How is your brain wired - are you biased? Am I?

Up until recently I think I didn’t believe racism really existed.  I just never thought about it.  Not really.  I’m fortunate to have friends from a wide range of races and walks of life - the benefits of living in my favourite city London.  And where I have experienced discrimination at work it’s been positive discrimination - gender and race.  I strongly believe me being a girl helped in securing my first role out of university.  I really did not know what all the fuss about race and gender was about.  I thought that if you’re having issues at work, work harder and let your work speak for you.  I thought racism was someone calling you the N word or being rude to you in the street and I haven’t ever experienced that or known anyone who has.

I’ve been living in this little bubble until recently when I moved house, to a new area.  My little bubble is bursting.  Because lately it seems to me that racism isn’t always overt.  Most often where it exists, it is very subtle.

It is not being attacked in the street for no reason.  It is a smile that dims when it’s your turn in the queue.  It is not someone calling you a monkey.  It is putting a “coolest monkey in the jungle” top on a little boy without being sensitive to its implications.  It is being mistaken for the delivery guy dressed in your bespoke made-to-measure suit at a cake shop.  It’s getting that ever so slightly less good customer service.  It’s your handyman not suggesting the best replacement tap because surely you can’t afford it.  It’s many things that it’s not.  And I admit a lot of it is laughable and easy to let slide, and I would normally not dwell on them as the are not regular occurrences.  But they happen way more often than they should.

I have a three year old.  And kids don’t see colour at all - or they see it as just that - colour.  So I wondered at what point it changes.  And how will I teach my girls to rise above this when I’m unsure myself?   I’ve tried to get my head around why we have these unconscious biases which I think we all have to some degree.  When I see a blonde orange-from-fake-tan skinned lady my mind automatically registers that her favourite show is Love Island (I secretly watch this 😂).  But maybe she was on the child genius show when she was 8, how would I know without having a conversation? 

I once attended a conference where a consultant was explaining a project she had led at a leading global investment bank.  They hired her to look into why at graduate level it seemed the recruitment process worked and there was a good mix of graduates.  But for ethnic minorities the glass ceiling was much much lower.  They didn’t seem to get as far as quickly as the others.  And they were baffled.  Because at graduate entry the level of intelligence and ability was even.  Her research showed that unconscious biases were at play.  And people were giving up when colleagues were being promoted over them because the boss could relate better with them or for other non performance related things.  So they quit or lost interest.  Also her research showed that performance was affected when you are in a place where you know your hard work will go unrecognised so many of them saw a dip in performance and left or were fired.  Research shows that continuous exposure to bias can hugely affect your mental health.

Why am I writing about this?  Maybe it’s to vent.  Or maybe it’s to challenge my own unconscious biases and yours.  The first step to solving something is acknowledging it exists.  And that it’s wrong.  And realise how easy it is to rise above them if we make a conscious effort.

How and where we  come into this world is not by accident, no.  But it is completely out of our control!  So as I’m thinking about all this race and unconscious bias stuff I’m thinking that it’s very silly to assume superiority over someone because of something you had no control over.  We didn’t work for our gender, we didn’t work for our race.  It was a gift given to each one of us.  The perfect gift for each one of us.

So next time we conclude on someone based on their accent, let’s realise how powerful and telling accents are.  Less than a minute and you can guess where someone has lived or that someone went to Eton.  But it doesn’t tell the full story.

Maybe your cleaner has a success story that will inspire you.

Maybe you should promote that person because she is better than the others, not the other one because he passed the Pub Test.

Let’s ditch the biases.

Rant over.  If even one person is challenged then job done.