Transcript

#103 Unconscious Bias is Real, So Are Solutions: Harvard Kennedy School Former Dean Iris Bohnet

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· 32 min · 5,083 words · 32 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "#103 Unconscious Bias is Real, So Are Solutions: Harvard Kennedy School Former Dean Iris Bohnet", an episode of 3 Takeaways published August 2, 2024 (32 min, about 5,083 words). It mentions 7 people, works and ideas, including Unconscious Bias, Affinity Bias, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Howard, Heidi Roizen.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Unconscious Bias, Howard, Affinity Bias, Harvard Kennedy School
  2. – 10:00: Unconscious Bias, Affinity Bias
  3. – 15:00: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  4. – 20:00: Unconscious Bias
  5. – 30:00: Affinity Bias, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  6. – 31:41: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Notable quotes from "#103 Unconscious Bias is Real, So Are Solutions: Harvard Kennedy School Former Dean Iris Bohnet"

  • Careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Iris Bon she's a professor and academic Dean at the.
    about Lynn Tomman · at
  • Having me Lynn my pleasure Eris let's start with understanding what unconscious bias is what is it and why does it exist maybe it is easiest if I start with an example in fact…
    about Unconscious Bias · at
  • The stereotype and problem what you are now asking about is the problem that we sometimes call Affinity bias or in-group outgroup preferences we're more comfortable with people…
    about Affinity Bias · at
  • Is the type of approach that we should be using and then in contrast we really haven't done that for diversity equity and inclusion really measuring what works and what doesn't…
    about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

Companies & orgs

  • Harvard Kennedy School — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Excited to be here with Iris Bon she's a professor and academic Dean at the Harvard Kennedy School she believes that firms are wasting money on diversity training because most…

Concepts & topics

Full transcript with timestamps

welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomman hi everyone it's Lyn tomman welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be here with Iris Bon she's a professor and academic Dean at the Harvard Kennedy School she believes that firms are wasting money on diversity training because most programs just don't work they don't change attitudes let alone behavior and rather than run more workshops or try to eradicate the biases that cause discrimination she believes that companies and organizations need to redesign their processes to prevent bias today I'm excited to learn how simple

evidence-based changes can reduce and neutralize the biased behaviors in classrooms police departments and boardrooms and in hiring and promotion welcome Eris and thanks so much for our conversation today thank you so much for having me Lynn my pleasure Eris let's start with understanding what unconscious bias is what is it and why does it exist maybe it is easiest if I start with an example in fact there is somebody who is called Heidi royen she's a real person she's a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and she became even more famous because a couple of years ago a few colleagues of mine wrote a case study on her and many of our listeners I'm sure have been in graduate school and participated in these types of cases where we analyze the case and we learn about the protagonist about what they did how they performed how they had success and failures and that's exactly the kind of case that this was

about but then a few years later people took that very case and replaced Heidi's name with Howard and now we use this case study in fact across the country to teach our students about the power of implicit or unconscious bias in a matter of minutes the students prepare for the case not knowing that there is a second protagonist called either Heidi or Howard and they come to class also having filled out a questionnaire where they evaluate how well Heidi and Howard have done and what we find time and again is that students agree and when I say students I do mean male and female students that students agree that Heidi did a great job and Howard did a great job in fact objectively they were both great but we just aren't quite as comfortable with Heidi because she defies our stereotypes of what a typical menure capitalist looks like and she defies our stereotypes of what a good woman does she was just a bit too

assertive a bit too successful in her life and that's unconscious bias of course unconscious bias has nothing to do with gender or race or nationality or religion or body size or height but we have documented unconscious bias in all of those Dimensions it has to do with the counter stereotypical individual so male nurses also experience unconscious bias because people aren't used to seeing men in those types of roles and female Venture capitalists experience unconscious bias because we're not used to seeing women in those roles unconscious bias does it have anything to do with tribalism with people associating with their group either by gender or by race or ethnicity or anything else it's a very good question Lynn I often distinguish between two ways which we can describe bias one is the the bias that I just alluded to and I want to call those stereotypes as in do you belong to the group that I'm

looking at am I thinking that you are the typical type of character when I think of venture capitalism so that's the stereotype and problem what you are now asking about is the problem that we sometimes call Affinity bias or in-group outgroup preferences we're more comfortable with people who look like I do and we in fact see both we see that I judge the kindergarten teacher based on whether or not to use a counter staral example whether he fits my expectations of the typical kindergarten teachers and then secondly I'm also more comfortable with people who look like me so if that person was a white Swiss woman who has done synchronized swimming as in my case then I'm more comfortable with that type of teacher than if the person look very different and both are real so stereotypes and in-group preferences have been very well documented and often hold us back from seeing Talent OR promoting Talent hiring

Talent what talent really is and how early do you see unconscious bias or Affinity bias in children very very early this is not my own research but it has been documented in newborns almost they recognize the faces that they are familiar with the skin tone of the faces they're familiar with certainly they recognize their parents be really early on and by the way when I say parent doesn't have to be parents it's just a primary caregiver whoever they see most they are most familiar with and so it's documented them really early on and familiarity again is not something that we should be ashamed of in fact I am not the one pointing fingers I am saying that that's human nature that we have been so to speak programmed to have those types of impulses and so the important question is not to train this out of our minds but to think about how we can change our environments to make it easier for all of us to get this

right where do you see unconscious bias or Affinity bias in society everywhere Lynn that could be a very quick answer but it has really been documented in many many different places that people enter a room and they don't know anyone and so we are much more likely to join a group that kind of looks like we do whether that's in terms of race ethnicity language of course is another big one culture gender anything that's visible and that makes us feel like we have an easier entry into that group but it has been documented as early as with children in that children kind of look for people who look like they do including in looks body size height we see that people tend to affiliate with people who are similar in many dimensions and then of course we see it in professional life as well so sadly my answer is in fact really true it is everywhere it is everywhere very sadly many organizations have tried diversity

and inclusion training how well has that worked not so well unfortunately and and it is a sad Truth for many organizations I know most all organizations still engage in training and so I think the bigger question is how could we improve our trainings because I don't think we will get rid of them very soon and there is a purpose for them to what good trainings can do is to raise awareness and I don't want to downplay that even though we might think it is more broadly shared the understanding of unconscious bias is increasingly shared by many people and people understand that stereotypes are real and that in group preferences are real it's still important for people to understand that it is likely them as well that it's all of us this is not a problem that happens elsewhere but it happens in our very own lives in our own organization in a very Ideal World what I sometimes call is happening in those trainings is

unfreezing our minds making us open to different possibilities the possibility that somebody else might perceive the room that I see in a certain way very different because they're used to standing in the back of the room and I might be used to standing in the front of the room and we've all had that experience it looks very different so this perspective really matters and that's what I want to call unfreezing but then we can't just let you know go to people back to their daily lives if their unfrozen Minds as in being open maybe a bit more it's a vulnerable place to be unfrozen so you will go back to old habits to all behaviors this is not an intentional move but it is often very unintentional just we go back to our old habits that's the second part of this awareness raising that we have to unfreeze the minds and then we have to give people the tools to in fact follow through on their virtuous intentions and

then eventually refreeze refreeze the new habits the new ways of behaviors and that often means a systemic change rather than change just in our brains before I ask you about how to get the systemic change what can we do to reduce and neutralize bias behaviors as we raise our children I myself have not done research on children but I am going to give you some generalizable insights from that type of research seeing is believing it's very important that our children see all kinds of different people in all kinds of different roles they need to see female astronauts they need to see black astronauts they need to see white male teachers that's really important and that of course affects our media affects the books that our children read affects the cartoons our children watch and that in fact is an area wherein I think compared to when we grew up we actually have made quite a bit of progress so seeing as believing

in there's some real really good research I'm showing that even short exposures to such of these role models that I just now described at an early age and even at a later age the research has been done in elementary school and has been done in high school of bringing in for example female scientists to increase the likelihood that girls think that stem feels could be for them um even short exposure can affect career trajectories I think that's something that parents could easily do just make sure that your children have all opportunities available again we don't want to brainwash them exposure to the whole world not in a stereotypical way would be very useful and so exposure to the whole world is important for raising our children looking at biased behaviors in institutions like corporations or police departments or boardrooms what can we do to systematically reduce and neutralized bias

behaviors the first big Insight is that we should not sideline our diversity Equity inclusion efforts in our organizations and as you say Lynn these could be NOS these could be for-profit these could be universities these could be police departments these could be agencies so when I say organizations I literally mean any any system of some sort of collaboration where we work together and I don't think we have in fact used the same kind of rigor and scrutiny and data and accountability and metrics in our efforts on diversity Equity inclusion as we have for example Even in our marketing departments that is the type of approach that we should be using and then in contrast we really haven't done that for diversity equity and inclusion really measuring what works and what doesn't work and using data to inform our decision- making it's both a simple and a big first point and has is simple because we do it in many

other departments but we just have to use that same type of business rigor in our divers sacred inclusion efforts if you look at the different stages from hiring to mentoring to promotion what do you see in terms of bias and how can we systematically debias at each stage this is a big question let me do the journey of an employee and focus on where bias could creep in and what specific things organizations could be doing it often starts with the sourcing organizations have to identify potential applicants and so where do you go where do you advertise is a first important step we have to cast The Net much more widely much more inclusively really understand the barriers that people experience and that's sometimes along racial lines but sometimes also along geography I think casting the net widely and thinking about where you Source your talent is very important and then secondly I just alluded to these job advertisements that

we place and that's really really loow hanging fruit in that we now have the methodologies the algorithms available to help us debias the language that we use in job ads we now can show which words are particularly gendered we have a library of gendered words which we know will be more likely to attract men and women respectively for example warm and caring were more likely to associate with women whether that's true or not and assertive and even leadership we're more likely to associate with men so making sure that you don't use very biased language in your job ads or if you have to use one of these terms counterbalance them with terms that are more likely to associated with the other gender is really really helpful and that's so that's just the entry stage and then we have to look at how we in fact evaluate these applicants and sadly evaluation is the home of bias in all kinds of different areas it's very hard

for us to be unbiased in those evaluation tasks and so what do we do let me just debunk some myths having diversity on your evaluation committee is not going to solve the problem by itself it's helpful but it's not true let me give you an example about stereotypes a personal story my husband and I brought our son when he was a baby to Harvard daycare center and we had to hand the baby to a male caregiver and the fact that my husband was male didn't protect him from being nervous about a male caregiver both of us felt in that moment this moment of shock and surprise that that's just not what we expected of course he was wonderful and everything turned out great but these stereotypes are shared independent of your own gender so I think that's just an important message in that that's why the evaluation committee is important it's important to have diversity under the committee but it doesn't protect us from

every sort of bias what it does help with are two things the other bias that we mentioned before and that's this ingroup preference that if we just go with people who look like we do who we think are in quotation marks are fit for the organization then it is helpful to have different representation different people of different histories different approaches different perspectives on that committee who might have different preferen in terms of replicating themselves the second reason why it helps is that of course a candidate also feels encouraged if they can see somebody like themselves in the organization evaluating them so if everyone looks completely different than they do that already might be a warning sign that that might not be placed for me so the message here is diversity gender committees is helpful but don't think it is going to solve the unconscious bias problem because stereotypes are shared the second

question is is it even a good thing to have a committee and that's actually where I feel quite strongly that we have a lot of evidence that groups often fall prey to group think where we don't benefit from the individual Representatives intelligence but rather fall prey to converging to maybe the loudest voice in the room or to what the person just before me said so we have to be very you very careful at what group think on these evaluation committee so therefore my advice typically is to say Do not interview candidates as a group but interview them as an individual so that's my second message don't do group interviews do individual interviews the third important message is that we generally tend to overvalue the interview sadly enough one of the worst predictors of future success in the organization is the unstructured interview the unstructured interview is an interview where we just have a preow

conversation where I might interview somebody I'm serving as academic Dean at the Kennedy School so one of my jobs is in fact faculty hiring and promotion Etc so I might then just use a free flowing conversation where we talk about the person's research their teaching but also their hobbies and then we might both discover that we enjoy hiking in the Swiss mountains and of course already I'm going to adore the person when in fact swis Mountain hiking has no predictive power in determining who could be a great professor at Harvard that's the problem with these unstructured interviews so do not do unstructured interviews if you do want to do interviews then do them in a structured way think about the questions beforehand use questions which have been proven to be predictive of future success in your organization and use the same set of questions with all of your candidates so if these are five

questions use the five questions in the same order and give every question score and then evaluate them comparatively I often refer to this as horizontal evaluation rather than vertical evaluation can you talk about career advancement how to debias that and practical methods people can use that's in many ways the elephant in the room I am not saying that we have solved our diversity problem at the entry level we have not so we have to keep working on diversification at the entry level and the hiring stage but we also know that this pyramid here is real where we have more diversity at the entry level and then much less at the top and that's true both for gender and for race in the United States in particular and so the question is what happens there and how do we lose our talent my first observation is actually related to something that you might want to call systemic but really has more to do maybe

with culture than with a firm system and that's performance support bias and I'm starting with that because that can happened very very early on and I first came across it in a law firm they have done the important work that has to happen first to diagnose the problem and of understand where the issue is and not just throw money at the problem and had realized that they have enormous diversity ENT level different gender with even more women as first year associates than men and also more diversity in terms of race and even sexual orientation they could measure at the entry level than at the partner level and then we worked on their promotion procedures their performance appraisals but we just couldn't quite get it to work and then we realized that the problem really started the very first year when somebody joins this Law Firm where some Associates are given more support to perform than others and

it happened unintentionally these are not bad people making bad choices this is all of us naturally being drawn to people who look how we do and what they then did was to formalize this process and that's I think a very important message for every organization that we have to fix our formal procedures and I will go to Performance appraisals and promotion process in just a moment but the first stage is more in the informal where some of these I sometimes we call them micro validations happen so pay a lot of attention to this more informal part of career advancement performance appraisals are another place where what I refer to as the mother of bias evaluation process is a huge handicap for all of us really hard to evaluate performance to assess performance in particular in the types of jobs that many of our listeners probably are in where we in fact refer to these um processes as subjective performance

appraisals we've actually just done some research with a financial services company on their performance appraisal systems they had used a process that many many organizations in fact the majority of organizations that I've ever worked with employ and that I have had concerns about they asked their employees to self-evaluate and then share those self- evaluations with their managers before managers make up their minds and that's probably not rocket science to imagine that the employee self evaluations could in fact impact the manager's assessment and if there are different is in either self-confidence or the cultural acceptability of shining the light on yourself then maybe we will see gender differences we might see racial differences we might see differences by geography in how comfortable people are giving themselves high ratings and so that was my fear this company also then had a glitch in their system where they

couldn't share self-evaluations with their managers in one year and of course that's a bit like how should I say is finding Swiss chocolate for a researcher in that you find a research site where you don't have truly AB testing that we normally like where we have a control group and a treatment group but it's close to an AB test where you have a bit of a shock to the system that was unanticipated and you can look deeper into what that shock did and here's what we found it's actually quite an interesting story showing that a deep dive can really guide the policy choices that a firm makes we found that all women gave themselves lower evaluations than men and this was particularly pronounced for women of color so women of color gave themselves even lower evaluations than white women we otherwise didn't find Big Race Dynamics we also didn't find although we expected that we didn't find huge

crosscultural Dynamics in this firm this is a multinational firm headquartered in the US and now the question is what do managers do with this information in the Years where they have self- evaluations available and what happened in this firm I think was happy news for the firm on the one hand and then surprising news for the firm in another dimension the managers closed that gender gap completely managers in fact equalized men and women on average however that did not happen for the race Gap that I talked about before that we in particular found for women and in fact men added to what was a gender gap to start with and a race gap for women of col color and added a huge race Gap so people of color ended up with much worse evaluations than white employees and certainly much worse than their self- evaluations would have suggested a short summary here is we find what I call supply side induced gender gaps where

employees themselves start out with gender gaps and the demand side induced race Gap where something we didn't see on the supply side was added by managers and so now the question is what happened in the year where self- evaluations weren't shared it actually helped women of color because now we take away that lower self- evaluation that they had started out with and so we might want to call this an anchor so we de anchor Managers from their self valuations and managers just assess the employees the way they always would it did have that impact but it didn't overall close the race Gap because managers independently added this big race Gap and in the end men of call in particular were doing worse in this organization they decided to stop sharing self- evaluations and in addition they have introduced calibration meetings where we don't just stop with managers assessments but we meet as a group at the end and we

actually look at our data horizontally across all of our departments and we look at whether we see certain patterns whether that's by gender by Race by nationality and we ask ourselves whether these are in fact based differences in performance or whether we see the patterns to a degree that we might be concerned about bias whether that's a long race or nationality lines so these deep Dives can really help inform what medicine I sometimes use the language I know from the Natural Sciences as the diagnostic of the ailment can really inform the medicine that I then prescribe not just throwing money at the problem but intervene where something is broken and that's exactly what this organization has been doing that's my recommendation for organizations first assess your performance assessments evaluate them how they're doing in terms of different demographic groups and then intervene to fix what you think is

broken promotions similarly you first have to assess we did this for another multinational company this time they were headquartered in the UK just to see where are they they were very focused on gender where are they losing women is it because women aren't happy tied is it because they leave either involuntarily or is it because we're not promoting them we found what we typically find in that we find a gender gap in promotions many organizations who do that type of analysis have noticed for example that women have to be enroll longer before they are promoted they might also have found that even if there's no gender gap promotions women are promoted to less prestigious roles than their male counterparts and those roles might not Translate for example into salary increases or in real responsibility changes so what the company ended up doing was to create a bit of a cheat cheet for each manager to

show manager the track record of promotions by gender compared to the available pool and that actually helped that organization a lot already very often these decisions happen inadvertently not by conscious decision making but just because of the biases that we had talked about before Lyn which again is the Affinity bias and The Stereotype and if you don't look the part I'm just less likely to think of you Eris before I ask for your three key takeaways is there anything else you'd like to discuss that you haven't already touched upon what should I have asked you that I didn't ask you the one thing I might want to just reiterate is the piece of culture that formal processes and much of my work focuses on formal processes are hugely important absolutely a place to start and numbers do matter so whether you are the only one or whether you are part of a group it really does matter in how you're

perceived but that now leads me again to this question of culture much of this happens at the water cooler or at the golf club or some bar so we have to think about the informal environment as well and one thing that I love for listeners to keep in mind are meetings so many of us are in meetings a lot maybe too much but a lot it's half informal half formal it's not quite like a promotion process but we still have some rules in our meetings and those rules in fact can be shaped and that's a place where you can have impact on people's experiences of inclusion and exclusion sometimes we refer to this as micro behaviors where some of us might not be given credit for our comments some of us might be overlooked some of us might feel like they're not in the know because the meeting really has taken place before the meeting and coalitions have already been formed so that's a place where I recommend people

pay a lot of attention last question Aris what are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today first of all I would love for you to address diversity equity and inclusion the way you address any other business challenge you use rigor use data use evidence to diagnose what the issue is and then fix what's broken that also includes accountability that accountability has to be clearly set on Whose responsibility it is to solve this problem and you use metrics to in fact measure whether the problem has been solved so that's my first message we also know that people work towards certain goals being quite clear about our aspirations our expectations of performance is as important in diversity equity and inclusion as it is in our sales departments or in our finance departments second don't try to fix Minds fix systems go after systemic bias in your organizations make a diagnostic

make a good effort to really understand which systems work politicians don't work often that's inadvertent it's not a conscious effort to exclude certain people but there's a lot of research documenting biases that can creep in into how we hire How We Do performance appraisals and how we promote our employees so systemic issues are hugely important and then thirdly don't stop with the system but also address your culture try to understand as best as you possibly can what's going on in terms of culture of inclusion exclusion in your organization and meetings often are a good place to start Eris this has been terrific thank you so much thank you so much for having me ly if you enjoy today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and and Facebook note that three takeaway.com is

with the number three three is not spelled out see you soon at three takeaway.com

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "#103 Unconscious Bias is Real, So Are Solutions: Harvard Kennedy School Former Dean Iris Bohnet"?

In order: 0:00 Unconscious Bias, Howard, Affinity Bias, Harvard Kennedy School; 5:00 Unconscious Bias, Affinity Bias; 10:00 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; 15:00 Unconscious Bias; 25:00 Affinity Bias, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; 30:00 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

7 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Unconscious Bias, Affinity Bias, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Howard, Heidi Roizen, Lynn Tomman. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#103 Unconscious Bias is Real, So Are Solutions: Harvard Kennedy School Former Dean Iris Bohnet"?

The episode runs 32 min; the transcript is about 5,083 words in 32 timestamped sections.

More from 3 Takeaways

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 7, 2026.