![]() ![]() This also increases the chance that men will be interviewed by men, which can reinforce existing biases.Įven just deciding what to wear every day takes more effort. Sometimes, solutions that seem like the right thing to do end up exacerbating the problem.įor example, women on engineering teams trying to recruit more women end up getting pulled into a disproportionate amount of job interviews, yet are still expected to be productive engineers or risk getting labeled as “diversity hires” themselves. The whole point of addressing bias is so that everyone can just come in and do their damn jobs without having to do the extra work of proving themselves in every interaction. This might be the most obvious of all, but it is worth repeating because people in leadership roles aren’t getting it and it’s not changing. Underrepresentation creates so much extra work for people in the underrepresented group Knowing a bad behavior is common can actually kill the desire to work for change, because it’s like hey, everyone is doing it. Some of them might seem obvious, but that doesn’t make them any easier to change. ![]() )Īfter talking with women from design teams, engineering teams, administration, and product, in both individual contributor and management roles, we’ve learned a few things we want to share. (One of the funny things about organizations is that they will talk about the difficulty of influencing the irrational, intractable habits and beliefs of their customers or constituencies all day long and never say “Whoa, look, we are made of those very same sort of humans!” with some exceptions. I know that getting out for a run in the morning will improve my whole day, but ask me again when my alarm goes off at 6am. Changing a complex set of behaviors and beliefs takes much more than letting everyone know that the behavior is a problem in some abstract way, especially when there are so many incentives to keep doing the same thing. We’ve known about gender bias for decades (for certain values of “we”), so clearly that isn’t it. (Beliefs are also a habit.) They run mandatory trainings on the assumption that once everyone knows about the issue, change will just happen. Too often, even the organizations that truly want to reduce bias and be more inclusive treat bias as a knowledge problem, not a habit problem. We started this workshop after identifying a central flaw in most anti-bias training. What we’ve learned from our own gender bias workshopįor the last couple of years, Mule has been running a workshop called Cut the Bias to help women in design and technology organizations overcome gender bias. ![]()
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