Earlier, I posted my first essays directed at discussing Diversity and Inclusion.  I started by defining the touchy concept of Unearned Privilege and then got into Unintentional Bias.  I wanted to wrap up this first go-round on D&I with a discussion about the “I”—Inclusion.  If you haven’t read those first two essays in this series, I encourage you to do so.  These concepts all flow together and reinforce each other. 

First, I need to define what I mean by “inclusion”.  I’m not necessarily talking about including people of all types and backgrounds on teams or in the room.  Don’t get me wrong—I think we SHOULD do that whenever possible, because you theoretically get a broader set of ideas and inputs from a group of diverse people.  It also makes your life richer to know and embrace people different from you.  That sort of representational approach to inclusion is the part that everyone is aware of and tends to be what people focus on initially.  What I’m speaking to in this essay is the more difficult part of “inclusion”—inclusive thinking.  “Inclusion” in this respect means asking yourself, “what am I assuming about this situation that’s borne from applying a broad brush to a whole group of people and do I need to take a step back for a second and challenge those assumptions?”  In the workplace, this often takes the form of dismissing ideas different from your own without really thinking through them or not considering someone for a role because they are different from what you envision in the job.  In your personal life, it could take the form of judging someone’s behavior and intent based on some defining characteristic (like race or age or accent), projecting your own interpretation on their actions. 

Remember that a couple of themes fell out of those first two essays: first, that people are usually unaware of their own privilege and biases; and, second, that developing an awareness of both is an active and on-going process.  Similarly, inclusive thinking is itself an active and on-going process.  Before I go further, let me remind you that we often spend a lot of time pointing out privilege and bias expressed by others; I’d rather we take that righteousness and first turn in inwards.  While it is indeed important to hold others accountable for the impact of their biases on other people, we all have way too much work to do on ourselves to have so much time available to “correct” others.

Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that you are well on your way to detangling which aspects of your life reflect unearned privilege and which reflect where you have been in the subordinate position (i.e. where you are a “fish” and where you are a “scuba diver”, using the analogy we’ve discussed before).  You have also started catching yourself in unintentional bias.  All of this navel gazing is a prerequisite for being able to navigate the world around us with a mindset of inclusion.  Your work, however, is just beginning.  Remember that we are hard wired to naturally trust those who are like us.  “Like us” can mean many different things: it could be race, religion, educational background, where you grew up or where you live now, work experience, and a zillion other things.  We simply gravitate toward those with whom we feel we have something in common.  It’s comfortable.  It’s easy.  It’s a nice shortcut.  And it’s what’s gotten us to our current environment in which we default to tribalism.

I am going to come right out and say something many might feel uncomfortable articulating: it is ok to feel more comfortable with people you share common traits or experiences with and, in fact, it is ok to seek out time with your “affinity” groups.  When I reaffiliated with a synagogue in the 2000’s after not having really engaged with the Jewish community for decades, I found a comfort in community that I hadn’t realized I’d needed so much.  I was very isolated as a Jew at work and while I never felt overt anti-Semitism, I always was aware of my difference.  Going to synagogue, building that Jewish community and feeling enveloped by it was just good for my soul.  Similarly, when I am with a group of gay friends or in a predominantly gay environment, THAT is good for my soul.  In neither situation am I with people who are just like me in all ways.  They just happen to share one trait that, in that moment, makes me feel less alone and more comfortable.

When is it not ok to seek out just your “peeps”?  It is when that group is in a power position and when they are together, they are making decisions and allocating resources in a way that highly favors people in the group and excludes people outside of the group.  A group of white men playing golf and having a good time is not a bad thing.  It would be a bad thing if, during that golf game, they made decisions on who should get the next promotion or worked out business deals with each other without realizing the narrowness of their inputs.  I’m not saying golf games should be banished.  I’m not saying friendships and relationships between members of affinity groups should be de-emphasized.  We’ve already established that we feel more comfortable around people we share key traits with.  My thesis is that big decisions and important discussion should not be happening so casually in a homogeneous group.  There needs to be more intention in those discussions about inclusion.  What I am saying is that if you are in a power position or any position of influence, you need to ACTIVELY seek out perspectives from people outside of your group, ACTIVELY embrace the exclusionary character of your own comfort zone, and ACTIVELY pursue ideas and options that include people and ideas different from your own.  Inclusion is an ACTIVE process.

This is not just a business issue.  It’s not even primarily a business issue!  The flip side to feeling more comfortable with people “like us” is that our lives become limited and narrow.  If you stay within your comfort bubble, pushing away people and ideas and experiences different from what you have known then you are missing out on a whole lot of richness in life.  As I discussed in the title essay to this blog, living for a few years in Mexico really drove that home to me.  I never realized how many aspects about how I lived my life were not universal.  Opening myself up to different living patterns, different ways of thinking and seeing the world, different ways of navigating daily life has made me a much happier person.  But you don’t need to go live in another country for a few years to get this benefit.  You just need to embrace an active curiosity about the people around you.  Purposefully resist instantly applying stereotypes and judgments.  Challenge yourself to treat an individual as a whole human, worthy of your interest.

I’m walking a fine line here.  I don’t want to sound punitive; however, all of us in some way, by accident of birth and circumstance, find ourselves to be comfortable fish in the ocean barely aware of the various scuba divers struggling around us.  Being aware of their struggle is just not enough.  Encouraging them to throw off their scuba gear and just be like fish will not eliminate their struggle or burden.  We need to actively work to understand people different from us; we need to actively embrace that “different” does not mean better or worse, just different; and, we need to actively hold ourselves and others accountable for the impacts of unintentional bias borne from unearned privilege. Inclusion is an ACTIVE process.

Last time I started in on a long-promised discussion about Diversity and Inclusion by introducing the topic of Unearned Privilege.  I had wanted to talk about the subject of this essay, Unintentional Bias, but found that I needed to talk about privilege first.  I’m starting to realize that this concept of unearned privilege is more foundational than I thought, so I encourage you to read that essay if you haven’t already. 

There is also one more thought I need to share before launching into today’s topic.  I implore you to not weaponize these concepts.  Discussions about unearned privilege and unintentional bias are meant to get you looking inward—not to give you verbiage to slam others.  The good Jew, here, is actually going to quote a translation of Matthew (7:5): “First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”  My corollary to this thought is that getting that log out of your own eye is a lifelong journey.  You should never get around to a righteous focus on the speck in your friend’s eye.  This is about you and your thoughts and your actions and your own journey toward virtue.

We touched on bias before when I made a first pass in A Less Punitive Perspective on Bias and The Danger of the Defining Characteristic.  In those essays, I focused on “tribalism” as being the source of bias. The Cliff Notes version is that our global society has evolved a lot faster than our internal hardwiring associated with building trust.  We still instinctively distrust The Other—meaning anyone who looks different than you do or acts differently than you do.  And the easiest way to navigate in our increasingly diverse world is to apply stereotypes and judgements to entire classes of people.  Unfortunately, in our hyperconnected world, that instinct is used against us through advertising and by those who play on our unintentional biases for monetary gain or for power and influence.  Hence the need to bring this discussion out into the open and get each of us to own our piece.

Building on this base thought, I’ve come to realize that unintentional bias is strongly connected to the unarticulated assumptions we make about others, which in turn are borne of our unearned privilege.  And since owning our unearned privilege is so uncomfortable, guess what?  Owning our unintentional biases is just as hard.  A good example from my working days comes to mind.  I have no idea why I know this story.  It seems like something I should not have been privy to, but I was.  Early in my career, a position opened up that would have been ideal for a good friend of mine.  She was just a few years older than me and very ambitious.  She was smart and a hard worker and passionate about the product line she was developing.  The position in question was a step up in responsibility and involved having the lead accountability on bringing this new product out to customers.  It involved strategy development and implementation and a more direct connection to the sale of the product.  Accountability for the “profit and loss”, or P&L, of a business was the holy grail of anyone looking to move up.  This role, however, required a lot of travel.  What I learned is that this friend of mine was not even offered consideration of the role.  Why?  Not because she wasn’t qualified.  She was the most qualified of the potential candidates.  It was because she had two small children.  The men around the table assumed that she would not want to travel so much because of her parental responsibilities so they didn’t even ask her if she was interested.  They actually thought that they were being sensitive to her situation!  That is unintentional bias based on an assumption drawn from unearned privilege.

Corporations have tried really hard to root out overt discrimination and their initial attempts at sensitization have had the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing unintentional bias.  In the 90s, my company started holding Leadership Education sessions.  This program was really well thought out and developed.  It brought some important insights and verbiage into the organization.  And it was intensive!  Groups of participants, who stayed together throughout their training, were taken off site for a week at a time.  There was prework to create anticipation and the subject matter pulled no punches, particularly around awareness of Diversity and Inclusion issues (at least as they were understood at that time).  The benefit and problem were that these sessions were held in a bubble.  Participants had to truly focus on the matter at hand and leave their “day job” to their teams back home.  The focus was the good thing.  The bad thing was that they went back to their day jobs after this intense week away, thinking their awareness was all raised (we didn’t have “woke” back then) and they truly believed they were no longer the problem.  They then went back to their regular behaviors without realizing that they were bringing unintentional bias into every decision.  They were sensitized to the plight of the scuba diver, to use my analogy from before, and they may have even understood their privilege as fish.  But they still didn’t understand what water was.  They were either trying to encourage the scuba divers to just throw off that scuba gear and breathe the water or shunting them to the shallow end citing sensitivity to their plight.  Neither worked well to give people of difference, any difference, an equal shot at opportunity.

Changing bias, you see, is an active and purposeful process.  It follows Newton’s Law of Motion:  a body in motion will stay in motion unless you exert a force to stop it.  Similarly, unintentional bias will continue unless you exert directed effort to stop it.  Remember that, as with unearned privilege, unintentional bias in and of itself is not a bad thing.  What matters is your awareness of it and what you do with it once you are aware.  Our unintentional biases are often born of our circumstance.  For example, I was raised in the 1960s in the deep South.  I harbor unintentional racial bias.  I know I do.  I hate it.  I’ve been working to root it out of me for decades.  I like to think that I’ve been largely successful.  My goal is not to never have a biased thought.  It is to quickly recognize when a biased thought emerges and to immediately challenge it, think about both the source and trigger of the thought, and try to get out ahead of it next time.  It’s an active and purposeful process.  And while I use the example of racial bias, in this case with respect to African Americans, I am by no means limited to that bias.  Nor is it my most vexing bias.  I am catching myself all the time in snap judgements that reflect unintentional biases that I never recognized before.  That’s when my face flushes with shame and I begin the internal flagellation to try and beat it out myself.

It is exhausting when you think about it and that exhaustion leads us to fall back into old comfortable patterns from before we realized we were carrying a bias.  That leads to resentment of the work it takes to root the bias out and often lashing out at those who have been on the receiving end of that bias.  Often, it also leads to projection—applying your own motivations to someone else’s behaviors.  That’s a different topic altogether.   While I begged you to not weaponize someone else’s bias, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hold someone else accountable for a bias they may not realize they are expressing.  It’s all in the “how” of making someone else accountable and that begins with your own humility.  Unintentional bias makes you human.  Everyone has it and always will.  Your job is to work on yourself, first and foremost.  Question those assumptions you are making about people different from you.  Learn about the realities of other’s lives.  Don’t assume.  Give them grace; share your privilege.  They will do the same for you.  We’ll be better off for it.

I have been threatening for a while to start digging into topics surrounding Diversity and Inclusion.  I “grew up” in my professional career during the time that D&I became recognized as an issue.  In the ‘90s and ‘00s, companies were casting about for ways to effectively address needs in their staffing and culture.  So, as a woman in a senior position in industrial (read: male dominated) corporations, as well as an increasingly out lesbian during a time of rocketing change in prevailing attitudes toward the gay community in the US, I was caught up in the middle of all this angst.  The topic of Diversity and Inclusion (I’ve determined that it is really one topic since you can’t have one without the other) is personal to me and I’ve been called upon by the companies I’ve worked for to participate in a range of activities surrounding it. I have a lot to say on this subject.

At this point you are probably thinking, “OK, I clicked on this essay because I was curious about the meaning of the title.  What does D&I have to do with water?”  Well, to start in on this topic of D&I, I wanted to present a bit of a primer on unintentional bias.  Bias is a tricky topic. It has gotten more so in recent years thanks to the amplification of social media as well as the divisions politically in this country that seem to cause people to jump on others in a heartbeat if they perceive bias of any sort.  My thesis is that most bias (not all, but most) is unintentional.  So, when I first started drafting this essay, that’s what I thought I was writing about.  As the paragraphs below starting coming out, though, I realized that before I could tackle unintentional bias, I had to first address its angry cousin:  unearned privilege.  Talk about a third rail topic!  We MUST go there.  But what does this have to do with water?

I was asked many times to speak to employee groups about D&I, ostensibly from the perspective of a gay person working in the company.  Here is the story I would tell to frame my experience:  Imagine that you are a fish in the ocean.  The environment is perfect for you.  You were designed for it.  You move freely and extract oxygen effortlessly to live.  The temperature is comfortable.  You don’t have to think about or worry about any of those “environment” issues.  You are free to put all your energies into finding food, ensuring your survival and growth, and perpetuating your species.  Now imagine you are a scuba diver.  You are also capable of swimming around in the ocean.  But for you to survive, you must wear a wet suit, fins, and carry around an oxygen tank and breathing system.  Yes, you can look for food and protect yourself from danger and do all the other things the fish can do, but you have to put a ton of energy into just surviving in the ocean!  And maybe there are one or two other divers with you, but in the vastness of the ocean, you feel pretty alone and VERY different and vulnerable.  The environment is not built for you.  YOU must adapt to the environment, not the other way around.  You can be successful, but it’s exhausting.  You tend not to stay there for long.  As a diver, you are acutely aware of your difference and your struggle to survive.  The fish?  They don’t even realize that the environment is suited just to them.  It’s just “the environment”.  It’s not so much that they recognize that water is the perfect environment for them.  They don’t even know what water IS.  That, in a nutshell, is unearned privilege.

This story reached a lot of people.  I could see the consternation on faces and had a lot of “I just didn’t realize” conversations.  I do believe there was a lot of sincerity on all sides and I choose to believe that most people really do want a world in which everyone has access to opportunity.  I also firmly believe that most people do not recognize their unearned privilege, at least not consciously.  The “fish” were seeing “water” through my eyes, not their own.  They were still trying to figure out what water is and they tripped all over themselves trying to articulate new rules of behavior.  There was a lot of walking on egg shells.  So, we never got very far.

I get a little twitchy trying to talk about this topic because it makes people so defensive.  Remember: those who enjoy privilege don’t see it as “privilege” because it’s all they’ve known.  The don’t see the water; they don’t even know what water is.  But when they see efforts to level the playing field, to give people who don’t have their advantages an opportunity to equally compete, what they see is unfair advantage given to others.  They see something taken away from them.  And they get angry.  Just because someone has privilege doesn’t mean their journey has been easy!  And those who see unearned privilege in others get very self-righteous and judgy about it.  I will admit to moments of looking in my rear view mirror at some middle aged white guy in his Ray Bans, top down on the BMW convertible, hair slicked back looking like he owns the world and muttering to myself, “unearned white male privilege”.  Why do I do that?  Because the years of built-up frustration that I have lived through are always just under the surface.  I still feel like that person on the outside looking in and wishing someone would give me the secret decoder ring to understand how to be successful in this environment that seemed so natural to the guys I worked with.  I react because it feels good to blame someone else for my struggles.  But I know nothing about that guy.  I look at the outer trappings and judge the whole person.  I don’t know what struggles he may have faced.  Nor do I, in those moments, embrace my own privilege.

So here is what I want to emphasize:  we are all a mixture of unearned privilege and disadvantaged outsider.  We are all both fish and scuba divers.  I would present myself in those D&I discussions as a “gay, female, lefthanded, Jewish chemist trying to survive in a straight, male, righthanded Christian engineering world.”  Oh, woe is me.  Yes, I am all of those things.  But I am also white; a native born American living in America; a native English speaker; and I grew up in a stable, middle class home.  I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from or having a roof over my head or being subjected to physical or emotional danger or abuse.  I am dripping with privilege.  So, yes, I’ve had some tough times and some hard climbs.  I have also enjoyed a lot of advantage along the way. There’s that “holding two opposing truths” things again.

Once you understand and embrace unearned privilege within yourself, the challenge is to turn that gaze outward and work to treat others with the grace and compassion you want for yourself.  Having unearned privilege is not evil.  It’s what you do with it that matters.  As you work to build the awareness of those aspects of your life in which you didn’t even know you were a fish in water, you become more aware of the scuba divers around you.  Don’t apologize for your privilege nor discount it as unimportant.  Look to see how you can reach out to those who didn’t enjoy your advantage and help bring them along.  This is why the concept of assumptions is so important to me.  If you don’t even realize there are privileges you’ve enjoyed, then you assume that everyone has had those privileges. If someone was never taught basic life skills like you were, that doesn’t mean they are lazy or stupid if they don’t manage money well or make poor choices.  It means they need to be taught those skills.  Lack of awareness of your own unearned privilege, coupled with acute awareness of the privileges others enjoy leads to incorrect assumptions and judgements.  THAT is what leads to unintentional bias.  And that’s where we’ll go next time.