Judith Williams_Unconscious Bias_SXW2O
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Unconscious biases are hard to detect because we can only consciously process a tiny fraction of the vast amount of information we receive. Even slight biases can significantly impact our social interactions, memory, decision-making, and beliefs. To address this issue, Google has trained over 28,000 employees on unconscious bias to give them a shared understanding and language to recognize and counteract subtle biases, with the goal of making the workplace more inclusive and equitable.
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Judith Williams_Unconscious Bias_SXW2O
- 1. Unconscious Bias Little Things Make a Big Difference
- 4. We receive 11 million bits of information every moment. We can only consciously process 40 bits.
- 6. Even a tiny bit of bias can have big consequences.
- 9. Social Biases Memory Biases Decision-Making Biases Probability & Belief Biases
- 11. So what is Google doing to bust bias?
- 12. 28,000Googlers have participated in UB@Work and now have a common understanding and language Unconscious Bias @ Work
- 13. EducationBias Busting @ Work… calling out bias
- 14. ~10%
- 15. Commit to one action: 1. Structure for success 2. Collect data 3. Evaluate subtle messages 4. Hold everyone accountable
Editor's Notes
- This is a story of how our brains evolved. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we were competing on the plains of Africa against animals with claws, and horns, and teeth. So to avoid becoming… photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bhimbetka_Cave_Paintings.jpg
- …this we develop our big brains. Our brain is perfectly suited for quickly filtering huge amounts of information, prioritizing, categorizing, and summarizing our surroundings for us unconsciously. This served us well for millennia, when our unconscious biases helped us avoid being eaten. photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Male_Lion_and_Cub_Chitwa_South_Africa_Luca_Galuzzi_2004_edit1.jpg
- We live in a different world today, but the need for filtering is just as important. Avoiding cars, ordering your coffee. Most of what we’re feeling and deciding is driven by unconscious processing. This is very functional. It is only dysfunctional sometimes - like in work environments. Fast forward to today’s world, while it’s not the lions, and tigers and bears we’re worried about, the threat is data overload. and it too can have costly implications. How many of you, raise your hand, have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, fitbit, online apps? ADD EXAMPLE OF BECOMING CONSCIOUS study link: http://www.cookross.com/docs/UnconsciousBias.pdf image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_times_square_night_2013.jpg
- If there’s one thing we hope you learn today it’s that YOU’RE BIASED! Surprise! But don’t feel bad. This is one of the key goals of our talk today - to have everyone here acknowledge that we, as humans, have unconscious bias. And so does everyone in your company. You also need to know IT MATTERS! Just because we all know everyone is biased doesn’t mean we’re are doomed - we can and must consider our biases for the good of our companies, the industry, and society. photo: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Sam_(pointing_finger).jpg
- Here’s a quick illustration of why bias matters. Even the smallest expression of bias can have a substantial impact over time. Methodology: 500 positions at L1. At L8, only 10 positions remain. To get from L1-L2, it’s 100% based on performance.15% attrition at each level, which are replaced by level below. Replacements have the highest performance scores from the level below. Performance scores were randomly “assigned” to men and women, with 1% positive bias introduced to men’s scores. The way that they introduced the variance was the women received score between 1-100 and men between 1-101. This is smaller than the difference between a 3.3 and a 3.4 on our performance score. Ran 20 promotion simulations and averaged results. Female representation decreased slightly with each simulation. Data for the room: 43% Women; 57% Men
- http://ncase.me/polygons/ 1. Small individual bias → Large collective bias. When someone says a culture is shapist, they're not saying the individuals in it are shapist. They're not attacking you personally. 2. The past haunts the present. Your bedroom floor doesn't stop being dirty just coz you stopped dropping food all over the carpet. Creating equality is like staying clean: it takes work. And it's always a work in progress. 3. Demand diversity near you. If small biases created the mess we're in, small anti-biases might fix it. Look around you. Your friends, your colleagues, that conference you're attending. If you're all triangles, you're missing out on some amazing squares in your life - that's unfair to everyone. Reach out, beyond your immediate neighbors.
- Add data points on what tech looks like As I’m sure this room is well aware, there’s a significant gender gap in venture-funded startups. A recent study showed that investors prefer pitches from attractive men. Across a field setting (three entrepreneurial pitch competitions in the United States) and two controlled experiments, we find that investors prefer entrepreneurial pitches presented by male entrepreneurs compared with pitches presented by female entrepreneurs, even when the content of the pitch is the same. This effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males are particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness does not matter among female entrepreneurs. These findings fundamentally advance the science related to gender, physical attractiveness, psychological persuasion, bias, role expectations, and entrepreneurship. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/03/06/1321202111.abstract
- So now that we know bias busting is impt at Google, what were we going to do about it?
- Educating - We needed to educate people, at scale, to do a few things: Ensure everyone had the same baseline knowledge Create a common language to talk about UB Establish a norm, that it’s ok to talk about UB, and it’s expected that you call it out We launched UB@Work and have since trained about half the company. The launch process wasn’t easy but here are a few things that we did that we think would be helpful if you decide to do your own launch: Understand your audience - we know ours needs data, so we included lots of internal and external research to convince ppl this was an issue that needed their attn Pilot the content, especially with your skeptics - share it with some trusted groups of individuals to get their feedback, and share it with some skeptics to get their feedback as well → remember diversity of perspective will yield a better product Get leadership support - our leadership were the first ones to go through the content and start to support it’s rollout in their orgs; they began verbal supporters with and without our central team help
- How many of you in here design or build products at work? (pause for them to raise their hands) And how many of you are only building products for the people on your immediate team? Probably not, right? You’re building your products and experiences for users all over the world, with a diverse set of skills, abilities and use cases. You need to channel those early on. Ideally you have great representation among your team members, but when that’s not available, perspective-taking is a useful exercise. When YouTube first launched the video upload app for iOS, 5-10% of user-uploaded videos were upside down. Were people shooting videos incorrectly? No -- our early design was the problem. It was optimized for right-handed users and didn't account for the unique perspectives of lefties. We don't have mean-spirited engineers or any malice for left-handed users: What happened was we unconsciously created an app that worked brilliantly for our almost exclusively right-handed developer team.
- Recap the four buckets. Hopefully you can find one thing that will help make you and your company better.