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Micro-inequities
We tend to think of discrimination as really harmful when it’s very severe. When something really terrible has happened to you, it’s very overt. But it’s actually these small micro-inequities that over time are actually more harmful. And this often happens on a very regular basis, far more than people think. It also compounds in a different way in that it compounds across people. So you may have a little bit of bias against one person, there might be a little bit of bias against another person, but over time you realize that pretty much a large group of people is feeling some kind of inequity.
I was in a company, and I was talking to an Asian American female senior executive. There were two in this company, and people continuously, on a daily basis, would confuse the names of one woman for another. Now, they knew what was going on. Most of the time, the other people didn’t even know they were doing it. This is very small. It’s not illegal. It’s not intentional. And most of the time people think it’s completely harmless, but what it was doing, it was depersonalizing them. It was making them seem like they were just there because of their Asian American identity. And you have to ask yourself: If people can’t even bother to understand the difference between one person and another, clearly that they’re being stereotyped in a particular way.
Three Negative Consequences
Why does this matter? Well, one of the reasons why it matters is because we’re losing really valuable talent when it is the case that people feel like they just don’t fit in here. If they don’t fit in at your company, they definitely are going to fit in at another company. When you’re spending thousands of dollars training people, you’re losing talent. And oftentimes in these competitive marketplaces, it’s just not good business.
A second kind of consequence really has to do with a larger group of us. If you look down the hall, if you look across the floor, each one of us has some kind of identity that can face bias in the workplace. For instance, all of us are going to age. Age is one of the most powerful parts of discrimination. Many of us will gain weight. The person sitting next to you could be suffering from depression or major anxiety. Some of us live with chronic pain. There are aspects of people that we associate with not being able to work up to your potential.
The third reason why bias is really important to think about, one of the long-term consequences of it, is that it creates this added stress. And this stress is unique to members of diverse groups, or whoever is the recipient or the target of that stress. Over time, it can undermine performance. It can undermine people’s motivation. It can undermine their leadership. It can also undermine their health, really eroding their immune system. And so over time, the very person that you’re trying to cultivate, a member of an underrepresented group, when you create these added stressors, it actually can lead them to not perform to the best of their ability. And so over time, you’re short-circuiting the very people that oftentimes you’re trying to promote.