How to Outsmart Your Own Unconscious Bias | Valerie Alexander | TEDxPasadena

Let's start with a brain exercise. I'm going to ask you to visualize three scenarios. The visualization part is very important, so close

your

eyes, breathe deeply and imagine that you are late for a flight, you run through the airport and you make it. You go through security, you run to the door, you go down the gangway, you get on the plane just as they close the door behind you and the pilot comes out of the cockpit to greet you, you arrive at

your

destination, you go to a local restaurant and enjoy the best meal of your life and really enjoy it, there are no calories or visualizations and at the next table there is a couple happily celebrating their anniversary.

The next morning, you go to the world's largest technology conference and the CEO of this year's most popular trade show. The hottest tech startup just took the stage to speak. Now you should have a solid picture of all of that, so open your eyes because I have some questions for you in your mental picture. Was it the black pilot? Was the couple married? Two men became the CEO of technology. stage looks like me it's okay if one or all of your answers are no your brain creates images of what's familiar you're less of a fan of what's unfamiliar the things I mentioned are generally less familiar the black pilot the same-sex married couple the female tech CEO, no matter how much you like the idea of ​​those things when you immediately confront them, the amygdala, which is the oldest part of your brain, tells the hypothalamus to activate the hypothalamic pituitary axis, which is where the brain and the endocrine system intersect.

At this point, the adrenal glands release cortisol into the bloodstream, triggering the stress response. This is the physiology of stress according to the Dartmouth University Journal of Science and it happens in a matter of milliseconds, long before you have a chance to consciously think I am. How happy that these two men have the freedom to marry the one they love as Dr. Susan Fiske explains that when it comes to unfamiliar social situations, there is ample evidence that encountering something fundamentally different from what we expect causes stronger activation in the amygdala and when we encounter something or someone we proceed as a rule, this is what kept our species alive for millions of years.

For years, this instant instinctive response triggers fight or flight, which is what kept us from being eaten by saber-toothed tigers or killed by a member of a foreign tribe, but in modern society our brains still do this when we encounter With the unexpected, our heart races. our blood pressure rises slightly, we sweat a little and, for no apparent reason, we simply feel stressed. There is a Chinese blessing that also works as a curse. May you live in interesting times. I'm the CEO of a tech company right now, which makes these very interesting times. I recently had a call with a potential investor where everything clicked, he understood the concept, he loved what we were building, he had key information about our technology, so we agreed on a day to talk again and he said great, why not? so you pinged me and I said you got it and then he said oh wait that's one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use on you because he's a man and I'm a woman and in the tech world right now Careers are being destroyed and entire hedge funds collapsing because some men have behaved incredibly inappropriately towards women.

I was afraid to use the phrase ping me now. That may seem ridiculous, but we now live in a world where words and phrases quickly take on new meaning if you need proof. just look at the Facebook post of any guy who got a text from his mom that says hey honey if you want to come over tonight we can Netflix and chill if you don't understand why that's funny google Netflix and chill." He asked one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use on you and there it was, I could practically hear the cortisol coursing through his bloodstream, no matter how well we clicked or what he thought of my company, I was still in his company. brain that I am Not just a CEO, I am a CEO and working with me could be a minefield of dangers that he has to think about, not because of something he would do or something I would do, but because men that neither of us I had never known they could.

We do not control the behavior of their brothers and the women we both respect bravely decided not to remain silent because speaking is the only way we are going to progress, so in addition to all the risks inherent in investing in one early stage startup, there is additional risk. layer of much scarier risks that come with working with me, the irony is that while some investors may feel that way about another cohort because I'm over 40, they don't even see me. I'm both highly dangerous and invisible, who knows that at this stage in my career where I became a ninja is one of those phrases I'm not supposed to use on you.

I'm so grateful he asked me. I'm happy he felt safe enough to ask and know he would do it. Let's not hit him for that if we want to get closer to equality. Let's stop attacking our allies when someone is willing to admit and argue that there might be a problem with their own behavior. We can't penalize them for that. As I would do it? We all feel left out of the conversation about Equality because of what we visualized at the beginning of this talk when asking the question. I knew this man was willing to examine his own behavior and I believe the biggest obstacle to achieving true equality goes unexamined.

Behavior when men in the startup world start to wonder if I work with women. Will I one day be the subject of an incendiary blog post? The answer is no, just continue to examine your behavior when working with female founders, colleagues, and executives. Ask yourself if this was a man I gently stroke your shoulder as I suggest we meet again what I say about how well your shirt flatters your figure would you place a higher value on his appearance and experience in determining your likelihood of success if not would it? Don't do it to her, it's that simple, unfortunately the much simpler answer to the female threat is no, you won't be the subject of an angry blog post, just don't work with women, of course, no one would say that out loud. high, but at some point. that amygdala, a synapse fires towards flight from some nameless potential danger and stress hormones flood your bloodstream, I can't explain it, I don't know why, but anything that makes you feel happy and comfortable with people who are They see and act like you is the same.

Which makes you think of logical, explainable, and totally defensible reasons not to work with someone you just don't fit in with, and when it comes to equality, examining our own behavior applies to women, too. I began my career as a securities attorney in Silicon Valley. at the dawn of the internet age it was crazy to be there as a first year associate. I built two eight hundred hours one night. I left the office around 2am. m., which was typical, so I left my timesheets for my assistant to process. because she came in the morning before me the next day, when I got to my desk about five minutes later and my assistant came in holding my timesheets and said, would you like me to show you how to enter them into the billing system?

I mean, sweet as pie and I was stunned for a moment and then politely declined her kind offer, but that question really started to bother me, why would my assistant ask the lawyer she works for if I want to learn how to do her job, so I started asking? Of the 14 male attorneys in our group, none of them had been asked if they wanted to learn how to use the billing system. We had a partner who didn't know that a billing system existed, but of the six lawyers, I was the only one. who had never entered their own timesheets, some of them did it regularly, others only once or twice, but they all knew how, so again I asked why would you spend such a valuable resource as your time on work than someone else's?

They are already paying you to do it. one response was oh it's not that hard we women do this to ourselves a lot we work on someone else's work because we are capable and we only want it done if a task is on someone else's to do list please do not do it. Being the first person in line to do it for them not only hurts you, but it sets an expectation that hurts all other women. The other answer to my question was that the translation of knowing laughter is easier. It's easier to do my assistants' work than I make my assistant do it when we talk about gender disparity in the workplace, discuss the different treatment women receive in performance reviews and promotions, or in hiring negotiations. and salary, but we rarely discuss the treatment women receive from subordinates, we don't recognize how exhausting it is. not getting the basic level of support necessary to do our jobs and that our male colleagues enjoy without even thinking twice about getting it, but only because we demand it and risk being labeled with a certain word or two, so we give in more on our own plates because in the short term it's easier and in the long term we burn out and leave and in retrospect everyone wonders why there aren't more women in higher ranking positions because no one ever examined the behavior, the funny thing about my situation It's just that if you asked the attendees in that group if they treated male and female lawyers differently, I'm pretty sure they would all have said no, and yet no lawyer had ever been asked if you wanted to learn how. do administrative work and all the lawyers had that is the real danger of unexamined behavior the beliefs that we are treating everyone the same when in reality they were not when we stop and examine our own behavior we can discover that we have different reactions and expectations of people simply because they don't look like us or worse because they do, the human brain is a remarkable achievement in evolution, the prefrontal cortex evolved when we needed more processing power, how amazing is that, but the amygdala that has been there since the first records of human existence when an encounter is unexpected it floods your system with stress stress hormones fight or flight is what kept our species alive for millions of years none of us in 100 lifetimes will be able to change that trigger inside our brain so that our The only solution is to change what is outside our brain to consciously turn the unexpected into the expected so that we do not have

unconscious

hormonal reactions that prevent our society from moving forward.

How do you do that? How do you change the unexpected into the expected? There are three things you can try one as you go about your day visualizing situations before they happen the meeting you are about to walk into the new doctor you are looking at the driver you just pulled over for having a broken tail light and any image change it open yourself to different possibilities the second thing when we encounter the unexpected have the courage to examine your own behavior ask yourself is this how I would handle this interaction if this person looked like me or if this person didn't look like me Me Third, make a conscious effort to expose yourself, your children, and others to what is currently unexpected and need not be greater.

Employees patronize companies. They vote for candidates who have earned the position and are also challenging the norms. Huge, far-reaching consequences when we can trade the unexpected for the expected. Consider this: we have two entire generations in the world whose first visual image of a United States president is black, no matter what kind of hate or ugliness was said. In their homes that image is always within the scope of what is expected for them, we normalize things by making them expected, that is the first step to prevent all women from being seen as higher risk investments and women of a certain age becoming Ninjas, let's do another one. visualization once again, please close your eyes and breathe deeply.

Now imagine that you are sitting in a college class on computer programming and the professor has just walked in. Image from a friend's Facebook post congratulating a couple who just adopted a baby. Visualize your status saying bad words. -in a new governor, now open your eyes and raise your hand if your mental image now differs substantially from what you had at the beginning of this talk, that previous brain exercise we did is something I do at the beginning of most meetings with investors, it's my way of tricking them into examining their own behavior, but it's also how I consciously turn whatunexpected than expected before I get to the point in my speech where I share with you that when we complete a series of venture funding rounds, the CFO Onboarding is black and the story of my company begins with two happily married men and the CEO of this year's hottest tech startup looks exactly like me.