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How can coaches recognise unconscious bias in themselves and then help their clients do the same? Jenny Plaister-Ten and Carol Whitaker report
We all have unconscious bias. The key is to recognise it. Unconscious bias triggers automatic judgements and assessments. Research from the KRW Institute (2009) suggests that 95 per cent of our decisions are made automatically – and we make around 1,000 decisions a day.
Some are made and stuck to with dire consequences, such as the BP oil tanker disaster of 2010. Others are made with undesirable consequences, such as recruiting in our own image.
Social scientists (such as Tajfel and Turner, 2004) have long recognised that we are wired to like and trust people like us. This means we quickly form allegiance to an ingroup and reject an outgroup. We expect, at an unconscious level, people to behave as we do. Conversely, we are wired to distrust people who are not like us. This can have undesirable consequences. For example, it can lead to stereotyping, misappropriation of blame and unfair treatment and processes.
In coaching, this can mean possible collusion, transference, projection, lack of challenge and matching for similarity rather than difference. Furthermore, in the matching process, it may be assumed that clients prefer to be coached by someone with a similar background, or in their native language. This may limit the depth of the coaching engagement. It seems that in cross-cultural coaching, being of a different nationality to the client could in fact be a useful tool.
In an excerpt from research by Plaister-Ten (2009, p72) a French coach, talking about coaching someone from Spain, says: “It’s about being extremely candid – asking for clarification, even using the pretext as an excuse that I was not born and raised in their culture.”
Around 150 key biases have so far been identified according to Jeffery (2014). Table 1 shows some common ones. These are unknown to us, yet they are present in our everyday thought patterns and decisions. It takes 50 milliseconds to make a decision about another’s gender and only double that about another’s race (Jeffery, 2014) .
This questions our assumptions about our rationality. We have far less capacity to make considered decisions than we think. Furthermore, neuroscience now shows us that we can’t even believe what we see. The visual centre of the brain is at the back of the head and we make sense of things before the visual image connects to it. That’s why identity parades are often inaccurate and this puts our whole legal system at question. In social settings (hobbies) too, bias can influence even the selection of musicians in an orchestra. Consider the TV programme, The Voice, which recognises biases by introducing ‘blind’ selection.
Unconscious bias, of course, serves a purpose when we are under threat, overwhelmed or in need of snap decisions. Kahneman, in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), says that when you think, your mind uses two cognitive systems: System 1, which works easily and automatically, makes quick judgements based on familiar patterns and is where bias occurs. System 2, on the other hand, takes more effort to operate; it requires intense focus and operates methodically.
These two systems interact continually, but not always smoothly.
Typically, there is a tendency for people to make simple stories out of complex reality. We seek causes in random events, consider rare occurrences likely and overweight the importance of our experiences. Hindsight bias causes us to distort reality by realigning memories with new information. On top of all this, we are bombarded by messages every day from the media and through commercial advertisements – messages designed to prime our decisions.
Two very significant areas where bias can impact the very fibre of our social and economic institutions are in gender and race.
Gender bias
Women are under-represented across the world. The World Economic Forum, in its Global Gender Gap Report (2015) has, since 2009, tracked and measured gender equality in 142 countries. This is based on four measures: Economic Participation, Education, Health and Political Empowerment. No country has achieved parity between the genders, but the top four are all Nordic countries, which have closed more than 80 per cent of the gap. Germany ranks 11th and France 15th. The UK, at 18th, enters the top 20 rising from 26th, due to improvements on the Economic, Health and Political Empowerment sub-indexes.
However, the US drops to 28th and continues to fall back, largely in the dimension of Political Empowerment and women in ministerial positions.
Partly in response to these findings, The Women’s Equality Party was launched last March in London and the BBC, as part of its ‘100 Women’ season, hosted a debate for senior media figures on 23 November, entitled: ‘Is the news failing women?’ This was after finding that 66 per cent of the BBC’s global audience is male, thus many television programmes are not written in a way that engages women.
Women have and continue to receive a fair amount of priming from societal expectations. Christine Lagarde, for example, the first female member of the International Monetary Fund, was told by a male partner in her law firm that as a woman she would not make it to partner. Board representation in the UK has improved – 20.7 per cent in 2014 compared with 12.5 per cent in 2011. However, most of those posts are non-executive directors (NEDS) rather than executive posts.
Pay gaps persist. The Chartered Management Institute published research last year showing that pay gaps between men and women widen as women move up an organisation, and women over 40 were found to be paid 35 per cent less than men in comparable jobs.
The situation becomes more complex when the results of a major new study in the US by Leanin.org and McKinsey & Company are factored in.
Women in the Workplace (2015) found that in corporate America men do not “see” gender inequality. Some 88 per cent of the men surveyed thought women had as many opportunities to advance as men, despite data saying that their chances of advancement were15 per cent lower.
So, there is evidence of women facing bottlenecks and ‘sticky floors’, as well as ‘glass ceilings’ and ‘bamboo ceilings’ in Asia. Women, though, also have unconscious bias, resulting in lack of aspiration for themselves and other women. They suffer far more readily from psychological states, such as ‘imposter syndrome’ or guilt when juggling work and family demands.
Racial and ethnic bias
In the current climate of widespread migration, stereotyping seems to be on the increase. Survival instincts are being triggered, as is fear of outgroups, with a negative impact on social cohesion. For example, according to a report to the UK Government, attacks on people in the UK with a Muslim background rose by 300 per cent after the Paris atrocities in November 2015.
We all know about the inappropriateness of ‘judging people’ for the colour of their skin, but research (Thomas, 2001) has shown that black and minority ethnics (BMEs) in the US are subjected to a two-tier system, whereby it is not until they have proven themselves to be highly competent that they get a promotion. Their white counterparts, on the other hand, have been found to be promoted based on potential ability. This can have negative consequences in team selection and team building, since the value of diversity for creativity and innovation may be overlooked.
When we encounter someone of a different cultural background, it is often their behaviour which seems strange to us. This can cause frustration and poor working relationships. Working practices can be a manifestation of deeply held values and beliefs that are “below the waterline” as in the metaphor “the cross-cultural iceberg”.
Think, for example, of someone who talks incessantly at the start of the meeting as compared with someone who just wants to get on with it. The former is likely to be from a relationship-orientated culture. The latter, on the other hand, may be from a culture valuing the task over the relationship.
As we increasingly work with people from all the over the globe, these clashes are likely to occur more frequently unless we understand the cultural tendencies of others and avoid stereotyping. Research from University College London even suggests that some stereotypes are unproven – such as pregnant women being forgetful and older workers being incompetent with technology. The more we challenge our stereotypical responses, the less likely we are to become victims of unconscious bias.
HR professionals are already recommending nameless applications on recruitment processes. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development public policy adviser, diversity, Dianah Worman, recently made a recommendation about this to the UK Government.
Interestingly, in this example, women still need a male sponsor, as this decision came from male executives at Vodafone Turkey.
What can coaches do?
How unconscious bias works: some examples
Concluding remarks
It seems that organisations are at the awareness-raising stage of surfacing issues associated with unconscious bias. Yet, biases are the ‘invisible air’ through which we walk every day and they exert their influence outside our conscious awareness (Lieberman, Rock and Cox, 2014).
The enjoyment we feel when we are right is one of the main reasons we are motivated to overlook our own biases. The consequences of doing this are stereotyping and a lack of robust decision-making.
Let us be instrumental in moving to the bias reduction stage. Overuse of intuition in the coaching relationship should therefore be questioned.
Table 1: Some common biases
References
