It's About Time We Challenge Our Unconscious Biases | Juliette Powell | TEDxStLouisWomen

I'm delighted to be here today but I hope I don't disappoint you and I truly mean this from the bottom of my heart because I'm NOT going to talk about what I thought I was going to talk about. I had this prepared since June. I knew exactly how to make you laugh, how to make you cry, how to push all your buttons, how to make you come home feeling empowered and wanting to do something great and then I got in this taxi yesterday at 5 in the morning to come here and my taxi driver He asked me what I had done and I stopped dead because I wasn't fully awake, you know, it's five in the morning and I'm not necessarily ready to have a conversation with a stranger yet, but I was curious to see what he was going to say, so who looks at me in the mirror while I was driving and says, "Oh, right, you're a model, a very old model, yes, that's me, you're a singer, no, I can't sing a note." oh you must be a basketball player sorry to disappoint you none of the above now of course I had to ask him why he thought I did those things and he said well look at you actually I do whether I want to or not , I have to continually look at and

challenge

myself and that's when I realized that the conversation I had had the day before, the conversation that stuck in my mind and wouldn't let me sleep even though I knew I had to rest so I could be with you today it just stayed there and now it bothered me.

I mean a conversation I had with a very close friend of mine and we were working on a white paper for PricewaterhouseCoopers and we were thinking about technology and I said, you know. I'm going to st. Louis and I are very excited about this, so he logged on and saw that I was indeed speaking and saw the bio that was read before I went on stage today and said Juliet, what's wrong with you? What are you talking about? and he said, you know, I started on this Lewis site from the TEDx night, but now I'm curious.

I'm checking every site where your bio is posted, including LinkedIn and your own website, Julia Telkom, and you never mention the fact that you were. Miss Canada, why did I say you were right? It's probably because it's not relevant, so what do you mean it's not relevant? It's part of who you are, it's part of what got you started and let me contextualize it for you, so when I went When I was a teenager, I had an amazing boyfriend who really believed in me and we used to do math together, that's how we met. , he was actually my math tutor and I got really excited about math because you know the interactions we had and when he told me that a friend of his had entered a contest and came in second place because of her appearance in terms of her race.

It bothered me, it really bothered me to the core and it bothered me because I didn't want to believe that. I live in a world where I can't do anything, I mean anything I want to do, so I decided I was going to do something about it. I had never seen a beauty pageant in my life when I was studying mechanical engineering. and that I was still in high school, but my teacher had gotten me a summer internship to study mechanical engineering, so it was even more important to me because it was the first

time

that someone really believed in me outside of my mother, so I entered school. contest with this in mind, of course I could win if I really wanted to right now.

I'm not taking it too seriously because I'm trying to keep up with school while I do the pageant and the next thing I know ladies and gentlemen, the next Miss Canada Juliet Bell and I, and if you ever see the video of this, I literally froze, I froze because in that moment I understood that my entire life, the entire trajectory of my life, in fact, had changed. He had signed a contract. and for a year I had to be this person and I didn't really know what that meant. I can tell you the press went crazy in Canada, they went completely crazy, there has never been anyone who looked like me and represented Canada in such a great way. it kind of broke the racial barrier and at the same

time

there was another press that was saying, "Wait a minute, now you could have made this whole idea about gender equality even more challenging for your generation of women and women to come, and not really".

It bothers me, so I spent the next 20 years of my life using technology to completely reinvent myself and not a single word about the driving force that made me take risks in technology, that made me want to build companies that made me want to understand how social data. people around the world and how big data, in turn, uses that social data as fuel for artificial intelligence and all its predictive capabilities, what got me started is what I never share, so when my friend called me attention to this, I followed up with: Is it because you're embarrassed?

And I really, really, really stopped. I really asked myself: Am I ashamed? And if I'm ashamed, why should I be ashamed? Is it because I have accepted the notion that someone who is considered physically attractive cannot be intelligent I don't think so obviously not obviously not, but something even more insidious had happened in all my time fighting to ensure that I was lucky enough to be one of the few visible minorities, one of the few women are inside the boardrooms advising them on research and development, what they should invest in, what they should think about, where we could go if we co-create the future together and when I say this, I don't .

I only mean in terms of the corporations that hire me, but rather in terms of all of us because that's what I really believe in, so I spent all this time investing in those ideas and acting on them and yet someone who knows me incredibly well shed a light on something I was completely blind to my own conscious or

unconscious

biases

now we all have

unconscious

biases

and when you think about it you can even find your own so I was backstage before and I was talking to some of The other presenters today and I was talking to some of the ladies over lunch, as well as the ones who came earlier, and I asked them what their unconscious bias is and some of them said intelligence.

When I look at someone, depending on how they present themselves, I will judge whether they are like that. you are as smart as me smarter than me less smart than me my preference could be tall people and in fact in society there have been many studies that have shown that tall people are perceived as more powerful, therefore, the leader of the group is one of the The men told me before going on stage that perhaps the unconscious bias in society is that women are passive. I can tell you many things, calm down, I am NOT. So what is this collective prejudice that we are all right about?

Why is it like this? I've been fighting the idea of ​​living in a man's world, and yet I perpetuate it by hiding from the consequences of being attractive. That makes no sense. What am I doing? That's why I have no real answers for you and I'm embarrassed even more because I work using social data and artificial intelligence and I sit in boardrooms and write thought leadership articles for large corporations that, as you know, inspire them and make them act. in certain ways, which affects everyone. us because multinationals whether we like it or not affect us all what I have done well again on the good side this is wonderful it has pushed me to try to improve myself and on the negative side I have perpetuated so many unconscious prejudices throughout everything in my career that I will never be able to see the repercussions of them because I don't know what they are, so I am very grateful to my friends on the one hand and very grateful to the taxi driver on the other. who just reinforced the fact that of course I mean I must be this or of course I must be that based on how I look but I don't buy it anymore I had to be aware of it but now that I am I need to start examining every bit of my life every time.

That I make a decision every time I say something to someone is that really what I think or am I just carrying the social line that we all tell ourselves because it's easier, it's faster and that's how unconscious bias works. We have this framework, this pattern in our minds of the way the world works and we don't have to think about it continually because we know we have mental models of how it works. Things work, but if your mental model diminishes you or a part of you or embarrasses you, it's about time we changed some of our mental models, so I'm tired of drinking the kool-aid.

I always wanted to be seen. for who I am, but the truth is that I am still exactly the same person I was. I won the Miss Canada pageant. I am still the same person who wants to make a positive difference in the world. In this particular case, I use technology. I use journalism I use conversations I use connection but I'm still the same girl so why don't any of my clients know that I've been Miss Canada? Why can't I talk about it on my own website? comfortably, the key is still because as I talk about it more, as I think about it more, I am changing the pattern, the model that I have adopted in spite of myself, the patriarchal model of what life is, of our place within humanity, is it really like that? about humanity or is it about humanity, one of the reasons I bring this up is not just to embarrass myself in front of a large audience, but because I also realize that not only do we all do it, but when we do it we remember those social data. trails that are feeding the algorithms that are feeding the prediction of what we like in terms of our movies in terms of our purchases in terms of our friends right, we are feeding those things using our social trails the little crumbs of our texts of our tweets from our Instagram photos all the details we don't think about because it's automatic, easy, fast and fun, so we are spreading our unconscious biases every time we communicate and therefore we are training like we train our children. algorithms and the AI ​​BOTS with those biases and again they serve as predictions and they serve as movies and they say that more and more different fields right will be automated and we will have more personalized services based on our preferences, but if our preferences are not really based on what What we believe but what we have bought, that is a self-perpetuating cycle and it is truly terrifying and that is why I am here today to share my discovery of my own unconscious bias. with you so you can start thinking about yours and so we can really start co-creating the world we want to be in together.

We would love to see our daughters and sons together moving forward, so I encourage you all. think about that and think about who in your life really knows you very well and is honest and capable enough to tell you what your particular bias might be and the fact that you don't know it is probably true and then I encourage you to look for a second person this time, not necessarily someone who thinks the same way as you, maybe they don't even agree with you, that person doesn't even have to like you who should tell you what your unconscious biases are and, if not, I don't have to no one like that, just hop on a new bird, hop in a cab, start chatting, thanks.