Transcriber: Noppakao "Angel" Leelasorn Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Wow, look at you all!
So I was waiting for my flight 2 days ago
at San Francisco International Airport
and sitting directly across from me
was a young attractive woman.
She wore heavy makeup and she had long, lacquered nails
and a skimpy top that was riding up just enough to reveal
a pretty, gaudy belly piercing.
So I had a shock of surprise when she stood up to board her flight
and I thought the title of the book that she had been engrossed in all this time:
"Fundamentals of Angel Investing"
So this was deliciously ironic for me because my topic is "bias".
I graduated with a science degree from UC Berkeley in 1984.
And it was hard studying science at Berkeley
and it wasn't just because of the content
I was the target of frequent, undeniable, in-my-face sexism.
But this was also a time of celebration and optimism for women
We were the first generation in history
where female college graduates outnumbered males.
We were flooding into the marketplace at unprecedented numbers
and into fields where before we had little to no representation.
And we naively thought that our generation
would be the one to make gender inequity a thing of the past.
But here we are, it's 30 years later
and the conversation remains much the same
Young female scientists tell me stories
that are heartbreakingly similar to those early experiences:
we still have a substantial pay gap
and shockingly few women at the top.
Only 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women and 18% of congress.
Oddly, we are 51% of the population,
yet occupy only 15% of lead roles in movies.
And my world, Silicon Valley, is one of the few places
where you might encounter this scene,
at a major conference during the bathroom break.
(Laughter)
So, as a woman, I find it disheartening
and angering, and really frankly boring to still be on this conversation.
And I imagine as a man, it gets old
having a finger always pointing back at you.
The tolerance for this conversation is wearing thin.
And this is nowhere more evident than in the insult-laden, often vulgar
and sometimes violent comment streams accompanying any online discussion
of a gender-related issue.
But these conversations leave out
a powerful and invisible actor in our story.
All of us, male and female, are unconsciously gender-biased.
And these biases lead well-meaning men and women to do things
that perpetuate the status quo without our ever knowing it.
So in telling this society, we can get our arms around this phenomenon,
we are unwitting accomplices
in the perpetuation of inequity and discrimination.
So let's take a look at the brain processes
that drive by us, how it shows up,
and most importantly whether there are some things that we can do about it.
Most people think that they move through their day
making their decisions with a conscious and rational process of deliberation.
And by this logic, it's difficult to do something
that's out of keeping with your values without knowing that you've done so.
But actually conscious decision-making represents
a tiny, tiny fraction of what goes on in your brain.
You couldn't possibly take in the oncoming barrage of information,
moment to moment,
process it and formulate a response to it
with this part of the brain alone. It needs help.
And what it calls on is a vast reservoir
of unconsciously stored associations.
You see, as you move through your day,
outside of your awareness,
your brain is always scanning for repeating patterns.
And when it finds them, it stores them
as the way things are or ought to be.
But the problem with this process,
which actually works well most of the time,
is that your brain is also not differentiating around the utility
or the fairness, or the accuracy of what the environment is serving up.
If it's associated out there, it's likely to become associated in here.
And it is these associations that we use to make meaning of the world
into formulate our response to it.
Now, we can measure unconscious associations quite easily
with an elegant and simple instrument called the Implicit Association Test.
Quite simply, for gender, all it does is ask you to associate certain words
with the image of a man or a woman.
And when those requested associations
match your unconscious associations,
you're going to be able to do these tasks more quickly and with fewer errors.
So most people in the population, as it turns out, male or female,
regardless of political orientation,
have an easier time associating words like
"leader", "strong", "protective" toward men,
and "nurturing", "emotional" and "fragile" toward women.
16 million people have taken the Implicit Association Tests to date
and the results are clear:
if you grew up here in the US, or for that matter, most parts of the world,
you likely have a significant degree of gender bias.
Okay, so where did those biases come from?
I mean, where are all these associations hanging out?
Well, just do a search on the internet for any profession
and add the modifier "male" or "female" in front of it
and see what comes up.
In this case, the search was on female executive
and as strange as the second image is, (Laughter)
the most troubling one for me personally at my age is the last one
because the subheading is "Aged female executive" (Laughter)
It comes from the things we were seeing from social media, in this case,
a recommendation of the top minds and big ideas that I should be following.
There are 22 images and only two of them are female.
It shows up in the notoriously lopsided gender ratios
at professional conferences.
And even the backgrounds tell a story.
It also shows up in headlines.
In this case, Fortune magazine felt it necessary to reassure us
that Marissa Mayer is the real deal.
Because as a blonde, attractive, young woman,
we might assume she wasn't.
So media is not benign,
because it is this sort of imagery
that our brains use unconsciously
in our calculations of who belongs where
and what competence looks like.
A Yale University study looked at bias
in the hiring for the traditionally male role of police chief.
And in this study, purportedly gender-blind participants
were asked to review two applications.
Now, when no names were attached, they overwhelmingly preferred
the application that had more education.
But when a male or female name was attached,
they overwhelmingly preferred the application with a male name.
This sort of result has been replicated in numerous other academic studies.
But these unconscious biases don't just cause discrimination,
they also influence our life choices.
A University of Washington study recently looked at the effect of classroom decor
on the choice of academic discipline.
So researchers decorated two classrooms,
one of them had kind of traditionally nerdy, male paraphernalia in it,
like Star Trek posters and comic books and video games.
And the other one had neutral objects,
like coffee cups, plants and art posters.
What they found was that female college students who spent time
in this traditionally nerdy classroom exhibited a markedly lower preference
for computer science as a field
than the females who spent time in the neutral room.
But for males, it made no difference whatsoever.
When you really look, this kind of bias shows up everywhere.
It's in what we choose to share with whom and whose opinion we seek.
It infects our assumption about who should do domestic chores
and who deserves the praise for doing so. (Laughter)
It shows up... yeah, (Laughs)
it shows up, for that lone female on a technology team
when her recommendations are disproportionately overlooked
or second-guessed, but she can't say anything about this.
And the phenomenon will likely remain invisible to her male colleagues.
Why? Because to do so is potentially career limiting.
It marks her out as "that woman".
You know, the one that plays the gender card.
So it shows up everywhere.
It shows up in our definitions of leadership,
and when vulnerability, and sharing credit are seen as weak,
and when taking up space and personal ambition are seen as strong.
Gender equity is not a woman's issue.
We need women to fully participate in the conversations
that shape the future of the world.
But it's not just women who benefit, men benefit too.
Because when we associate masculinity with money,
muscles, domination and aggression, we dishonor legions of good men
who do not embody these characteristics.
No piece of legislation or mandatory sexual harassment training
or quota will get rid of unconscious bias.
These things are neccessary.
But when we focus only on overt sexism, we miss the point
and worse yet, we allow ourselves to point our finger
at a hypothetical bad guy out there.
But when we allow ourselves to understand that we're biased too,
we're able to transform this conversation
from one of blame and shame to one of committed action.
Believing in gender equity is not enough.
We are the creators and the consumers
of the environments that drive by us.
So what can we do about it?
There's actually a fairly simple solution,
and that is to commit yourself to becoming
a good observer of your environment.
Make it a daily practice, and if you need to remind yourself.
In fact, you might even notice something today
as a result of the last 10 minutes we've spent together.
But if you do, don't judge it, because we all do it.
Don't judge it, engage with other people.
Get curious, and use it to fuel an exploration.
When you see bias, or the environments that drive it,
say something, talk about it,
and where you can, change it.
And this is for the men in the audience.
Women can't and shouldn't take this one on by ourselves.
We need you to pick up the mantle alongside us.
So let's help each other.
Let's help each other change these limiting narratives
of what it means to be a man or a woman.
Because nobody here is to blame for this problem,
but we are all, together, responsible for a solution.
Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)