it down that way because I think when we all hear bias, it sounds very negative. Oh, I don't, I don't want to be biased. I'm not biased. Of course we'll, we'll talk about with you

how we're all biased. But in some ways bias is a, is a neutral term. It's how we apply it, right. And in the definition or the example you just gave about ice cream preference has a kind of consciousness to it. Yes. Is bias always unconscious? No, I think that bias can both be conscious and unconscious.

So bias is just this idea that you're veering, you're taking a mental shortcut to choose one thing over another or preference one thing over another based off of other information that you know. You're not, you're working off of limited information, if that makes sense. So again, like what we were talking about the plants, theoretically, if you wanted to be truly unbiased,

you would eat every single plant to determine if you could eat all of them. Is that possible? No, there's way too many. You wouldn't live very long. So you're going to use mental shortcuts to say that plant looks like the other one that made me really sick.

I'm not going to do it. So then you go towards berries and, you know, wheatgrass and all of the other things you know you can eat and things that look like things you know you can eat. So it's bias is to put it succinctly is as a mental shortcut based off of limited information that you already have to make a quick decision in a true scientific method, fully,

I guess if you had all the time in the world, you would find all of the information for every possible item. But again, as we've talked about, that's impossible for the human brain. We don't have the cognitive ability to do that. Okay, so armed with these kind of working definitions for this conversation, let's talk about you.

Where are you from? Where did you grow up? I grew up in New York. I was born in New York, lived in Puerto Rico for two years as a child. So between the ages of two and four and then came back to New York and then I was a proud New Yorker ever since.

So my mother's got him on and my father's Puerto Rican. So we spent two years there with my family on his side. And I was in Queens originally, then we went out to Long Island after we came back and I was joking around because everyone always asks New York, so you're from Manhattan. No, in fact, most of Manhattan is actually transplants.

I grew up where the real New Yorkers grow up, which is right outside of Manhattan. So I'm gonna get so much black for that. So I gotta tell you, I'm in Manhattan for the last 17 years and my husband always tells me, you're not a real New Yorker. He says I won't be a real New Yorker until I walk over syringes in Central Park in the 70s.

I'll never get there. But I defer to you, you're a real New Yorker, having lived an itinerant life, at least in your early youth, what kind of perspective did that give you with bias? What was your experience with bias growing up? It's definitely, so I, as I said before, I was living in Puerto Rico up until the age of four. I don't really have memories of before the age of two.

So when we came back, it was just me and my mom living with two of my aunts that are also Guatemalan. And I, from a really young age, I was very aware of what bias looked like. And an example of that, I don't know what the most severe case of bias I experienced as a kid or my mom did, but I'd remember the earliest. And it was when I was in kindergarten,

since I had just come from Puerto Rico, I didn't speak English, or if I did, it was not good. So my mom had heard that at the school district I was going to, if you couldn't speak English, they would automatically put you an ESL, which would mean that you were off track for the advanced classes. And they had known that I was, you know,

at the risk of sounding like every millennial mom, I was gifted and I had, you know, I was testing really well as much as you can test as a four year old, but the teachers in Puerto Rico were telling my mom that I should be fast tracked into a special program. But when we moved to New York, she just knew that if I was put in an ESL class,

that wouldn't be the case because all of the ESL classes are taught remedial content. Even if these children are really bright, just the sole fact that they don't speak English means that they're not set up for success and they're set up with way less resources, way less content, you know, like, and so much of those early years is whatever you can fit

in a kid's head is going to set them up for the rest of their life. So my mom just told me, don't speak to anyone until you learn English. Don't let them know. And I knew that I just couldn't speak to my teachers. So my teacher thought I was just like super shy. And I could kind of, you know,

kids learn languages really fast. So it only took me like less than a year to really pick up enough English to really understand what the other kids were saying and doing. So by first grade, I was fine. But I remember, I only knew like two family friends in my class.

So I would really only speak to them in Spanish. And I was just trying to figure out how to parse everything together and figure out where we were going. But it was a secret. I couldn't tell anyone that I didn't really know English well because if I got put in the other class or, you know, I got put in ESL,

they would just automatically pigeonhole me as someone who was quote unquote remedial, even though other kids that were in the ESL classes should have been allowed to experience the same amount of learning, but they weren't given those resources or those opportunities. So from a really young age-

How do you think, yeah, how do you think that early experience shaped you? It made me really aware of the fact that I had certain characteristics that other people looked down on. And I became aware of the fact that that was how life was just going to be for me a little bit for a while.

It gave me a lot of drive, which I think that a lot of people tend to glorify this idea of grit, that, you know, here she is like uphill battle, like showing the world that they're wrong. But I don't necessarily, I think the psychological effects of it are things that I'm still coping with, you know,

in therapy. And it was really fascinating reflecting on this in recent years while I've been, you know, trying to write more and write more of a blog. And just really acknowledging the fact that it's from a really young age, I knew that I had certain characteristics

that other people made other people think that I wasn't as equipped or capable or as intelligent or as valuable as other people. You know, that's such an interesting perspective, Linda, because what you're describing is this almost a, I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but almost a fair justified resentment towards having to be resilient.

You know, people could applaud you for that, but you're kind of like, why should I have had to work harder? Yeah. All right, so your teachers in Puerto Rico were right. You are gifted. You, you end up at Harvard. And what was, what was that like?

It was the best of times and the worst of times for sure. Just the traditional Harvard experience of having grown up as kind of a big fish in a little pond and having the very harsh reality check of, oh, I'm not the smartest person in the room anymore. That's awkward. And, you know, being surrounded by so many people who are just so brilliant.

And if you're ever playing the comparison game, there will always be someone smarter, more well adjusted, more social, more anything. So very early on in my college career, I had to rectify that comparison game of trying to just use everyone else's barometer for my own success and happiness. So it catapulted me into a level of emotional intelligence

that I had definitely never thought possible for myself earlier on, because I was a very like STEM person. So, you know, bias and stereotypes about STEM people where we're a little emotional, everyone thinks that we're a little like unemotional or emotionally unavailable, but I promise some of us are very emotionally intelligent.

You know, it was a Harvard graduate called Theodore Roosevelt who said about comparison. He says, comparison is the thief of joy. So it sounds like an important lesson that you were wise enough to teach yourself as a college student. Exactly. I mean, 67% of Harvard students come from the top 20%

of wealth owning households. And it's also a school, I think it has like less than an 8% Latinx population. So how isolated did you feel? And did you feel kind of like, hello, I'm the model minority? Yeah, it was really isolating in the sense that a lot of people can't understand your experiences,

no matter how much they want to, they'll like they'll listen, they'll sympathize, but there is a certain point in which, you know, in the same way that you can talk to one of your girlfriends going through a breakup because you've understood it and you've been there yourself. I wasn't able to do that for a certain like life events

that were going, that I was going through at the time. And... Can you give me an example? Yeah, so I remember my freshman year, I really wanted to study abroad in Nairobi that summer. I was taking Swahili, which is an African language, my freshman year, and that summer, the Swahili professor was conducting a study abroad trip.

And I really wanted to go, but you know, I couldn't afford it. I was on full financial aid and it was extra money. So I was trying to figure out how to get a grant or anything like that. So I was pretty convinced I was gonna get one specific grant and then it fell through. And I remember just being really upset, you know, just like rightfully emotional at home,

just like talking to one of my college roommates, just, you know, being upset, but I wasn't going to be able to go, which also sidebar, I actually ended up being able to go because I got a separate grant. So it ended up being a happy story, but I remember just talking to a friend who just goes, oh, well, like, I'm sure that your parents

will be able to cover it if you just talked to them that you lost the grant. And I go, what? And she goes, no, I mean, it's really not that much money. It's only like a little under $10,000. And I just look at her go, my mom makes $30,000 a year. I don't know how you think a third of her annual salary or wage will actually be able to cover this trip.

And it was one of those very harsh realities for her where she realized, oh, wow, I did not realize that people make that little. And it was one of those moments where I actually had to sit there and explain that to her. Explain that not everyone has $10,000 lying around. In fact, most people in America don't. And I think that it was, it's just little things like that

were like in ways that I would be able to talk to someone at home or even just someone in the real world here in LA where I am able to tell them, oh yeah, I couldn't afford this. When you're an adult and you're working, you understand more that people don't have $10,000 lying around a lot, especially if they have kids. But in that environment of just privilege,

a lot of those people had never been exposed to individuals who didn't have just that excess wealth. Yeah, it's a very interesting and complicated experience at a place like Harvard or other Ivy League schools or places like that because there is this very privilege community that is also very, for the most part, I'm generalizing, that is also very progressive.

And there are a lot of light bulbs that still need to get turned on for people who mean well, but have literal, they may be very, very smart, but have literal ignorance. Like in the neutral sense of the word ignorance about other people's experiences. Yeah, switching gears from Harvard to Tinder. So what did you do at Tinder?

And we should say Tinder is a dating app, right? And is Tinder the one that coined sort of swipe left, swipe right, like put that into our cultural lexicon? Yeah, they were the first of their kind. They were the first dating app. Well, I think dating websites had existed before. So match.com and eHarmony were already in existence, but they were the first app to visualize

the online dating experience and make it more accessible and take away the stigma. So you decided to take the plunge, a little leap of faith. And you started Tinder and was it part of your job to look for bias at Tinder? Or was it something you just couldn't miss? It's something you just can't miss. So I started as an engineer.

I was working on, at first I worked a bit on the spam project. And then I went on to work on features like the group dating feature. So like you could actually create groups and swipe on other groups. I worked on one of the features called boost, which was like the top revenue grossing feature

of Tinder in the year. And it started off, I wanna say like maybe my last couple, my first big push about unconscious bias at Tinder was actually just getting unconscious bias training in the company. That's interesting. So your work with bias at Tinder started as an employee and the experience you had as an employee.

But you also identified bias in Tinder's users in how they chose to swipe, is that right? So once we started talking about unconscious bias and it became a prominent conversation that was happening, I started talking to, and I moved from backend engineering to data engineering. I remember talking to some of the individuals building the algorithm about things that they were finding

and the sociologists that had worked there, she was a staff sociologist, some of her research had showed that specific people that got matched the least were black women and Asian men. And I remember asking, is that user preference or is that our fault? And they go, what are you talking about?

They go, well, is it user bias where this is happening on like a user level and or is this actually something that our recommendation algorithm is perpetuating? And I remember just the look of confusion on the engineer's face is like, wait, we could possibly be perpetuating this? And it ended up not being the case,

it ended up looking like it was more of a user issue on a global scale. But I remember just even asking the question, oh, is this actually a user problem or an engineer problem? It was the first time I'd even asked that. And it became this question of, oh, wait, us, we could be perpetuating a problem? And I, so talking to the engineer.

That's such a powerful question, right? I mean, that's part of your life's work now is helping companies ask, wait, us, could we be part of the problem and not knowing it? Exactly, and so we talked about it and I know people that still work there now and it's definitely been a question that they continue to ask themselves.

Like, oh, here's the problem, is this our problem or is this something that we can't control? Or is this something that we can control for? And what do you say about that as someone, you know, you're a computer scientist. How do companies need to look at this question about whether it's the responsibility of platforms or businesses to counteract bias

versus personal responsibility of their users? Definitely, so I think that corporate responsibility can't happen before personal responsibility because corporations are the results of personal decisions. However, so all it takes is a group of individuals at a corporation, especially the C-suite, to say we should review this, we should look into it,

we should just ask ourselves if we have a problem and put in the resources to bring in some experts to figure out if there's a problem. That's the first step. And from there, it is corporate responsibility to fix their problems in the sense that, you know, it's kind of this idea of like, if we all do our part, eventually, like the wave will be big enough

or we'll be able to combat anything. But corporations and institutions, they amplify existing human flaws because, yeah, like it is corporate responsibility over personal responsibility, in my opinion, to actually make the most impact, but it starts with personal responsibility. That's right.

Why don't people ask themselves that? Like that question you just asked in my part of the problem, is this my fault? If every single person started asking that, it would change everything. Why do you think people don't ask themselves that? A variety of reasons. I think that, well, first and foremost,

specifically in America, and I can speak to this on the American stance, we have this very deeply ingrained, puritanical culture of being the city upon a hill. Being, like, outside looking in, we have to be perfect. We, like, there is just no room for flaws, there's no room for imperfection. It's, you know, you are what you say, you say what you are, you hold strong,

and that is what is good. And we really need to move past that, and we really need to push forward with this idea of it's okay to be wrong. It's okay to say that you've made mistakes in the past, like it's okay to accept someone else's feedback and be better, but I feel like we kind of get stuck in this, I couldn't possibly be wrong,

I couldn't possibly have made this mistake. And I feel like a lot of it tends to be to accept that you've made a mistake, to accept that you have potentially perpetuated, you know, oppressive institutions or have been biased yourself. It would involve you acknowledging the fact that you are not perfect, but you are human.

So when someone is faced with the breaking news that he, she, or they have made a mistake, have caused pain or are biased, is the justification or the defensiveness sometimes, well, it's unconscious, I'm not in charge of that. What do you do with that response? Definitely, so that is, I think, why we've seen a lot of activists be against the idea

of unconscious bias as a solution, is because some people just go, well, it's unconscious, so it's not my fault, and I'm good to go. And that's not what we're looking for. I'm good to go. Yeah, and so that's not what we're looking for. When it comes to unconscious bias,

what we're looking for is this, it's two-fold. It's the idea of catching yourself in the act and then also being able to accept the feedback for when you don't. And so, if you catch yourself, like when you, if you're being mindful and you make, let's say you're thinking about who to promote, or something like that, you automatically think,

well, this person's clearly the obvious choice of who I'm gonna promote on my team. And you start to think, well, why do I think that? And it's just like finding new ways to ask yourself the question of why do I think that. Another example that people really like is we call it the network mapping activity. It's one of our micro-learnings.

It's this idea of reflecting on who you interact with, like physics, or something like that. Like physically, well, not now because it's COVID, but reflecting on who you interact with on a day-to-day basis and on a week-to-week basis and on a month-to-month basis and seeing what the actual breakdown of people is and seeing, oh, wow, if I'm not getting exposed to people who are different than me,

then of course I'm gonna have biased thoughts because I never see those other people. And I don't have, I'm not de-stereotyping in my mind. And it's just like going, taking the active route of removing the stereotypes of other ethnicities, other genders, other sexual orientations from your mind. And a really easy way to do this

that one of our subject matter experts loves talking about is specifically, let's use the, let's focus on racial bias specifically for black people. Why don't you research black scientists and black professionals who have made incredible impacts and longstanding legacies in the world? Like, if you ask anyone, please give me an example of a black individual who has made a tremendous

social impact, everyone says MLK. They go, okay, anyone but MLK or Malcolm X, name one. Right, and then you say name a scientist and they say Neil deGrasse Tyson. Exactly. There's just a whole, there's a whole long list. Exactly, so go through this and actually just start researching it.

And this exposure actually helps, it's not long-lasting, but it will get you in the practice of, okay, I actually need to start thinking of looking, like finding the people who are antithetical to the stereotypes that I've been told my whole life exist. And seeking, you have to become a seeker. Yes, so it's become, it's this whole process of seeking

and making, seeking information, seeking knowledge, seeking the knowledge of the other people's experiences part of your daily life and a habit. And it sounds overwhelming, but it really isn't once it becomes habit. You're now at a company called Biasync. So Biasync is a science-based assessment to combat unconscious bias.

What does that mean? How can you be science-based? So we're science-based through and through. So what we're actually giving companies is the first way to figure out the state of the state when it comes to diversity and inclusion. So before there hasn't been many ways to, you know, measure unconscious bias or, you know,

have a data-driven approach to it outside of something like headcount and promotions, which are very long feedback cycles that make it very difficult to actually assess how productive certain initiatives are because it's taking a really long, you know, like headcount is something that like, it takes a very long time to increase or make better or.

By headcount, you mean literally count how many quote unquote diverse employees the company has? Yeah, because that doesn't, you can have a bunch of people of different colors, but that doesn't mean there's no bias, right? Yeah, and it doesn't mean that it's an inclusive environment and it doesn't mean that it's actually, people are actually given the space to voice their opinions

and that their voices are equally heard. So how does science help? And what do we mean by science here? Is this a lot of math, a lot of sort of algorithm? So our actual LMS, so we call it the baseline course that actually walks users through the introduction to unconscious bias and, you know, describes two specific forms of bias

that arise in the workplace, one of which is gender bias, the other which is racial bias, you specifically focus on black bias. In the future, we'll address other, you know, the myriad of biases like, ageism bias against LGBTQ individuals, bias against pregnant women specifically.

So like there's so many different kinds of biases that we want to address, that we're going to address. It's just a matter of not overloading our users with all of the information. But in it, we also have a variety of assessments that we conduct, two of which are unconscious bias assessments that actually measure how much unconscious bias, roughly speaking, that you have

towards specific demographic. From there, the actual corporation, depending on whether or not they consent into the data, certain corporations do, others don't, we actually show an aggregate level of bias in the company to actually see where their gaps are. And when we say how, how do you do that? Really, so how much do you know

about the implicit association test? Nothing. Okay. So the implicit association test is actually developed by a few psychologists at Arama Mater. It started in the 90s and it's been, you know, put through the ringer in terms of actual validation does this work, does this not, for decades. And what we find now is that the group of academics

that have worked on this, like the general body of academics that have worked on unconscious bias, have for the most part, agreed that the unconscious bias assessment is valid in terms of understanding how much bias exists for that person, for a specific demographic of people. And so is this a, is this a test someone takes online? Yeah, you can, yes, you can take it online.

So it's basically the idea is that we look at one, like two categories of people and two attributes. So the example that I'll give is flowers and insects. So we're looking at flowers and insects and we're using good words and bad words. So the idea is to see whether or not you have an unconscious bias towards insects or flowers. And so we'll show you images of insects and flowers

and you're supposed to rapidly match. At first you go, flowers, good, insects, bad. So you match flowers to the good words and insects to bad words and then you flip it. And then you do insects to good words and flowers to bad words. And it's actually in a variety. So we measure unconscious bias based on how much longer

it took you to correctly match good, like the good attributes with a specific image versus the bad attributes with a specific image. Because if you're, as we said before, our bias is shortcuts. So if you're- Yeah, it's, you're quick to say a cockroach is creepy, but it's hard to say that the flower is stinky

or something, right? Exactly. Or creepy. Yeah. And so again, what we're showing you here is just what you're, the 95% of your subconscious is thinking. And it's not measuring racism. It's not measuring prejudice. It's not measuring sexism. We're not telling you that this is how prejudice you are.

Because again, prejudice is pretty conscious. Prejudice is saying, I actively dislike this group of people or I'm actively going to go out of my way to make sure that this other group of people does not have the opportunities that other people have that this group of people like is not, like don't interact with people that look like me.

That's prejudice. And that's not what we're measuring. What we're measuring is unconscious bias to show you that you are human. We have been taught these things since birth. These are institutionalized in the media we consume to the places that we're allowed to live. And so-

So, so does bias sync go into a company and help it engage its employees and taking these empirical kinds of tests? So they're embedded in the baseline assessment. It's a baseline course. So it's an introduction to unconscious bias with the actual assessments integrated into it. And so then from there, every month we app following it,

it's about a two year contract, we give users micro learnings. So little tips and tricks like what I was telling you earlier to help mitigate the negative impact of unconscious bias. So we're human. We're never actually going to fully get rid of bias and actually like bias, we show companies where their pain points are

and where they need to focus on, but we can mitigate its negative effects and we can work to create processes that prevent bias from affecting others so that we can create a more- Let's talk about those negative, let's tell me about those negative effects. It's easy to say, oh yeah, gosh, let's combat implicit bias.

But what role does bias have in corporate hierarchy and then in a sort of corporate culture and then in culture at large? So the easiest way to distill it down is that you both hire and promote people that remind you of you, if all things even, all things like no processes in place. Yeah, yeah.

And why is that bad? If what you're looking for is someone who's like you in the sense that you know you're hardworking, so you want someone who's hardworking, if you know you're a really good team player and you want someone else who's a good team player, there's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong

than having someone who matches your personality in the sense that you know that you've had the skill sets to be a great employee to get to the point where you've been promoted. So you want to hire other people that are like you to also match those attributes. The issue falls when you automatically assign unconsciously your attributes to people that look like you.

And you know, if you yourself- And assume that someone who doesn't look like you doesn't have those attributes. Won't have. Exactly. Right. So it's not the issue that, you know, Faith, you're intelligent, you are, you know,

a powerhouse in the podcast world. You want to hire someone else who reminds you of you in that sense. The issue is if you have a team, you're managing a team and you automatically only veer towards the people that remind you of you in a sense that like unconsciously, do they remind you of you because you look the same? Or do they remind you of you because they're familiar?

It's a familiar face, like a face that you grew up with and like she reminds me exactly of my best friend from childhood, but did you grow up in an environment that only had a specific kind of person? So wouldn't another deleterious effect of unconscious bias be a lack of growth for a company because you're not getting all sorts of new experiences and ideas that come from having diversity?

A lot of people tend to think that the negative impacts of unconscious bias are, you know, quote unquote purely ethical, but they actually have financial and monetary consequences as well. We're talking, there are a lot of estimates, I think Gallup estimates that we lose billions a year based off of, this might be a wrong statistic actually,

I should look that up, but Gallup estimates we lose a lot of money a year based off of unconscious bias because we actually, it's this idea of, you know, that whole joke or not joke, you've probably experienced this as well of like, you'll say something in a boardroom, no one hears it, a man says it because he thought he thought it but like you had said it literally five minutes prior.

Well, he's brilliant. He's brilliant and that's his idea and that's amazing. The problem of people's voices not being heard or being appreciated, like these very credible and talented individuals that you're clearly hiring for your company, we're not listening to their perspectives or their opinions. And so that loss of idea, that loss of creativity

actually creates a negative financial impact because then you're literally just paying people that you're not listening to. It's... Wow, when you put it that way, that's kind of amazing. And we're also looking at like, people who don't feel included or don't feel heard, much less likely to work hard.

So you're actually talking about, at that point, loss of productivity. And then at another layer, we're talking about just a complete loss of professional development. Like what if the woman that you're not listening to in the meeting could have been the next Elon Musk? But you weren't listening to her.

And therefore she wasn't given the opportunity and therefore she wasn't allowed to prove herself and therefore she wasn't able to get the financial backing of her company. And then she wasn't able to create gas-free emission cars. Like we're talking about just loss of productivity, loss of creativity, loss of innovation because people just aren't listening to good ideas

because of their bias. Your inability to mitigate your bias and quiet that voice actually leads to a loss of productivity and financial success for you. I am, this is one of those amazing conversations that has taught me so much, but has also left me with more questions. And I mean the good kinds of questions.

Like the questions to ask myself and to ask the people around me. And I'm really, really grateful. And you're great at what you do. Thank you. I'll try my best. The makeup of our workforces often starts at human resources. In order to create a more diverse workforce,

we need a more diverse pool of applicants. HR is often at the top of that funnel. And the HR team at US Bank is constantly looking to give more people more opportunities to get a better sense of how they're confronting systemic and individual bias. We spoke to US Bank's Greg Cunningham and LCO Barcelos right at the outset

of LCO's tenure at the bank. We learned a lot about why confronting bias matters. And we also get a sense of what it really looks like to be on the receiving end of it. What is the mission of your job at human resources? You know, there's so many ways to look at this faith. I think first and foremost, we are here to help the business achieve its priorities

and its strategy through talent, right? So that's the first element of how do we enable the business through talent? And in parallel to that, it's being the voice of the employee. It's understanding the culture, being the voice of the culture. So I often tell my team, we are stewards of the culture, right? We're stewards of the team, but with the purpose of enabling business success

through people or through talent. You know, well, you know why you're here. We're going to talk about diversity and we're going to talk about implicit bias, which I love this topic. It's so fascinating. There's so much to understand. And with that in mind, would you say

that being in HR is more challenging than ever before? When these, I mean, I imagine that HR personnel, HR officers of 40 years ago, we're not having these discussions, right? That's right. Hard to say that was way before my time in faith, but I would say it is a challenging time to be ahead of HR or as I said, the steward of culture,

steward of talent and really, but it's challenging, but it's exciting, right? It's a really, it's a fantastic time for someone that has aspired to be an HR leader or be in human resources. Such an exciting time because talent really matters and culture really matters and we see this now more than ever.

What would you say is the state, and I invite both of you to chime in, what would you say is the state of diversity in corporate America? Oh, boy, that's a loaded question, right? I mean, Greg, you're the expert here as well, but I would say it's in some ways, it's in discovery because I think companies who thought

that they had it figured out are figuring out that they actually didn't have to figure it out. It's evolving because a voice is being found and I find that absolutely beautiful, right? Where there's a voice that's now growing across our workforces across corporate America and we have to listen and we have to pay attention to that voice.

And so it's ever-evolving. You know, Greg, you've written that so many organizations hire for diversity but manage to assimilation. So I think that speaks to what Elcio was just saying, right? Yes. This is not just hiring people of different colors, it's more than that.

Every organization has diversity, faith. Diversity are multiple dimensions of identity that we all have. And so diversity is not where the real opportunity is. The opportunity is around inclusion. Inclusion's the verb. And, you know, that statement I made is one that I've carried with me for a really long time

because of my own experiences in previous organizations. You know, companies do hire for diversity and I think every organization has diversity statements or some commitment around diversity. But oftentimes what happens is, you know, people once in the organization, they aren't always in an environment that truly understands how to get the best

out of their talents, how to cultivate the skills and as I like to say, their superpower in the organization. We all want to be part of a team where we're contributing and adding value to our full capacity. And that's how teams and organizations win. When every single person on the team, when the entire organization is sort of moving together

around common objectives and everybody's contributing in meaningful ways, that's what inclusion looks like. And so this notion of assimilation, I think has been something that has really hampered diversity and inclusion efforts from making real change in corporate America that we've all wanted to see.

And when you don't have that real change, do you all have personal experiences with companies not performing at their best, not even knowing how good they could be if they truly had diversity and inclusion and took a look at bias? You see it every day. I mean, I think this awakening

that companies have had over the last six months is too long and coming. I think more often we've seen examples of certain industries and individual organizations who have valued and certainly benefited from it. But more importantly, Faith, there have been studies and there's real empirical data that has been studied over a series of years

by McKinsey and others that have shown that diverse organizations, those companies that are more diverse at the board and the senior executive level actually perform better financially in terms of earnings, before interests and taxes. And those companies that have gender diversity perform anywhere from 15 to 20% better.

Those companies that have ethnic diversity perform anywhere from 25 to 30% better. There's real data in studies that have been done on it. And so I think this notion of companies that don't embrace it are doing it at their own peril and are missing out on real opportunities to grow overall. So both of you are dedicated to making sure people feel included

and that their voices matter. So would you say that becoming aware of implicit bias and having anti-bias training within your company is a tool to achieve those goals of having people feel included and that their voices matter? Is that where implicit bias awareness comes in? Yeah, I think it's yes.

The short answer is yes. Which is why we've made anti-bias training mandatory for every single employee in our organization. Every employee in our organization takes anti-bias training. Not only do they take anti-bias training, they take cultural identity training. And so we go a step further with our mandatory training

to make sure that it's not enough to just be aware of the importance of anti-bias. But you have to understand the importance that identity plays into the question you asked before about why women and minorities have been shut out of many of the leadership opportunities. But what's also critical in this conversation, faith around bias is the notion that

we have to have different expectations around what leadership looks like in our organization. The awareness is one thing, but to take action on it is vitally important because we're missing out on opportunities to grow the pie for everybody in the organization. And leaders have to have new definitions around what leadership looks like.

That's why people of color and women have been shut out of C-sweets and organizations for so long is because they weren't viewed as leaders. They weren't viewed as having leadership qualities and the ways in which they demonstrated skills and talents weren't valued in the same way. Back to the point Elsie was making about everybody's voice matters.

And so I think what's happening is we're having different conversations now around how people contribute in differential ways and what leadership looks like. And there's not one way to lead. There's multiple ways of leading that actually drive better outcomes even than what we've seen to this point.

Elsie, I have to ask you, you're 10 weeks on the job. Have you had your implicit bias training? Was it recent? I have, I've gone through my training and... Did you do okay? I'm crossing. I did okay. I did okay, but it's an ever-evolving story, Faith.

Sure, I mean, honestly, did you learn something? Like when you went through, did you have an uncomfortable moment or a realization that you didn't know before? There is, with implicit bias to me, it is always a learning opportunity, right? So for sure, as I went through the training, you learn two or three new things.

I can share a brief story with you because its implicit bias is so near and dear to me. I went through a personal experience with this in my career. I grew up in Brazil, went to school in Brazil, and after college came to the U.S. and along my career journey, I will mention the company's name, it would be embarrassing to them.

But along my career, I decided to make career change and decided to, back in the 90s, there used to be this thing called job fairs that we would all go to and all the employers were there, right? And I went to this job fair and passed out likely about 50 resumes across all the different job booths. And with a name like Elcio Barcelos, I didn't think anything about it.

I just, I didn't think people would think anything differently for me as a potential candidate. And when it was all said and done, Faith, I probably had about four or five callbacks at most out of 50 or so that I had passed out. So then I got the little pamphlet from the job fair and I said, I don't know why I thought about it. I honestly, I wasn't aware of any type of complicit bias

at that point, but I thought, what if I were to change my name? And my full name, you asked me earlier, I said Elcio Barcelos. My full name is actually Elcio Robert Thomas Barcelos. So I said, I'm not gonna really lie. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drop the Elcio. I'll be Thomas. I'll drop the Elcio, make it an E.

I'll drop the Barcelos and go by E. Robert Thomas. Yeah. And then what happened? But the same resume. Nothing changed on the resume, but it was now I was E. Robert Thomas. So I mailed the resume out to all the employees that were on the fair that I had dropped my resume to.

And I probably got about 35 or so callbacks from that. Now, interesting enough, I did land a job and the company that I landed the job offered me, offered a job to E. Robert Thomas, which was a big problem when I got my first paycheck because my account was Elcio Barcelos. The day that I was supposed to start, literally the day I was supposed to start,

I received one of those automatic emails or mess emails, right? It was a letter in the mail at the time that said, thank you Elcio Barcelos for applying. You don't have an opportunity for you right now. And but I appreciate your application. But the same day, the same day I was supposed to start, as one, I got a decline from the other, right?

So when you say is the training a tool that we have, a training is a tool that we have, but it has to be much more than a tool. It has to be a way of life. It has to be something that we are open to adjusting and learning and applying, but it boils down to, am I listening? Am I paying attention to my surroundings?

Do I know what matters to one? What matters to the other? Am I able to look through those things? And look, you can have the most impactful experience and then tomorrow you still learn something new. You know, just on a broader scale, what do you think the consequences are of not addressing bias in the workplace?

There are not, you know, not every big company in America is doing what you're doing. What are the consequences of this? I, you know, it's to ignore it is to ignore the obvious. And unfortunately there are companies that still do ignore it. And in a quick summary, I was meeting with a number of heads of HR recently in a little round table session,

just talking amongst ourselves, trying to figure out how to manage through COVID and social unrest and all these things. And one of my peers said, wow, it's like, we just had this trifecta right a tough year financially and we just had this COVID thing hit us and now social unrest is hitting us. And my reply was, but social unrest may be active now,

but it's not just hitting you. This is something that's been real for a long time. And so to ignore is it's, it's to not be realistic to know that the world is evolving around you. And that's that voice I mentioned earlier. There is a voice that is growing and string and we need to listen to that voice. It really matters to listen to that voice.

Thanks so much for listening to Real Good by US Bank. If you like what you heard, listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. See you next week. So listen to Smart Podcast. We'll see you next week. Smart Podcast to learn important things. I hope you liked that episode of Real Good.

And obviously on Tuesday, we'll be back with a brand new episode. I might even do a little bonus field trip one from the road because I'm going to cicada country, Ohio. I'm gonna check out these bugs. Okay, also I accidentally dyed my hair a color I did not intend to. And now it matches my mustard sweater perfectly.

I don't know what I'm gonna do about it. Okay, bye-bye.