FOUR
Bias and Privilege in Mentoring
The impact of bias and privilege on how we view ourselves and others cannot be underestimated and is often hard to see—especially when we are looking at ourselves. Yet even though it may be difficult (self-understanding often means going deeper than new mentors and mentees expect or are comfortable with), this is a critical area to explore. As we become aware of own biases and privilege, we also become aware of our assumptions, behavior, and interpretation about the others with whom we interact.
Exploring Bias
Bias is an inclination in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another. It can, and often does, lead to prejudice—an adverse judgment or opinion formed without supporting knowledge or facts. It is important to distinguish between the two concepts, since many people whom no one would describe as prejudiced may in fact regularly demonstrate bias. Biases form our own cultural contexts and the conclusions we draw to make sense of observations we have or lessons we learn. Often, they are invisible to those who have them—which is to say, all of us. We may demonstrate bias without being consciously aware that we are doing so.
Although many people don’t think they have biases, the fact of the matter is that we are all biased for or against something. Some biases serve us well. For example, as a student, I may develop a bias for languages over science, technology, engineering, and math courses because language arts courses come more easily to me, or because I had a difficult biology class in which I struggled. The bad experience in biology might lead to a prejudice that all science classes will be difficult, and I should avoid learning in every related topic. This bias might lead me to discovering and developing my strengths in language or lead me on a path to a career where I use my language skills; or it might disadvantage me, steering me away from courses or subjects that are science based. This could adversely impact me by causing me to avoid classes that challenge me, or it might lead me to a new interest.
In the workplace, bias can be limiting in a way we might not even notice. For example, let’s say that I need to hire people who have the skills and competencies lacking on our team. I might have a bias for candidates with certain work experience, training, or prior employers. Perhaps this is because new hires with these qualifications have been successful in the past. My bias may seem to serve me by shortening the length of the hiring process, but by not considering candidates with experience or training with which I am unfamiliar, I might miss out on hiring someone who has a different perspective and outlook that might enhance my team.
In the context of mentoring, bias may prevent us from ever getting to know our partner on anything more than a superficial level—we fail to see the 80 percent below the waterline. For example, my bias may steer me to look for a mentoring partner whom I view as “like me,” or to assume that the person I view as “like me” necessarily shares my views. Although this approach seems to serve our mentoring relationship by creating a strong initial connection through our commonality, we both miss out on the benefits of mentoring across differences. Compounding this, if my mentoring partner seems (superficially) to be “like me,” I will tend to overlook (and therefore fail to explore) the ways in which we may be different. At best, this results in a missed opportunity for growth and learning; at worst, it leads to a mentoring relationship that has not met its potential.
How Biases Evolve
Biases form from generalizations we make based on our experiences, on how we are raised, on the beliefs we have, and on lessons we learned from friends, family, and others in our environment. Although bias can serve as a shortcut, helping us make quicker decisions, it can also lead to overgeneralization, discrimination, and missed experiences and opportunities.
Sometimes our biases arise from our fears. We create them to help us feel safe, such as a bias against crowds or a bias in favor of a nine-to-five career. As humans, we form biases not just for or against things but also for or against people or groups of people. Many of these biases about people are unconscious and come from cultural conditioning, stereotyping (assumptions about a broad group of people made based on limited data), or generalizing from past experience. We can manage our bias by noticing when we are making decisions or judgments based on fact or based on assumptions that come from generalization or stereotypes.28
Managing Our Bias
Learning that we are biased for or against a group of people can be surprising, enlightening, and often disheartening because we envision ourselves as fair and just. The fallacy in this thinking is that if we are biased, we must also be unfair or unjust. We equate being biased with being “bad” in some way. Although bias can lead to prejudice, having bias does not mean we are bad or racist or bigoted. We can manage our bias by being aware of it and working to counteract it by engaging in experiences that lead us to make judgments based on experience rather than on generalization.
Unconscious Bias
The most insidious biases are the ones we are unconscious of. Research shows that most people vastly underestimate the extent to which they are biased.29 In 1995 three researchers—Tony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek—created the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures unconscious preference based on a number of categories, including race, age, gender, and sexual orientation.30 The IAT, a short online assessment offered for free, requires you to associate common adjectives with images to help assess unconscious biases for particular groups and bring these forward so that they can be managed. The results can often be eye-opening (as they were for each of the coauthors).
Unconscious bias shows up in many ways and may not be as straightforward as a preference for a particular race, gender, age, and so on. We may, for example, be biased for or against a certain way of thinking or a specific attitude. This type of bias can take many forms. Taking time to become aware of two types of biases—namely confirmation bias and affinity bias—can help you recognize your own biases when you are exhibiting them.
Confirmation bias: Confirmation bias is the tendency to interpret things in a way that confirms and reinforces your own perceptions or point of view.
After her first meeting with Christopher, Mia was frustrated that they hadn’t gotten to goals, but she wasn’t surprised. Frankly, it was sort of what she expected. Throughout law school and her legal career, there had been many times her law professors and the partners had talked about the importance of goals, but there were never any concrete suggestions offered and no one ever seemed to make time to talk with her about what she actually wanted to achieve and how she would get there. She had hoped this time might be different, but now it wasn’t looking promising.
Notice here how Mia interpreted the meeting to confirm her expectation that the mentoring program was just more unproductive “talk” about goals, instead of merely Christopher’s attempt to slow things down and build trust. This is confirmation bias in action: when there are multiple ways to interpret an event or behavior, we find the one that confirms our prior experiences or bias.
Affinity bias: When you gravitate to people with whom you share common interests, traits, or background, you may be demonstrating affinity bias. This is the propensity to prefer people with whom you share an affinity.
Christopher recalled his experience on the advancement committee when the law firm was evaluating associates for partnership. He had voted for Stu, the associate whose career path was most similar to his own. Stu had “grown up” at F3. He had started his career there and dealt with cases like those Christopher had worked on, and he was well-known to the firm leadership. The other candidate, Frank, had come to the law firm just three years before. He had extensive experience in patent litigation, an area with which Christopher was unfamiliar. There was only one spot left for partnership that year. When it came time to vote, Christopher voted for Stu because he was confident that Stu would have acquired the requisite skills needed for partnership along the way.
» YOUR TURN «
1. If you took the IAT earlier, you are probably already thinking about what you’ve learned about your own biases, and you have probably noticed that there are certain situations in which you are predisposed to a bias or judgment. Jot down your thoughts about that here.
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Even if you did not take this test, reflect on your own experiences as you answer the rest of these questions.
2. Where are you looking for evidence to confirm a preconceived judgment or opinion?
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3a. Jot down the ten people with whom you most closely associate at work.
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3b. Are they similar to you in race, age, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic background? Consider whether you regularly seek the perspective of someone who has a substantially different background from you. How much do you know about the backgrounds of these ten people you’ve just listed?
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4. What can you do to expand the diversity of your inner circle and to create more awareness about their backgrounds and identity?
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5. Pay attention to how confirmation bias and affinity bias show up in your daily interactions. What ideas do you have right now to mitigate those biases when you recognize, in real time, that you are demonstrating them?
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Exploring Power and Privilege
Privilege is usually tied to socioeconomic status or a specific element of identity (such as level of education or perhaps an Ivy League education) and is often correlated with power, the ability of a group to influence systems and other people.31 Whereas bias is a preference or inclination that results in a conscious or unconscious disadvantage or advantage to others, privilege is an unearned advantage to yourself that results in a disadvantage to others. What’s important to understand is that privilege, like bias, may not be perceived by the person exhibiting it.
In We Can’t Talk about That at Work, the global organizational development and diversity and inclusion consultant Mary-Frances Winters captures the notion of privilege at its very essence. Privilege, she writes, “refers to the advantages that people benefit from based solely on their social status. It is a status that is conferred by society and perpetuated by systems that favor certain groups. This status is not necessarily asked for or appropriated by individuals, which is why it can be difficult for people to see their own privilege.”32
The topic of privilege is both misunderstood and sure to ruffle feathers. For those in a dominant group it sometimes feels difficult to swallow that the status they enjoy is, at least in part, due to something that is unearned. After a training at which we (the authors) discussed privilege, a senior white male protested vehemently, “My status is not unearned. I came from nothing and worked hard for what I achieved!” We responded that recognizing your privilege was only that—seeing that (in his case) his gender and race automatically privileged him in the mainstream US business culture in which he worked. “It does not mean conceding that your success was easy, that you did not work hard, or that you were handed title, wealth, or anything else,” we explained. “It simply gave you a leg up you might not otherwise have had.” We could see he was considering it, but it’s a hard concept for many people.
Privilege is relative, and dominant groups in society have benefitted the most from unearned power. Whether you have worked hard and been rewarded for your hard work, if you identify with a dominant group (be it race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status), you have undoubtedly benefited from some unearned privilege. This doesn’t mean you have to feel guilty; but you do need to recognize that others may be experiencing disadvantages you might not be able to begin to understand without meaningful, mutually respectful, and curious dialogue.
It is common for those with privilege not to realize that they have it. One big reason is that we tend to see ourselves as individuals, while others may automatically see us as part of a group. Trying to see ourselves as others see us can be an eye-opening step toward self-awareness and change. In mentoring, the mentor may have an assumed privilege of knowing more about the workplace than the mentee; or the mentor may be in the workplace majority in one or more categories. For example, Mia may automatically view Christopher as a person of privilege because he is a white European male who is a powerful partner in the firm. And she would be correct in her view. For mentors, understanding the privilege that comes with the job is key to understanding their mentoring relationship.
Why does privilege matter so much? If you are interested in the topic of privilege, a must-read early article on the topic is “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” by Peggy McIntosh.33 McIntosh, a white woman, tackles the topic of privilege by race. She lists twenty-six conditions of privilege that white persons can count on, and that African Americans or other people of color do not experience. These include privileges characterized by the following statements:
» If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area that I can afford and in which I want to live.
» I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
» I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
» I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the newspaper and see people of my race widely represented.
» Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
» I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
» If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
Note that the privilege McIntosh addresses is privilege of skin color, but the same concepts apply to any privilege based on status. “I could think of myself as belonging in major ways,” McIntosh notes, “and of making social systems work for me.”34 This concept of presumed belonging is at the heart of privilege, and the key to recognizing privilege is to see where you might have presumed belonging based on some element of your identity (for example, education, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, gender, native language, ethnicity, etc.) where someone else might not.
Because privilege arises from a presumed sense of belonging, it is important to remember that privilege is not solely the domain of mentors, bosses, or people higher in the org chart. Mentees, too, benefit from privilege, sometimes from privileges their mentors do not have. We often find that, to their detriment, mentoring pairs remember to talk about the privilege of the mentor but forget about the mentee. For example, we’ve heard the same story from more than one woman in senior management in the technology sector. Often, early in their career, they were the only woman at their organization and struggled to prove themselves in what was (and still is, to a large degree) a man’s world. Today, they find themselves successfully mentoring men who automatically benefit from that male privilege. In each case it was eye-opening for the mentee to learn the impact of his privilege on the mentor, and for the mentor to reflect on the personal qualities it takes to face organizational and industry barriers to inclusion.
Finally, what about the person without privilege? Just as the person with the privilege may not know they have the privilege, it is quite likely that the person without the privilege does recognize that they do not have the same sense of belonging. Not only does this impact opportunity, but it is undoubtedly reflected in their worldview and cultural lens. This, too, is a topic for reflection and discussion between partners.
» YOUR TURN «
1. Look at excerpted statements from McIntosh’s list above. How do these resonate with your view of privilege?
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2. Where do you experience a presumed sense of belonging? What does that tell you about the privileges from which you benefit?
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3. Where and when have you experienced a lack of privilege? How might you describe to your mentoring partner the obstacles you have faced as a result?
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Now that you have spent some time surfacing your own biases and assumptions, the real differences that lie between you and your mentoring partner begin to become clearer. Next is the “Learn from Differences” part of the book, and we’ll begin with preparing the mentoring relationship.
Chapter Recap
1. Everyone is biased. When we take the time for self-awareness, we can explore our biases and manage those biases so that they don’t unfairly or unconsciously exclude or disadvantage others.
2. Bias shows up in various ways. Two common kinds of bias are confirmation bias (favoring information that confirms our existing beliefs) and affinity bias (bias toward things/people/beliefs that are “like me”).
3. Understanding your privilege (or lack thereof) is important to neutralizing power in a mentoring relationship and relating better to your mentoring partner. Privilege means unearned advantage. If you have privilege, this does not mean that you have not earned what you have, but it does mean that you may have a presumed sense of belonging that others don’t have, which makes it more likely that you will succeed in a given situation.