Raise Your Hand if You Have No Bias

Have you had any conversations recently about bias where someone confidently volunteers : “Seriously, I know I don’t have any bias” ? 

I’ve had a few of these debates recently, thanks to this year’s International Women’s Day theme, #BreakTheBias, and see that it’s difficult to argue with someone who is feeling genuinely offended at the idea that they would possibly have such a thing. I guess it’s easy to mistake this term ‘bias’ to be synonymous with condemning words like “prejudice”, “bigoted”, “narrow minded”, etc. It is too easy to forget that what we are speaking about is unconscious bias and what that really means. 

Some years ago I took my first Harvard University-developed Implicit Association Test (IAT). If you have never done one of these, I highly recommend it. It takes less than 10 minutes, it’s free and confidential. But most of all, utterly enlightening. By measuring reaction times during a word categorisation task, an algorithm calculates whether you have positive or negative associations with a certain group. There is a long list of biases to choose from; skintone, disability, transgender, race, age, weight, the list goes on. You can be as woke as you like and see that biases run deep. 

You see that it is not an indictment on your character. By its very nature, unconscious bias is not intentional and is difficult to spot. It’s not something you can intellectualize yourself out of with the good will of your heart. It’s in us because it’s ingrained into the world we live in and it’s up to us to recognize that and do something (lots of things,) about it.

Writing this, I thought I’d check my own gender bias. I did the test just now and it told me “Your responses suggest a slight automatic association for Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.” That’s me, a female business founder and CEO of an agency specializing in tech. I grew up in the US with two liberal, professional parents showing me that I could do anything I wanted. And still. But of course, still.

Talking about IWD with my dad the other day, he admitted regret that he never showed my sister and I how to fill up the car with gas or mow the lawn. I reassured him that I figured it out myself at 16 when I popped along to the local gas station in my ‘Daisy Dukes’ and applied for a summer job. We shared a laugh, of course, but recognising how we parent/ coach/ mentor and treat our children is spectacularly important.

Every time we play into the inadvertent compliments we give to our 5 year old boys for being clever while our girls are pretty … Even just our approving head nods that agree she will be trouble with the boys when she gets older make us complicit in perpetuating these biases that shape our world.

Across the Pond is my company -  I founded it and I know in my bones what I want it to be. I love my business like another child (almost,) and have always been determined to make it better than amazing. And, yet, still…  it’s taken me years to get comfortable inhabiting the title of CEO. I felt like I’d arrived at my destination with someone else’s suitcase and had to make due with their wardrobe. I was moving through time with clothes flapping uncomfortably around my limbs, inhibiting my movements and distracting my mind. I felt a little bit all-wrong, all the time.

My implicit association of a ‘good CEO’ kept telling me I needed to make some pretty big changes and learn a hell of a lot of things. I needed to be more brutal, decisive and have answers to most things - or at least just know a lot more things. I would chase time outside of busy work days to ‘catch up’ - to be something else. With two small kids and a business to run, that time never appeared. It just made all the other moments feel epically harder and way less satisfying.

One day my therapist asked me this incisive question; “What if you knew that a ‘good’ CEO is just like you, Julie?” 

That day, she gave me permission to break through the bias I was adhering to. (OK it was the culmination of some years and lots of  imposter - earned money well spent on therapy leading up to this penny drop moment… but it was wonderful!)

I found it fascinating that, even while outwardly living contrary to one of these stale stereotypes, this “slight automatic association” gender bias still affected how I thought of myself. And much more importantly, this affected how I parented my two girls. 

I am conscious of proactive countering, such as encouraging them to invite the boy to the dance instead of waiting to be asked (they have!), but I know I also slip. My daughter made the very good point last Christmas that if she were a boy, she would already have the PlayStation that “Santa” kept rolling over onto next year’s list. Whether or not it would have been good for her to spend the better part of her last 3 years of waking life in front of a TV screen instead of TikTok, I don’t know. But my bias changed the course of those years for her for sure.

Every time we refer to some unnamed plumber / doctor / teacher / social worker and carelessly wield a stereotypical pronoun in there, we reinforce the bias. I do it all the time.

Less so now, of course, but … still.

As a business, we are deeply committed to create an environment where diverse representation shows people they can comfortably bring their very own suitcases to work; dress comfortably and be their whole, full selves.  We are also determined to use our sphere of influence to help showcase how many ways of being there are in the world. 

Being fortunate enough to work alongside some fantastic examples of women inhabiting bias-busting careers in the tech industry set us off on this path to showcase them. 

And, as one of the missions of this IWD is forging women’s equality in tech, it feels a perfect time to be shouting about our every expanding Women in Tech series. 

You can read the inspiring conversations both our APAC MD, Serene Wong and China MD, Li Wei have had so far here:

Google’s Sapna Chadha

Meta’s Sylvia Loke

TikTok Thailand's Nod Viraysiri

Lenovo’s Rebecca Wang

Stay tuned for the EMEA stories in the making as I write!

It’s a small step in the right direction, but, just like the awareness we hold in our breath as we speak to our children, the thousands of small steps being taken this International Women’s Day do have an impact. Let’s celebrate that, take a moment to consider each other’s achievements, and look forward with hope to a world which is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, and where difference is valued.