When I talked to a gender-bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university off the record, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Based on the researcher’s experience, being a short woman in Corporate America requires that I'm twice as smart, twice as competent and twice as hardworking as a tall white man.
It's not like people readily believe that tall white men naturally make better leaders. But that's the thing about unconscious bias—it's an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon.
Unconscious bias is as old as human beings, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment. In other words, we usually don’t have ill intentions when we discriminate.
The good news is that people are getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as mastering business process improvement techniques and strategies that root it out before it does too much damage to a company's culture.
Let's examine a few places bias at work commonly show up.
Resume Filters
You may not realize it, but people don't review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, address, photo or educational institution.
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