Valerie Purdie-Vaughns on Unintentional Bias | Big Think

So, discrimination and bias and inequities are one of the most important topics of the day today. One of the reasons why is that many, many companies are becoming increasingly diverse. Companies value diversity. They think it's really important.

And yet, the way our brain works, we still engage in many different kinds of biases, and they happen outside of our awareness. The more and more that we hear about this, the more and more we talk about it and have conversations about it, the more it helps us to become just much more powerful and informed leaders, both in the national context and also in the international context as well.

There are lots of things that we now know about discrimination that we didn't know before. Often times, the science is a lot more far ahead than what people think. For example, many, many people continue to think that discrimination is overt, it's intentional, it's some bad apples or bad people engaging in bad behaviors.

What we now know is that most discrimination is actually quite unintentional, it's unconscious, and it happens outside of our awareness. A great example of this is letters of recommendation. This is a great example because you're really trying to write a letter of recommendation for someone, but we know that there winds up being very, very strong gender biases when you write a letter for a woman versus a letter for a man.

So, letters for men are longer. They use the word "brilliant." They use the word "genius," and they focus on the person's qualities. Letters of recommendation for women tend to be shorter. They use the word "team player," and they often times incorporate things about women's personal lives.

Even when you're really trying hard to advocate for someone, these unconscious biases can affect how you're actually advocating for someone when you're on their team and advocating on their behalf. So that's an example of unintentional bias.

It's very much the case that bias also varies by group. What I mean by that, for instance, is that discrimination and bias against lesbians, gay individuals, transgender individuals, and bisexuals is on the decline. It's not completely gone, but it is certainly on the decline.

However, bias against older employees, and this just means people that are over 50 years old, bias against people who are overweight, and bias against people who have physical limitations has very much not changed over the past 15 years. In some respects, with the inclusion of technology companies, it's actually on the rise.

We need to be careful to think that just because discrimination or bias is declining for some groups, it doesn't decline for all groups at the same time.