MINDFUL INCLUSION

Felicity Menzies is Founder and Principal Consultant at Culture Plus Consulting, a diversity and inclusion consultancy based in

Singapore with expertise in cultural intelligence, global diversity management, and unconscious

bias.

WHY ARE WE HERE?

Sometimes the behavioural research leads us to completely change how we think about an issue.

For example, many of our anti-discrimination policies focus on finding the bad apples who are explicitly prejudiced.

In fact, the serious discrimination is implicit, subtle and universal.

(New York Times, 2013).

Because we are, by definition, unaware of our automatic unconscious beliefs and attitudes, we believe we are acting in

accordance with our conscious intentions, when in fact our unconscious is in the

driver’s seat.

“I promote on merit”

AGENDA

AWARENESS INTENT MITIGATE

The nature and origin of unconscious bias.

Commitment to respond fairly.

Strategies for managing bias.

AWARENESS

UNCONSCIOUS BIAS

Beliefs (stereotypes) and attitudes (prejudices) we hold outside of our conscious awareness that influence our interpretations and responses automatically without our knowledge

We likely deny their existence

We can simultaneously hold explicit opposing beliefs and attitudes

EXPLICIT BIAS

Stereotypes and prejudices individuals hold that they are aware of but may choose to conceal because of pro-egalitarian social norms or legal restrictions

GROUP ACTIVITY

TAG GAME

SIZE

COLOUR

DIVERSE

SHAPE

Our brains are hard-wired to sortpeople instinctively into different groups

based on their similarities.

SOCIAL CATEGORISATION

REFLECTION ACTIVITY

INGROUP BIAS

We exhibit greater liking, trust and empathy for ingroup members.

We make more favourable assessments and confer greater benefits on people from our own social group.

We are quicker to condemn the failures and non-conforming behavior of outgroup members.

We also more likely to cooperate with ingroup membersbut compete with outgroup members.

FATHER-SON ACTIVITY

A father and son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured.

The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local morgue.

The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and was immediately wheeled into an emergency operating room.

A surgeon was called. Upon arrival and seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed ‘’Oh my God, it’s my son!‘’

Can you explain this?

STEREOTYPES

STEREOTYPES

SCHEMAS

PHYSICAL OBJECTS

ACTIVITIES GROUPS

ROLESINTANGIBLES

ARE STEREOTYPES GOOD OR BAD?

ARE STEREOTYPES GOOD OR BAD?

By perceiving individuals in terms of their social categories, we can

form assumptions and expectations about others to

guide us in our interactions with them.

PROBLEMATIC STEREOTYPES

NEGATIVE BIAS

ECONOMIC BIOLOGICAL MOTIVATIONAL

SOCIAL JUDGMENTS

SOCIAL JUDGMENTS

AUTOMATIC AND CONTROLLED PROCESSING

CONTROLLED

Conscious SlowerRational (Prefrotnal Cortex)

AUTOMATIC

Unconscious Fast < 100ms

Activates stereotypes Emotional (Amygdala)

WHEN ARE WE MOST SUSCEPTIBLE?

AMBIGUIOUS LOW SELF-ESTEEM MICRO-BIASESMULTITASKINGRUSHED

Even well-intentioned individuals fail to suppress their automatic stereotypes and biases all of the time."

INTENT

NEW CLIENTS

NEW SUPPLIERS

TOP GLOBALTALENT

IMPROVED PROBLEM-SOLVING & DECISION-MAKING

INNOVATION

DIVERSITY BENEFITS

DIVERSITY & THE BOTTOM LINE

01 Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. (McKinsey, 2015)

02Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. (McKinsey, 2015).

03 Asia Pacific firms with at least 10 percent women on boards have average ROE of 15.4% compared to 11.8% for those that do not. (Korn Ferry / NUS, 2015)

04 On a sector adjusted basis, Credit Suisse LGBT 270 index has outperformed MSCI ACWI by an excess 3% per annum over the past six years returning, 6.4% on average each year. (Credit Suisse, 2016).

GROUP ACTIVITY

INCLUSION

Organisations that give diverse voices equal airtime are nearly twice as likely as others to unleash value-driving insights and their employees are 3.5 times more likely to contribute their full innovative potential

Firms with inclusive cultures are 45% more likely to report a growth in market share over the previous year and 70% more likely to capture a new market.

(Centre for Talent Innovation, 2013)

EMPLOYEE LIFE CYCLE

RECRUITMENT

FEEDBACKTRAININGSTRETCH ASSIGNMENTS

INCLUSION

INTERNATIONAL ASSIGNMENTS

EVALUATION

PROMOTION

SELECTION PAY

HIRING FOR FIT

Ingroup bias can lead to a tendency to hire and promote people similar to ourselves.

Elite employers rank ‘hiring for fit’ as one of top three criteria they use in assessment; 50% ranking fit higher than analytical and communication skills (Rivera, 2012)

What does ‘fit’ actually mean? What is driving fit—facts or emotion (it feels right)?

HIRING FOR CULTURAL FIT

Dissimilarity between organisational and leader culture is a better predictor of firm performance than cultural fit.

Leadership is effective when it provides resources lacking in the organisation’s culture.

(Hartnell, Kinicki, Schurer, Fugate, Doyle, 2016)

Task Relationship Optimal Performance

DIVERSITY DIMENSIONS

RACE & ROLE

Stereotypes associated with diversity dimensions interact with role schema to influence assessments of competence.

RACE & ROLE

When Asian Americans were in roles in which they were perceived to be more technically competent that Caucasian Americans they were still perceived “to be less prototypical leaders” than Caucasians.

(Sy et al. 2010).

QUIZ

Wong Tung-Sheng John Davis Emily Watson, a 31-year-old Asian American male Caucasian American male Caucasian American female, graduated in 1994 from University of Arizona as a Engineering major. He he she has been employed in the same U.S.-based organization for five years as an Engineer Project Manager. Hishis her responsibilities include managing customer complaints, providing consultation regarding the company’s services, and troubleshooting customer problems. While he heshe sometimes has problems with certain co-workers, he he she is generally good tempered.

How technically competent is this individual?

What is the leadership potential of this individual?

CULTURE & LEADERSHIP

The criteria that individuals use to judge leadership varies across cultures.

ETHNIC & RACIAL BIAS

Asian names increased discrimination in short-listing job candidates. Asian minority groups ‘whiten’ resumes by changing their names to "sound more American or ‘white,’” or by using a middle name instead of a first name. Whitened resumes were twice as likely to get callbacks—a pattern that held even for companies that emphasised diversity. (Kang, DeCelles,Tilcsik, & Jun, 2016)

Callback rates are approximately three times higher for a resume with a white name and Canadian education and experience than for an otherwise similar resume with a Chinese name, education, and experience (Oreopoulos, 2011).

ACCENT

People are less likely to believe factual information when it is delivered by someone whose accent is different than the dominant accent, even when alerted to the phenomenon (Keysar & Lev-Ari, 2010).

GENDER

GENDER EVALUATION

GENDERED FEEDBACK

GENDER BACKLASH

GENDER PENALTY

Gender evaluation bias is a consistent or systemic devaluing of women relative to men in occupational settings.

Gender backlash is a form of stereotype bias in which women (or men) who behave counter-stereotypically received negative social or economic reprisals.

Gendered feedback involves systematic bias in the terms used to evaluate male and female performance.

Gender penalty refers to harsher condemnation of mistakes made by individuals performing counter gender-stereotypical roles

GENDER EVALUATION BIAS

Staff in a science faculty rated male applicants for a laboratory manager as more competent than equally qualified female candidates and chose a higher starting salary for male candidates. Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) departments are just as likely to discriminate against female candidates as their male counterparts (Moss-Racusin et al., 2010).

In post-doctoral fellowships, women had to be 250% more productive (e.g. published journal articles) to be rated the at same level of competence as men (Wenneras & Wold, 1997).

GENDER EVALUATION BIAS

In hiring for major orchestras, women’s hiring outcomes increased greatly when using screens (Goldin & Rouse, 2010).

Women’s software change recommendations accepted more often than men’s when gender is not identified. But when a woman’s gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. (Terrell, Kofink, Middleton, Rainer, Murphy-Hill, Parnin, 2016).

GENDER BACKLASH

GENDER BACKLASH

GENDERED BACKLASH

Women's perceived deserved compensation drops by 35%, twice as much as men when they are equally aggressive in workplace communication. (VitalSmarts, 2015)

Using a brief, framing statement - that demonstrates deliberation, forethought, and control -reduces the social-backlash and emotion-inequality effects by 27 percent:

"I'm going to express my opinion very directly; I'll be as specific as possible." (behavior phrase)

"I see this as a matter of honesty and integrity, so it's important for me to be clear about where I stand." (value phrase)

"I know it's a risk for a woman to speak this assertively, but I'm going to express my opinion very directly." (inoculation phrase)

GROUP ACTIVITY

GENDERED FEEDBACK

Women receive 2.5 times the amount of feedback men do about aggressive communication styles, with phrases such as “your speaking style is off-putting.”

Women were described as “supportive,” “collaborative” and “helpful” nearly twice as often as men, and women’s reviews had more than twice the references to team accomplishments, rather than individual achievements.

Men’s reviews contained twice as many words related to assertiveness, independence and self-confidence—words like “drive,” “transform,” “innovate” and “tackle.”

Men also received three times as much feedback linked to a specific business outcome, and twice the number of references to their technical expertise.

Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, 2015

GENDERED MISTAKE PENALTY

Women in counter-stereotypical roles are penalised more for their mistakes. For example, male police chiefs experienced a rating drop of 10% after a mistake, whereas female police chiefs experienced a rating drop of almost 30% for the same mistake. The female chief should be demoted, whereas the male chief should not be.

Similar results for CEO of an engineering firm and chief judge of a supreme court.

However, results were reversed when role was a female gender-stereotypical role. Male presidents of a women’s college judged more harshly for errors than female presidents of a women’s college.

AGE BIAS

Most age discrimination complaints are > 45 yrs.

30% recruiters given age ‘cap’ assignments.

Use subtle job terms: ‘up-beat’, ‘high flyer’, ‘fast paced’ ‘energetic’, ‘dynamic’, ‘innovative’ to screen out mature people.

Research has found no relationship between age and job performance.

TEA BREAKENJOY YOUR COFFEE

COVERING

26% 14% 32% 26%

A strategy through which individuals manage or downplay their differences to avoid negative stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination (Kenji Yoshino).

APPEARANCE ASSOCIATION ADVOCACYAFFILIATION

COVERING?

IMPLICATIONS OF COVERING

16% LESS CCOMMITTED TO THE ORGANISATION

14% LOWER SENSE OF BELONGING TO THE ORGANISATION

15% LESS LIKELY TO PERCEIVE OPPORTUNITIES FOR ADVANCEMENT

27% MORE LIKELY TO HAVE CONSIDERED LEAVING THE ORGANISATION

32% NEGATIVE IMPACT ON IMPACT SELF OF SELF

RECAP

Bias is natural and inevitable; with social, biological/cognitive and motivational origins

Our biases are often unconscious and automatic

Bias affects our judgments and behaviours, even if we explicitly reject the stereotype

We can override automatic biased reflexes with deliberate intention

Cognitive or emotional load increases susceptibility to bias

Bias limits the strategic benefits of diversity for organisational performance

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2

3

4

5

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DENIAL

BIASED ATTRIBUTIONS

CONFIRMATION BIAS

STEREOTYPE THREAT

INTERNALISED BIAS

THE STUBBORN NATURE OF BIAS

THE BIASCYCLE

CONFIDENCE GAP

Source: Bain, 2014

GROUP ACTIVITY

MITIGATING BIAS

MarthaVigorous

JasonSmallDavid

PowerfulKaren

DelicateGloriaFeatherTony

MightyMatthew

WispyRachelRobust

MALE AND STRONG

MALE AND

STRONG

FEMALE AND

WEAK

MarthaVigorous

JasonSmallDavid

PowerfulKaren

DelicateGloriaFeatherTony

MightyMatthew

WispyRachelRobust

MALE AND STRONG

MALE AND

WEAK

FEMALE AND

STRONG

IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST (IAT)

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

ECAPS

SLOW DOWN

PERSPECTIVE-TAKING

ASK YOURSELF?

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE

EXEMPLARS & EXPAND

MITIGATE BIAS

SLOW DOWN

Create space to override automatic reflexes with mindful responses

Don’t make key decisions when busy, anxious or in a negative mood

Monitor your micro-biases(e.g. eye contact, smiling, mobile use, body language, interrupting)

Be particularly vigilant in situations where your biases are likely to be most influential

Act with a conscious intent to be fair

PERSPECTIVE TAKING

The active contemplation of another’s psychological experiences—thinking and imagining the feelings and viewpoints of others

Enhances ‘self-other’ overlap—the merging of one’s mental representation of themselves with outgroup members

Increases empathy and reduces the activation of negative stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination

Inclusion does not mean treating everyone equally. It does mean treating people fairly, instilling an expectation that every individual will have fair access to contribute

and succeed.

GROUP ACTIVITY

ASK YOURSELF?

ASK YOURSELF...

DOES THIS PERSON

REMIND YOU OF YOURSELF?

DOES THIS PERSON REMIND YOU OF ANYONE

ELSE?

IS THAT POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE?

ARE THERE THINGS ABOUT THIS PERSON

THAT PARTICULARLY

INFLUENCE YOUR

IMPRESSION?

ARE THEY REALLY

RELEVANT TO THE JOB?

WHAT ASSESSMENTS

HAVE YOU ALREADY MADE?

ARE THESE GROUNDED IN

SOLID INFORMATION OR

YOUR ASSUMPTIONS?

ROSS, 2015

CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE ATTRIBUTIONS

CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE ATTRIBUTIONS

Interpreting a person’s behavior in terms of their cultural framework rather than your own

FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR

Attributing the cause of a person’s behavior to

character traits / flaws rather than external influences /context

ATTRIBUTIONS ACROSS CULTURES

She doesn’t speak up in meetings

He doesn’t stick to the meeting agenda

She prefers to work alone

She lacks initiative

He is disorganised

She is unfriendly

He seeks a lot of feedback

He lacks confidence

She responds badly to direct criticism

She is overly sensitive

CULTURAL VALUES

INDIVIDUALISM VS. COLLECTIVISM

POWER DISTANCE UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE

ASSERTIVENESS

ORIENTATION TO TIME BEING VS. DOING HIGH VS. LOW CONTEXT

MAP CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND CREATE A THIRD SPACE

TRAIN IN COUNTER-CULTURAL PRACTICES

MAKE THE IMPLICIT EXPLICIT

SEND OUT AGENDAS IN ADVANCE AND CANVAS OPINIONS BEFOREHAND

INVITE ALL PARTIES TO CONTRIBUTE AND ENSURE NO GROUP DOMINATES

CULTURALLY INCLUSIVE WORKPLACES

CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN MULTICULTURAL SETTINGS

COMPETITIVE

Combative and argumentativewhere most forceful, assertive and dominant party wins

COOPERATIVE

Integrating diverse perspectives and

contrasting viewpoints for a solution acceptable to

all parties

EXEMPLARS

EXPAND YOUR CIRCLE

CASE STUDY

RESPONDING TO BIAS

Politely challenge decisions—seek factual evidence to support statements “Can you give me an example?”

Encourage a wider perspective “Could there be other factors at play?”

Encourage the use of objective criteriarelevant to job performance “Does that affect job performance? How?”

Politely challenge language used—ask for clarification of vague or gendered language “What do you mean by that?”

Engage in supportive, non-accusatory dialogue and questioning to uncover assumptions.

REFLECTION & CONCLUSION

REFLECTION

LEARN SHARE CONSEQUENCE APPLY EXTEND

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02

03

04

05

What are your main learnings from today’s workshop?

How will you take those messages to your

wider team (managers, peers,

subordinates)?

How will you apply what you have learned

today to mid-year performance reviews?

How does what you have learned today impact results of the

employee engagement survey?

In what other ways can you personally seek to

reduce unconscious bias at a personal, team and

organisation level?

CONCLUSIONS

Our brains are hard-wired to sort people into groups, and to make fast and automatic social judgments.

Stereotypes are socially-constructed and arbitrary and are often invalid and negatively biased towards outgroups.

Bias in social judgment can occur outside of our conscious awareness, influencing our decisions about and responses to others without us even knowing.

Overcoming bias requires awareness of our hidden biases and the motivation to monitor our responses, challenge our assumptions, and engage in techniques that dismantle social categorisations.

ECAPS

Q A&

THANKS FOR LISTENING

Q & A SESSION

CONTACT

https://www.facebook.com/cultureplusconsulting/

@culture_plus1 info@cultureplusconsulting.com

www.cultureplusconsulting.com

https://www.linkedin.com/FelicityMenzies +65 6408 0682

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