How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias | Valerie Alexander | TEDxPasadena

let's start with a brain exercise I'm going to ask you to visualize three scenarios the visualization part is very important so please close your eyes take a deep breath and imagine you're late to catch a flight you rush through the airport you make it through security you run to the gate you make it down the jetway you step on the plane just as they close the door behind you and the pilot steps out of a cockpit to say hi you get to your destination you go to a local restaurant and you have the best meal of your life and really enjoy this there's no calories and visualization and at the table next to you is a couple happily celebrating their anniversary the next morning you go to the biggest technology conference in the world and the CEO of this year's hot hottest tech startup just took the stage to speak now you should have a solid picture of all of that so open your eyes because I have some questions for you in your mental image was the pilot black was the married couple two men did the tech CEO on stage look like me it's okay if one or all of your answers is no your brain creates images of what's familiar it's less of a fan of what's not familiar the things I mentioned are generally less familiar the black pilot the same-sex married couple the female tech CEO no matter how much you might love the idea of those things when immediately confronted with them the amygdala that's the most ancient part of your brain signals the hypothalamus to fire up the hypothalamic pituitary axis which is where the brain and the endocrine system intersect so at this point your adrenal glands release cortisol into your bloodstream which triggers your stress response this is the physiology of stress according to the Dartmouth undergraduate Journal of science and it happens in a matter of milliseconds long before you have the chance to consciously think I'm so happy these two men have the freedom to marry who they love as dr. Susan Fiske explains when it comes to unfamiliar social situations there is ample evidence that encountering something fundamentally different from what we expect elicits a stronger activation in the amygdala and encountering something or someone we proceed as the norm this is what kept our species alive for millions of years this instantaneous instinctive response triggers fight-or-flight which is what kept us from being eaten by saber-toothed Tigers or killed by a member of a foreign tribe but in modern society our brains still do this when we encounter the unexpected our heart races slightly our blood pressure goes up we sweat a little and for no discernable reason we just feel stressed out there's a Chinese blessing that doubles as a curse may you live in interesting times I am the CEO of a tech company right now which makes these some very interesting times I recently had a call with a potential investor in which everything clicked he got the concept he loved what we were building he had key insight about our tech and so we agreed on a day to speak again and he said great why don't you ping me then and I said you got it and then he said oh wait is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you because he's a man and I'm a woman and in the tech world right now careers are being destroyed and entire venture funds collapsing because some men have behaved incredibly inappropriately towards women he was afraid of using the phrase ping me now that might seem ridiculous but we now live in a world where words and phrases rapidly take on new meaning if you need proof just look at the Facebook post of any guy who got a text from his mom that says hi honey if you want to come over tonight we can Netflix and chill if you don't understand why that's funny google netflix and chill' he asked is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you and there it was I could practically hear the cortisol coursing through his bloodstream no matter how well we clicked or what he thought of my company it was still in his brain that I'm not just a CEO I'm a female CEO and working with me might be a minefield of dangerous he has to think about not because of anything he would ever do or anything I would ever do but because men neither of us had ever met couldn't control their bro havior and women we both respect bravely chose not to remain silent because speaking up is the only way we're going to make progress so in addition to all the risks inherent in investing in an early-stage startup company there's an added layer of much scarier risks that come from working with me the irony is that while some investors might feel that way for another cohort because I'm over 40 they don't even see me I am simultaneously both highly dangerous and invisible [Laughter] who knows that at this stage in my career I'd become a ninja is that one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use with you I am so grateful that he asked I'm happy that he felt safe enough to ask and know that I wouldn't pummel him for it if we're going to get anywhere close to equality let's stop attacking our allies when someone is willing to admit and discuss that there might be a problem with their own behavior we can't penalize them for that how would any of us feel to be excluded from the Equality conversation because of what we visualized at the start of this talk by asking the question I knew this man was willing to examine his own behavior and I believe that the biggest stumbling block to achieving true equality is unexamined behavior when men in the startup world start to wonder if I work with women am I going to someday be the subject of an incendiary blog post the answer is no just continue to examine your behavior when working with female founders and colleagues and executives ask yourself if this was a man would I gently stroked his shoulder as I suggest we meet again what I comment on how well his t-shirt flatters his figure would I place a higher value on his appearance and his experience in determining his probability of success if not don't do it to her it's that simple sadly the much simpler response to the female threat is no you will not be the subject of an angry blogpost just don't work with women of course no one would ever say that out loud but somewhere in that amygdala a synapse fires towards flight in the face of an unnamed potential danger and stress hormones flood the bloodstream can't explain it don't know why but whatever makes you feel happy and comfortable around people who look and act like you is the same thing that makes you come up with logical explicable totally defensible reasons not to work with someone you just don't click with and when it comes to equality examining our own behavior applies to women too I started my career as a securities lawyer in the Silicon Valley at the dawn of the Internet era it was an insane time to be there as a first-year associate I build twenty eight hundred hours one night I left the office around 2 a.m. which was typical and so I left my timesheets for my assistant to process because she got in in the mornings before I did so the next day when I got to my desk about five minutes later and my assistant walks in holding my timesheets and she said would you like me to show you how to enter these into the billing system I mean sweet as pie and I sat stunned for a moment then politely declined her kind offer but that question really started to bother me why would my assistant ask the attorney she works for if I want to learn how to do her job so I started asking around of the 14 male attorneys in our group none had ever been asked if he wanted to learn how to use the billing system we had a partner who didn't know there was a billing system but of the six female attorneys I was the only one who had never entered her own timesheets some of them did it regularly in some just once or twice but they all knew how so again I asked why why would you spend a resource as precious as your time on work someone else is already getting paid to do one answer was oh it's not that hard women do this to ourselves a lot we do work that someone else's job because we're capable and we just want it to get done if a task is on someone else's to-do list please don't be the first person in line to do it for them not only does that hurt you it sets an expectation that hurts all other women the other answer to my question was it's just easier the knowing laugh translation it's just easier to do my assistants work than to make my assistant do it when we talk about gender disparity in the workplace we discuss the different treatment women receive in performance reviews and promotions or in hiring and salary negotiations but we rarely discuss the treatment women receive from subordinates we fail to acknowledge how exhausting it is to not get the basic level of support needed to do our jobs and that our male colleagues enjoy without even thinking twice about it or to get it but only because we demanded it and risk being labeled a certain word or two so we give in we pile more on our own plates because in the short term it's just easier and in the long term we burnout and leave and in hindsight everyone wonders why there aren't more women in higher ranking positions because no one ever examined the behavior the funny thing about my situation is that if you asked the assistants in that group if they treated male attorneys and female attorneys differently I'm pretty sure every one of them would have said no way and yet no male attorney had ever been asked if you wanted to learn how to do administrative work and every female attorney had that's the real danger of unexamined behavior the beliefs that we're treating everyone equally when in reality were not when we stop and examine our own behavior we can catch ourselves having different reactions to and expectations of people simply because they don't look like us or worse because they do the human brain is a remarkable achievement in evolution the prefrontal cortex evolved itself into existence when we needed more processing capacity how amazing is that but the amygdala that's been there since the earliest records of human existence when an encounter is the unexpected it floods your system with stress stress hormones fight-or-flight is what kept our species alive for millions of years none of us in 100 lifetimes will ever be able to change that trigger inside our brains so our only solution is to change what's outside our brains to consciously turn the unexpected into the expected so that we don't have unconscious hormonal reactions that keep our society from moving forward how do you do that how do you change the unexpected to the expected well there are three things you can try one as you go about your day visualize situations before they happen the meeting you're about to walk into the new doctor you're seeing the driver you just pulled over for having a broken taillight and whatever mental picture you get change it open yourself to different possibilities the second thing when we do encounter the unexpected have the courage to examine your own behavior ask yourself is this how I would handle this interaction if this person looked like me or if this person didn't look like me third make a conscious effort to expose yourself and your children and others to that which is currently unexpected and doesn't need to be higher the employees patronize the businesses vote for the candidates who have earned the position and are also challenging the norms there are enormous and long ranging consequences when we can change the unexpected to the expected consider this we have two entire generations in the world whose first visual image of a United States president is black it doesn't matter what kind of hate or ugliness might have been spoken in their homes that picture is always within the realm of the expected for them we normalize things by making them expected that is the first step towards keeping all women from being seen as higher risk investments and women of a certain age from becoming ninjas let's do another visualization once again please close your eyes and take a deep breath now imagine you're sitting in a college class on computer programming and the professor just walked in picture the Facebook post of a friend congratulating a couple who just adopted a baby visualize your state swearing-in a new governor now open your eyes and raise your hand if your mental image differs substantially now than it did at the beginning of this talk that earlier brain exercise we did is something I do at the start of most investor meetings it's my way of tricking them into examining their own behavior but it's also how I consciously turn the unexpected into the expected before we get to the point in my pitch where I share with them that when we complete a series a round of venture financing the chief financial officer we're bringing on board is black and the story of my company starts with two happily married men and the CEO of this year's hottest tech startup looks exactly like me you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 223,748

Rating: 4.8042088 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Behavior, Education

Id: GP-cqFLS8Q4

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018