I am biased against women in leadership.

Specifically, I associate men with leadership and career, and women with family.

At least, that's what the Harvard Implicit Association Test told me.¹ And, as the creators of the test recommend in their book, The Blind Spot, I took the test more than once. All six times that I took an iteration of the test, the result was the same: I harbor a strong unconscious bias against women in leadership roles.

If you asked me if I believe women belong in leadership roles, I would confidently answer yes. But, if forced to quickly pair masculine- and feminine-associated terms (man, woman, Mr., Ms.) with domains such as leadership, career, or family, my unconscious is firmly stuck in a biased rut.

Discovering this bias after taking the first test didn't make me any better at suppressing it in the retakes. My unconscious biases overrode my willpower, every single time.

Seated in our amygdala, our unconscious mind drives up to 95 percent of our decision-making.² If you've ever attended a training on unconscious bias, you've probably heard how our biases are interwoven with an unconscious recognition of patterns, a scheme whose purpose is to keep us safe from potential threats. This combination of sensory perception and unconscious interpretation signals to us how we should respond to our surroundings, including who we should regard as friend or foe.

This unconscious self-defense system keeps ticking away when we go to work, influencing who we associate with, who we think of as capable, and who we do—or don't—value.

Understanding how ever-present and influential our biases are is key to understanding why current approaches to DEI aren't working.

But the Bias—Is It Really That Bad?

In 2014, the United States Institute for Peace partnered with the Geena Davis Institute to release a study on gender in media. Part of the study involved observing people in large groups, and researchers witnessed a bizarre behavior: When women made up 17 percent of a group, men estimated that they actually made up 50 percent of the group. Once a crowd was 33 percent female, women were perceived as the majority.³ The study's participants, however, did not overestimate the presence of men in large groups.

When typically underrepresented individuals are in spaces where we're not used to seeing them, we tend to overestimate their presence. A female minority, for example, can seem like a female majority in a space that is typically male-dominated.

Most of us don't have to estimate the number of people in groups at work, but our perceptions of others' behaviors can be influenced by what we're used to seeing and have come to expect. For example, while women have been stereotyped as talking more than men, multiple studies have found that they spend less time than men talking in meetings. Their comments are shorter, and they are interrupted more often. One study found that women needed to make up 60 to 80 percent of a group before they used as much speaking time, collectively, as men in the conversation. Another now-classic study recorded university faculty meetings and found that, with one exception, the men at the meetings spoke more often, and without exception, spoke longer.⁴ The longest comment by a woman at all seven gatherings was shorter than the shortest comment by a man. In online discussions on professional topics, messages written by men have been found to be, on average, twice as long as those written by women.⁵

And despite this, our perceptions of women as “chatty” remain. As stated in a PBS summary of research on gender and language, “[In] seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that [women] are getting more than their fair share.”⁶

Because a gender-balanced workforce is a fairly new phenomenon, female voices can be heard as more present than they actually are. Even when we believe we're comparing the talking time of women to that of men, we're unconsciously comparing the talking time of women now to the talking time of women in the past.

Our perceptions of the ways people behave are built on a baseline of the ways we expect them to behave, and these differences impact how we treat people. Anything exceeding our expectations or past experiences feels extreme, and we push back against it. These unconscious expectations—the norms our amygdala clings to—sabotage one of the common approaches to DEI that has gained momentum over the last few years: leaning in.

Lean In: The Self-Empowerment Paradox

In 2013, the term “lean in” became the rallying cry of (mostly white) women looking to climb the corporate ladder and smash the glass ceiling. Sheryl Sandberg popularized the self-empowerment slogan in her monumental bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.

Initially, I was one of her early devotees. When the book came out, I was feeling stuck, but still ambitious. I wanted to be taken seriously.

Her book seemed to provide answers. If there wasn't a seat for me at the table, I was going to bring a folding chair! If someone spoke over me in a meeting, I was going to insist on finishing my point. I was going to practice The Shine Theory and highlight the work of other women in the office.

Most daunting: I was going to renegotiate my salary.

I unearthed my copy of Lean In recently and discovered that I had highlighted the entire section that gives tactical advice on ways women can negotiate and still be seen as “likable” enough for their peers to keep wanting to work with them. At the time of my Lean In enthusiasm, my employer was about to be acquired by another company, giving me an opening to renegotiate my role. I was going to pitch myself for a new position, with a new title and a specific salary. I had memorized all of Sandberg's one-liners. I substituted “we” for “I,” because a woman will still be seen as communal if she asserts, “We had a great year,” as opposed to “I had a great year.” I visualized the conversation, including how I would counter potential objections.

I remember being more nervous than I expected, but I stuck to my plan. I was polite but firm. I made the conversation about our common goals, and I concluded with a firm handshake. I left the meeting with the kind of adrenaline high I had only felt in athletic competitions. Whether or not I had persuaded, I had stuck to my guns, and my script.

I got the call: I would be getting a new title and a new salary. At the time, I felt a sense of success beyond myself. It felt like a mini-victory for women, a tiny step toward closing the pay gap.

Years later after I had left that role, I reconnected with a former co-worker from the same company. She had just moved on to a new employer and wanted to share something with me she had held on to for years: The salary I negotiated for myself that day was actually below the bottom of the range for that position at that company. I had leaned in to a starting salary below what they would have offered me, and they said nothing. The amount employers had paid me in the past influenced what I felt comfortable asking for in my negotiation, and this employer took advantage of my own biased baseline. I might have done more to help close the pay gap if I had said nothing at all. By leaning in, I had sold myself short.

Leaning In to a Double-Bind

I want underestimated individuals to feel as free as their peers to ask for what they deserve. But the consequences of treating Lean In as a DEI solution can do more harm than good. While women are often criticized for not negotiating more, their reticence has a rationale: Asking for more penalizes some groups in ways that it does not harm others.

In a series of studies conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Law School, researchers found that when women do dare to negotiate for a pay raise, people in hiring and management roles like them less and are less likely to want to work with them. Male employees asking for the same raise do not suffer this penalty.⁷ In these studies, managers were presented with demands from a job candidate, who was given a gender-neutral name. The studies found that managers had strong negative reactions to the demanding job candidate when referred to throughout as “she” but not when the candidate was referred to throughout as “he.”

Beyond being viewed negatively, women often don't reap the same rewards as men when they do negotiate. A 2018 study questioned workers about their “asking” habits and compared the level of ask with the level of reward, by gender.⁸ Their conclusion: “Women are asking for raises as much as men. They're just not getting them.”⁹

Holding background factors constant, the data sets demonstrated that males and females ask equally often for promotions and raises, but women are less likely to get them. Over a lifetime of salary negotiations, this adds up, and the un-likeability risks women take each time compound.

Every time a woman negotiates, she runs the double risk of not getting what she asked for and being liked less by her peers for asking in the first place. While she may be passing up a raise if she doesn't ask, she may be putting herself in an even worse position if she does, especially if her negotiation is unsuccessful.

We're not used to women asking for pay raises or advocating for themselves, so when they do, it feels extreme. Once again, because of our biased baselines, we feel a sense of disruption to our unconscious expectations. What often gets misdiagnosed as a “confidence gap” when women don't negotiate may actually be an acute awareness of how advocating for oneself can be perceived and how that friction can harm one's career, rather than advance it.

This limit to leaning in is not specific to gender. Expectations we have of what people will do, how they will react, and where we expect to see them impact how we treat them. When these norms are disrupted, we perceive actions committed by one person differently than actions committed by another. This empowerment double-bind extends to workers of color, and Black employees most severely.

In a series of studies published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, participants were shown a number of resumes of white and Black job applicants, along with their headshots.¹⁰ The participants were asked to evaluate each job seeker and rate the likelihood that the applicant would negotiate if offered the job. Controlling for outside factors, the participants identified Black Americans as less likely to negotiate than white Americans. In the second half of the study, the job seekers and their evaluators actually interacted. Black job seekers negotiated similar numbers of offers and counteroffers as their white counterparts, but their evaluators reported that the Black job seekers had negotiated more than white job seekers. Because evaluators expected Black job seekers to negotiate less, the evaluators had an exaggerated view of their behavior. Furthermore, the perception of having been “pushy” resulted in Black job seekers receiving lower starting salaries.

Women of color face the most stringent double-binds when attempting to lean in. While white women are stereotyped as communal, caring, deferential, and concerned about others, Black women are stereotyped as assertive, angry, and “having an attitude.”¹¹ This means that while white women face a challenge of being seen as so communal that they can't lead, Black women walk an even thinner tightrope. They have to counter preconceived notions that they are aggressive and angry by being extra accommodating; however, they cannot seem so subservient that they can't be seen as strong, individual leaders. They have even less permission to assert themselves, and even thinner margins for negotiating.

Despite being the most educated group in America,¹² by percentage of their group population, and starting their careers with more ambition than white women and men,¹³ Black women fill only 1.4 percent of C-suite roles, while comprising 7.4 percent of the population.¹⁴ While walking the thinnest of tightropes, they still manage to ask for promotions at the same rate as men but are only 58 percent as likely to receive them.

If the research so clearly shows how bias is sabotaging these interactions, it seems that training to build awareness around our biases would be the obvious solution. Bias, unfortunately, can't be trained away.

The $8 Billion Training Trap

On February 11, 2018, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was asked at a town hall meeting about the arrest of two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks the previous April. He stated, “As somebody who grew up in a very diverse background as a young boy…I didn't see color, and I honestly don't see color now.”

In response to the arrest, Starbucks closed 8,000 stores for an afternoon and hosted its largest one-day corporate training on unconscious bias. Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, took part as a leader. In a video at corporate headquarters, hip-hop musician and actor Common delivered an opening meditation, urging employees to participate with open minds. Starbucks didn't skimp. This was venti-sized diversity-and-inclusion star power.

And yet, almost a year later, Starbucks's chief executive couldn't understand why “I don't see color” is off the mark at best, and more likely, harmful. Starbucks is just one of many US companies that spend a total of $8 billion a year on diversity training, only to have it backfire.

As noted in chapter 1, one of the most pernicious aspects of bias is that learning about it doesn't make us any better at recognizing it in ourselves or stopping it from impacting our behavior. As I experienced through the Harvard Implicit Association Test, being faced with my own biases over and over didn't make me any better at countering them in the kinds of split-second decisions that make up most of our lives.

But why do these trainings backfire? Why are white men who are asked to attend diversity trainings actually less likely to hire and promote women and minorities?

This unintended consequence can be credited, in part, to a pesky phenomenon known as moral licensing.

Diversity Trainings: Issuing Moral Licenses

To better understand where trainings go wrong, let's look at a study examining a phenomenon that confused political pundits following the 2016 election: Obama voters who voted for Trump.

Daniel Effron, a psychologist at the London School of Business, pioneered a study focused on people who publicly self-identified as supporters of Barack Obama. He found that not only did voting for Obama fail to indicate that the voters would be racially open in the future or continue to vote for progressive legislation, it could indicate the opposite—if those voters had a chance to let people know they voted for Obama.¹⁵

In two studies that yielded the same results, participants were asked to decide between equally qualified white and Black candidates to fill a hypothetical role. The participants—most of whom were white or Asian, and all of whom supported Obama—were divided into two groups. One group was allowed to openly endorse Obama before being given the study scenario. The other group wasn't.

Those who could not express their support for Obama before making a hiring decision tended to play it safe, saying that either candidate would be equally suited for the job. Those who had been allowed to openly endorse Obama before making a hiring decision were more likely to pick the white candidate for the job.

Another test explored the behaviors of those who harbored prejudice toward Black people. Effron's team used the Modern Racism Scale, which gauges people's racial attitudes, to identify participants who voted for Obama despite harboring negative feelings about Black people. These participants were given a scenario in which local government money could be given to two private organizations. One organization served a Black community, the other, a white one.

The subjects—who again were mostly white or Asian Obama supporters but who also backed Kerry in the 2004 presidential election—were split into two groups. One group was only given an opportunity to openly endorse Kerry, while the other group was only given an opportunity to endorse Obama.

When participants with more negative attitudes toward Black people, according to the Modern Racism Scale, had the opportunity to say they supported Obama, they allotted more money to the white organization than those who could only endorse Kerry.

What Effron and his team observed was a classic case of moral licensing. When those who harbored prejudicial attitudes were able to acquire moral capital by endorsing Obama, they felt more comfortable acting on prejudices that favor white people. It's the equivalent of saying “I have a Black friend” before making a statement that favors white people, to absolve oneself of the consequences of saying something prejudiced. Those who harbor prejudices feel they have more permission when saying something racially questionable, because they believe they've already proven through a different action that they're racially open.

This psychological mechanism is present in many parts of our lives, in ways that have nothing to do with race, gender, or bias. Classic examples include eating a donut because we ran an extra mile on the treadmill, or feeling okay about buying from a morally questionable but convenient business because we went to church yesterday. We provide mental loopholes for ourselves that justify certain behaviors, even if it doesn't lessen their consequences. These examples only sabotage small goals in our own lives, but moral licensing can wreak havoc in the workplace, especially following diversity trainings.

These trainings can actually amplify our tendency to morally license poor behaviors that will disproportionately impact women, people of color, and other underestimated groups. The training becomes the “good deed” we do now, that unconsciously makes us feel freer to do something less virtuous later. As we've seen in the Obama voter studies, this impulse to morally license one's own biased behaviors is even stronger in more prejudiced people—typically, the exact audience that trainings are intended for. Trainings provide an “out” for those who need the trainings the most. Employees who already hold discriminatory views feel they've earned a sense of protection from being accused of being prejudiced by acquiring their “I attended a training” certificate. They treat their accumulation of moral capital as a visible shield for themselves, rather than the beginning of a journey to becoming less biased in their behaviors.

Beyond Moral Licensing

Trainings don't work for another much simpler reason: We don't like being told what to do. Even with great diplomacy, trainers often come across as trying to police attendees' thoughts and actions. When we feel coerced into a choice or behavior, we often do just the opposite, even when we wouldn't have in any other situation, just to prove that we are our own person.

In research from the University of Toronto, subjects of a study read a brochure critiquing prejudice against Black people.¹⁶ When pressured to agree with it, participants actually strengthened their bias against Black people. When left to come to their own decisions about the reading, however, they were more inclined to agree with the critiques of prejudice.

Trainings that invite participants but allow participation to be fully voluntary have shown some promise. Those who voluntarily attend these trainings are more likely to promote Black men, Hispanic men, and Asian-American men and women. These findings don't necessarily speak to the role trainings play in countering bias, though. Participants who are willing to volunteer their time and energy to attend these trainings are probably already more comfortable with the concept of equity for underestimated groups, compared to their peers who choose not to attend.

Attending Trainings While Underestimated

The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology described white men's reactions to pro-diversity trainings and messaging as follows: “We found evidence that it not only makes white men believe that women and minorities are being treated fairly—whether that's true or not—it also makes them more likely to believe that they themselves are being treated unfairly.”¹⁷

If white men saw that diversity messaging was present before applying for or interviewing for a job, “[these] messages signaled to these white men that they might be undervalued and discriminated against. These concerns interfered with their interview performance and caused their bodies to respond as if they were under threat. Importantly, diversity messages led to these effects regardless of these men's political ideology, attitudes toward minority groups, beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination against whites, or beliefs about the fairness of the world. This suggests just how widespread negative responses to diversity may be among white men: the responses exist even among those who endorse the tenets of diversity and inclusion.”¹⁸

Underestimated employees aren't unaware of the reactions that their peers can have to diversity trainings and programming. They witness their co-workers becoming defensive or angry and worry that this friction will turn into retaliation.

Because trainers are aware of the defensiveness that white employees may feel, they often try to “tone down” the training content to avoid conflict. For many employees of color, this means having to sit through hearing their experiences being minimized or trivialized. The discrimination they've experienced becomes euphemized as “differences in perspectives,” or they are encouraged to “find common ground” with those who have excluded them. Consequently, underestimated groups can leave trainings feeling even more discouraged and undervalued than before.

Finally, in reviewing responses that employees have provided to GEN's national workplace experience survey, we noted repeated versions of this experience: “Any time we have a training or company meeting about diversity, I am the only Black person in the room. Even if I don't raise my hand, at some point, someone will turn to me and ask me for my opinion—as a Black person—about diversity in our office. What am I supposed to say? I don't speak for all Black people. And I'm not gonna say what I really think.”

The status of being “the only” suddenly becomes synonymous with being “the expert” or “the representative” in conversations about diversity. As this respondent stated, “I don't speak for all Black people.” No race or gender is a monolith. The experiences of one underestimated individual do not necessarily reflect those of other underestimated individuals, and asking one to speak on behalf of a group is an unfair burden. Not only do individuals not want to misrepresent their peers, they do not want to put themselves at risk. Should the one Black person in the room be honest and risk making their white peers defensive and angry? Or, should they perform the emotional labor of comforting their peers with a watered-down version of their experiences as The Black Person in the Workplace?

Trainings create impossible choices for anyone who is “the only” in the room.

Finding Affinity: Employee Resource Groups

For those who are often “the only” in the room, employee resource groups or affinity groups can provide a sense of community and solidarity. While these communities can provide a safe space for people and opportunities for networking, they are also too often treated as a substitute for inclusive workplace cultures. Rather than acknowledge and support the specific role that affinity groups can play, employers often see them as an opportunity to “check” the DEI box and consider the “diversity issue” handled. Providing a siloed space for people to come together over shared identities does not counter the bias they'll continue to face throughout the organization.

These groups also don't guarantee safe spaces for all employees; while organizations may offer women's groups, or groups for people of color, this does not mean that women of color have been offered a safe space. They still face a great deal of risk sharing their experiences with either white women or men of color in spaces where they may once again be “the only.”

While I believe companies should continue to support affinity groups, treating them as a DEI solution is flawed in the same way that encouraging employees to lean in or attend trainings is flawed: It puts the onus on employees to compensate for biased institutions, rather than on the employer to debias them.

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“But we've always done it this way…”

I chose this as the title of the chapter because it is the response I hear most often when clients are faced with the shortcomings of the DEI approaches they've been using for years. I understand the inertia that comes with abandoning these approaches. It feels like a risk. But as we'll see in the next chapter, clinging to these methods poses an even bigger risk to the survival of companies that don't evolve.