It's About Time We Challenge Our Unconscious Biases | Juliette Powell | TEDxStLouisWomen

I am delighted to be here today but I hope I don't disappoint you and I say that truly from the bottom of my heart because I am NOT going to talk about what I thought it was going to talk about I had prepared this since June I knew exactly how to make you laugh how to make you cry how to push all your buttons how to make you go home feeling empowered and wanting to do something great and then I got in this cab at 5 o'clock in the morning yesterday to come here and my taxi driver asked me what I did and I kind of stopped in my tracks cuz I wasn't quite awake you know it's five o'clock in the morning and not ready to have a conversation necessarily yet with a stranger but I was curious to see what he was gonna say so he looks at me through the mirror as he was driving and he says oh of course you're a model very old model yes that's me you're a singer no can't sing a note oh you must be a basketball player sorry disappoint none of the above now of course I had to ask him why he thought that I did those things and he said well look at you indeed I do whether I want to or not I have to look at myself and challenge myself on an ongoing basis and that's when I realized that the conversation I had had the day before the conversation that's stuck in my mind and wouldn't allow me to sleep even though I knew I had to rest to be able to be with you today it just stayed there and it bothered me now I'm referring to a conversation that I had with a very close friend of mine and we were working on a white paper for PricewaterhouseCoopers and we were thinking about technology and I said you know I'm going to st. Louis and I'm very excited about it and so he goes online and he saw that indeed I was speaking and he saw the bio that was read before I came on stage today and he said Juliet what is up with you so what do you mean and he said you know I started on this TEDx night Lewis site but now I'm just curious I'm going through all the sites where your bio is posted including LinkedIn and your own website Julia Telkom and you never mention the fact that you were Miss Canada why is that I said you're right it's probably because it's not relevant so what do you mean it's not relevant it's part of who you are it's part of what gave you your start and let me contextualize that for you so when I was a teenager I had an amazing boyfriend who really believed in me and we used to do math together that's how we met actually it was my math tutor and I got very excited about math because of you know the interactions that we had and so when he said to me that a friend of his had entered a pageant and come in second because of the way that she looked in terms of her race it bothered me it really bothered me to my core and it bothered me because I didn't want to believe that I live in a world in which I can't do anything I mean anything that I want to do so I decided was going to do something about it I had never even watched a beauty pageant in my life at the time I was studying mechanical engineering and that I was still in high school but my teacher had gotten me a summer assistantship to study mechanical engineering so it was all the more important for me because it was the first time that somebody actually believed in me outside of my mom so I enter the pageant with this thing in mind of course I could win if I really want to at this time I'm not taking it very very seriously because I'm trying to keep up with school while I'm doing the pageant and next thing I know ladies and gentlemen the next Miss Canada Juliet Bell and I'm and if you ever watch the video of this I literally I freeze I freeze because at that moment I understood that my entire life entire life trajectory in fact had changed I had signed a contract and for a year I had to be this person and I didn't know what that meant well I can tell you the press went crazy in Canada they went absolutely gaga there had never been anybody that looked like me that represented Canada so great I had somehow broken the race barrier and at the same time there were other press that were saying well wait a minute now you might have kind of made this whole idea about gender equality even more challenging for your generation of women and the women to come and not really bother me so I spent the next 20 years of my life using technology to completely reinvent myself and never a word about the very motor that made me take chances in technology that made me want to build companies that made me want to understand how social data influences people around the world and how big data in turn uses that social data as fuel for artificial intelligence and all of its predictive capabilities the very thing that got me started is the very thing I never share and so when my friend brought this to my attention he followed up with is it because you're ashamed and I really really really stopped I really wondered am i ashamed and if I am ashamed why would I be ashamed is it because that I've bought into the notion that someone who is considered to be physically attractive can't possibly be intelligent I don't think so obviously not obviously not but something even more insidious had happened in all of my time fighting to make sure that I was lucky enough to be one of the few visible minorities one of the few women to be inside of boardrooms advising them on research and development on what they should be investing in on what they should be thinking about on where we could possibly go if we co-create the future together and when I say this I don't just mean in terms of the corporations that hire me but rather in terms of all of us because that's what I really really believe in so I spent all of this time investing in those ideas and acting upon them and yet somebody who knows me incredibly well put a light on something that I was completely blind to my own conscious or unconscious bias now all of us have unconscious bias all of us and when you think about it you might even find your own so I was backstage earlier and I was speaking with some of the other presenters today and I was speaking with some of the ladies during lunch as well those that arrived earlier and I asked them what's your unconscious bias and some said intelligence when I look at somebody depending on how they present themselves I will judge whether they're as intelligent as me more intelligent than me less intelligent than me my bias might be tall people and in fact in society there have been many studies that have shown that tall people are perceived to be more powerful therefore the leader of the group one of the men said to me before I came on stage that perhaps the unconscious bias in society is that women are passive I can tell you a lot of things pacify I am NOT so what is this Collective bias that we have all of us right why is it that I've been fighting against the idea of living in a man's world and yet I'm perpetuating it by hiding from the consequences of being attractive that makes no sense what am i doing and so I have no real answers for you and I'm all the more embarrassed that because I work using social data and artificial intelligence and that I do sit in the boardrooms and that I write thought leadership articles for large corporations that you know get inspired and that it makes them act in certain ways which affects all of us because multinationals whether we like it or not affect all of us what have I been doing well again on the good side this is wonderful it has pushed me to try to surpass myself and on the negative side I've perpetuated so many unconscious biases throughout my career that I'll never be able to see the repercussions of them because I don't know what they are so I'm really thankful to my friends on one end and I'm really thankful to the taxi driver on the other end who just reinforced the fact that of course I mean I must be this or of course I must be that according to the way that I look but I don't buy it anymore I had to be conscious of it but now that I am I need to start examining every little bit of my life every time I make a decision every time I say something to someone is that really what I think or am I just toting the social line the thing that we all say to each other because it's easier it's faster and that's how unconscious bias works right we've got this framework this pattern in our minds of the way that the world works and we don't have to think about it on an ongoing basis because we know we've got mental models of how things work but if your mental model diminishes you or a part of you or shames you it's about time that we change some of our mental models so I'm tired of drinking the kool-aid I'm I've always wanted to be seen for who I am but the truth is that I am still exactly the same person that I was one I won the Miss Canada pageant I'm still the same person who wants to make a positive difference in the world in this particular case I use technology I use journalism I use conversations I use connection but I'm still the same girl so why is it then that none of my clients know that I've been Miss Canada why is it that on my own website I can't talk about it comfortably well the key is yet because as I talk about it more as I think about it more I'm changing the pattern the modeling that I've adopted despite myself the patriarch model of what life is about of our place within mankind is it really about mankind or is about humanity one of the reasons I'm bringing this up is not just to embarrass myself in front of a large audience but because I also realize that not only do we all do it but when we do it remember those social data trails that are feeding the algorithms that are feeding the prediction of what we like in terms of our movies in terms of our purchases in terms of our mates right we are feeding those things using our social trails the little crumbs of our texts of our tweets of our Instagram photos all the details that we don't think about because it's automatic and it's easy and it's quick and it's fun so we're spreading our unconscious biases every single time we communicate and therefore we're training like we train our children the algorithms and the artificial intelligence BOTS with those biases and again they're serving as the predictions and they're serving as the the movies and they're saying that more and more right different fields will become automated and we will have more customized services based on our preferences but if our preferences aren't actually based on what we believe in but rather what we've bought into that's a really scary self-perpetuating circle and that's why I'm here today to share my discovery of my own unconscious bias with you so that you can start thinking about yours and that we actually can start co-creating the world that we want to be in together that we'd love to see our daughters and our sons in together moving forward so I encourage all of you to think about that and to think about who in your life knows you really really well and is honest enough and capable enough to tell you what your particular bias might be and the fact that you don't know about it it's probably true and then I encourage you to go get a second person this time not necessarily somebody who thinks the same way as you perhaps doesn't even agree with you doesn't even have to like you that person should tell you what your unconscious biases and if you don't have anybody like that just jump in a new bird jump in a cab start chatting thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 124,653

Rating: 4.5323381 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Women

Id: thkmVv54e6M

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2016