This was not a point which was received warmly in the room. This was very definitely not what attendees wanted to hear. Before being able to proceed to my next unpopular point the Chief People Officer of The Daily Telegraph decided to take us there herself. Inappropriate behaviour in the workplace was a problem to be emphasized. A lot of women had terrible stories of this. Many women in the room doubtless had stories of their own. But it was suggested that the whole matter of relations between the sexes was really a very straightforward matter to arrange. Especially in the wake of the MeToo movement, everything had become clear. Men needed to realize that there was behaviour that was appropriate and behaviour that was inappropriate. And while conceding that the categories for both had changed again only very recently, it was also suggested that the mores were in some sense timeless as well as always obvious.
My suspicion is that anyone who has ever worked in an office knows that it isn’t at all as straightforward as that. ‘Is it permissible to ask a colleague out for a coffee?’, I wondered aloud. This appeared to be a borderline case. If the coffee was requested more than once then this was an obvious problem. ‘Men have to learn that no means no’, it was suggested. ‘Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do in front of your mother’ was suggested as one basis for a moral norm – ignoring the fact that there are plenty of perfectly legal, acceptable and very enjoyable acts that adults perform in their lives which they would not do in front of their mother. This was nit-picking, it seemed. ‘It’s really not that difficult,’ the Chief People Officer reiterated.
Except that it is, isn’t it? And every woman in that room – like the vast majority of women outside it – knows that to be the case. For instance, they know that a considerable percentage of men and women meet their future life partner in the workplace. Even though the internet has changed much about dating life, most studies even from recent years show around 10–20 per cent of people still find their partners at their place of work. Given that successful people like those in the room are the sort of people who have a work-life balance that disproportionately favours work, they are going to be spending more time with their colleagues than at social engagements. So is it entirely wise to cordon off this significant tributary of potential life partners? Or to limit it to the tiny slivers of potential permitted by their organization’s Chief People Officer? To do so would be to demand the following: that every man had the opportunity to pursue only one woman in their work life. That that woman could be asked out for coffee or a drink on only one occasion. And that this sole shot must have an absolute, 100 per cent accuracy rating on the one occasion on which it was deployed. Is this a sensible, orderly or indeed humane way to arrange relations between the sexes? Of course most of the room laughs at the very suggestion. Because it is laughable. And it is risible. And it is also the law of the modern workplace.
An investigation by Bloomberg published in December 2018 looked at attitudes among senior figures in the world of finance, which is an undeniably male-dominated sector, with male majorities in each main area other than support staff.14 The attitudes of men at a senior level were striking. In interviews with more than 30 senior executives from the world of finance men admitted to no longer being willing to have dinner with female colleagues. They also refused to sit next to them on flights. They insisted on hotel rooms being booked on different floors from female colleagues and avoided any one-on-one meetings with women.15
If this is truly the attitude of men in the workplace then it does not suggest that the whole area of etiquette around the office is generally either honest or obvious. Rules that claim to be established have only just come in. Norms that are meant to be universal weren’t followed until the day before yesterday. And then underneath all of this is the sense gathered from the Bloomberg report, which is not that people do not trust themselves (though they may not) but that they don’t trust the honesty of other people making claims – including claims made by women once they are alone with a male colleague. If the etiquette of the workplace is so easy to work out it is surprising that it is so complex.
Back at the conference in London, one of the most striking things about the day is that the discussion ends up being of the sort which until very recently was confined to liberal arts college campuses. At the ‘Women Mean Business’ conference we conclude, inevitably, with a discussion about ‘privilege’. Who has it, who should have it, and how can it be more fairly apportioned?
Not least among the oddities of this discussion whenever it arises – and this is very common today – is the fact that privilege is an unbelievably hard thing to define. It is also very nearly impossible to quantify. One person may have ‘privilege’ from inheriting money. For another person this same privilege may be a curse, giving them too much too early and disincentivizing them from making their way in the world. Is a person with inherited wealth but who has a natural disability more privileged or less privileged than a person without any inherited wealth who is able-bodied? Who can work this out? Who would we trust to work it out? And how can the various stratas of this arrangement be flexible enough not just to include everybody in view but also take into account the comparative changes for the better and worse which will occur across every human life?
Another problem connected to privilege is that though we may be able to see it in others we may be unable or unwilling to recognize it in ourselves. By any stretch of the imagination the women in this room form the top percentile of people not just among those who ever lived but among those in their own countries, cities and neighbourhoods right now. They have significant salaries, considerable contacts and will have more opportunities in an average month than most white males will have in a lifetime. And yet privilege as an issue is repeatedly raised because it is assumed to be something that other people have.
Unconscious Bias Training + Intersectionality
This brings us ineluctably – and right on cue – to the ultimate destination point of this impossible process of perpetual stratifications and deduction: the importance of ‘intersectionality’. The Chief People Officer of The Daily Telegraph gets us there before I can. But it is important, she stresses, to consider the intersectional overlay in all of this. For we should recall that it is not only women who need to be empowered and given a leg-up in the hierarchy. There are other marginalized groups who should also receive help. A member of the audience reminds the panel that some people are refugees and it is important that their voices do not get lost in all this. A point which can be made widely and endlessly. Some people have disabilities. Some people are depressed. Not everyone is beautiful. Some people are gay. And so on.
The woman from J. P. Morgan tells us that this is precisely one of the reasons why her firm has instituted compulsory ‘unconscious bias training’. There is general agreement that this should be instituted more widely. Our brains are so wired that we are sometimes not aware of biases and prejudices that may lie dormant in the back recesses of our brains. These engrained prejudices may lead us to prefer men over women (or, presumably, vice-versa) or people of one skin colour over another. Some people may be put off hiring somebody because of their religion or sexuality. And so ‘unconscious bias training’ is available at J. P. Morgan and at an increasing number of other banks, financial institutions and other private and public companies in order to rewire our attitudes and allow those who submit to it to have their natural prejudices altered, cleaned up and corrected.
Just one of the staggering oddities of the discussion going on is the certainty that the readers of The Daily Telegraph would absolutely hate all this. In Britain the Telegraph is regarded as the newspaper of the conservative right. Its readers might fairly be said to be less in favour of change than in things broadly staying the same, whereas unconscious bias training must be very high up the list of things that will stop anything being the same. That is the point of it. It is intended to change everything. And it has come to occupy a central position not just at conservative newspapers and leading Wall Street and Ci
ty of London firms, but at the heart of government. In 2016 the US Government’s Office of Personnel Management announced that it was planning to put all of its employees through unconscious bias training. That is a workforce of 2.8 million people.16 The British government has committed itself to similar processes of bias and ‘diversity training’ for all.
The schemes themselves slightly differ, but all centre around versions of what at Harvard University has been developed as the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Since it went on the internet in 1998 more than 30 million people have taken the test on the Harvard website to discover whether or not they harbour unconscious bias.17 What the IAT attempts to work out is who individuals think of as being in an ‘in group’ and who they might see as being in an ‘out group’. Cited thousands of times in academic papers, it has undoubtedly become the most influential measure of ‘unconscious bias’.
It has also spawned a whole industry. In 2015 the Royal Society of Arts in London announced that it was training people on selection and appointment panels to address their unconscious bias. The organization released a video explaining how this was done. It advocated four principal moves: deliberately slow down decision-making; reconsider the reasons for your decision-making; question cultural stereotypes; monitor each other for unconscious bias. All of which presupposes certain sets of outcomes. For instance, once someone has questioned a cultural stereotype are they allowed to hold onto it? Probably not. If people monitor each other for unconscious bias and find none, is that a failure or a success? A sign of unimaginable virtue, a sign that people aren’t spotting the signs or a sign that everyone is cheating? When people talk about ‘questioning’ things through the application of unconscious bias training they do not seem to mean ‘questioning’ people. They mean ‘changing’ them.
Anyone who has ever had to interview large numbers of people for any role will know that a significant part of the process is ‘first impressions’. The reason there are so many heave-some mottoes like ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression’ is that it is widely recognized to be true. It isn’t just how people look, how they are dressed or what firmness their handshake does or does not have. It is about a whole set of other signals and impressions that a person gives off. And the response to them does indeed involve prejudice, and swift decision-making. Not all of which will be bad.
For example, most people have a natural prejudice against those with swiftly moving, shifting or darting eyes. Is that presumption a ‘bias’ or might it be justified, built in by an evolutionary instinct that it may be unwise to overcome? More pertinently, what should a small-business owner feel in an interview with a woman in her late thirties who the boss suspects is likely to become pregnant in the next few years? Obviously employment law prevents the interviewer from delving into this. But it could be said that the employer has an instinctive bias against such a candidate. And the law might wish to change that. But the small-business owner’s bias against hiring a woman who may work for a short period of time before going on maternity leave, thereby costing the company in maternity pay for a job she may not return to, is not an entirely irrational bias.
Testing yourself for existing prejudices may root out some deep-seated distrust of people of a certain background or powerful women, or much else. It may also just make you distrust all of your instincts. And just as instinct can lead individuals in the wrong direction, it is also very often the only thing that has seen them right.
What is more, you may feel differently from one day to the next, and people who have taken the IAT have found exactly that. Indeed, criticism of the whole idea of implicit bias is such that even some of the people who worked on the Harvard test, which has become such a benchmark, have expressed their concern about what their work has been used for. Since its deployment in the corporate world, government, academia and an increasing number of other places, two out of the three people who created the IAT at Harvard have publicly admitted that the test cannot do what it purports to do with sufficient accuracy. One of the three, Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia, has said publicly that the extent to which the test can measure anything meaningful has been misconceived. There had been an ‘incorrect interpretation’ of his work, he noted. Of attempts to prove bias in individuals he has said, ‘There is some consistency but not high consistency. Our mind isn’t that stable.’18 What is more there is mounting evidence that none of this works in practice. For instance, that increasing the number of women on selection panels doesn’t increase the chances of a woman getting a job.19
So here is a whole area which has been insufficiently studied but has already been rolled out across government and business. Will its effects be benign, its only costs being the huge expense in recruiting experts to guide people in this inexpert discipline? Or will attempts to presume to rewire the brains of every single government employee and everybody in business have repercussions which nobody has yet dared to imagine? Who knows.
But if implicit-bias training looks like a half worked-out theory turned into a fully worked-out business plan, the dogma under which it sits is a grade even beyond that. At the ‘Women Mean Business’ conference it is the Chief People Officer of The Daily Telegraph who is busily pushing the importance of an intersectional approach in business as well as in society more widely. This comes in response to women in the audience wondering where they should place ethnic minorities, refugees and asylum seekers in the list of groups who deserve a bit of whatever can be squeezed out of those with power.
It should probably be said from the outset that despite presenting itself – like ‘bias training’ – as a fully worked-out science, intersectionality is far from it. Its originators, like the feminist authors and academics ‘bell hooks’ (i.e. Gloria Jean Watkins) and Peggy McIntosh, simply assert that Western democracies include a range of groups (women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities and others) who are structurally oppressed in a ‘matrix of oppression’. From there what the intersectionalists urge is a political project rather than an academic discipline. The interests of one of these groups is portrayed as the interest and concern of all of these groups. If they unite against the common enemy of the people at the top of the pyramid who allegedly hold the power, then something good will happen. To say that intersectionality has not been thought through is an understatement. Together with its other faults it has not been put to the test in any meaningful way anywhere for any meaningful length of time. It has the most tenuous basis in philosophy and has no major work of thought dedicated to it. To which someone might respond that there are plenty of things that haven’t been tried yet and that don’t have a fully worked-out structure of thought behind them. But in such cases it would ordinarily be deemed presumptuous, not to say unwise, to try to roll out that concept across an entire society, including every educational institution and every profitable place of business.
Although many people in important, well-remunerated positions now argue for this theory, where can this ‘intersectionality’ be said to work? And how could it? Just look at the set of unsolvable questions which it sets off even just in this room at the ‘Women Mean Business’ conference. All of the women here have benefited from career advancement. Many could hardly enjoy more. Which of them is willing to offer up that place to somebody of a different skin colour, sexual orientation or class position, and when and how should they do so? When, and how, is anyone meant to be able to discern that the person who is prioritized over them, if they were to take a step back and urge this other person forward, has not in fact had a far easier time in their life than they have themselves?
In recent years, as intersectionality has begun to catch on, the workplaces which are attempting to implement it have produced stranger and stranger conundrums. The order of their discoveries sometimes varies but the discoveries themselves do not. At firms in all the major cities a concerted drive will take place to promote women or people of colour into higher positions. But as an increasing number of companies and government d
epartments have to account for pay differentials between the sexes and people of different racial backgrounds, fascinating new problems arise. In the UK all organizations with more than 250 employees must publish the average pay differences in their company between men and women. In 2018 MPs suggested that all companies with more than 50 employees should have to provide the same information.20 This means, among other things, that an entire bureaucracy has to be created to sort through a new set of problems.
I will keep the following person’s identity secret, but it is a telling case. A person I know in Britain recently got a job in a large corporation. They went in on a very fine salary. A short time into the job this person’s superiors approached with an embarrassing request. Would the individual be willing to accept a larger salary than had previously been offered? The institution was getting close to the end of its financial year and was seeking to satisfy the infinite number of graphs and breakdowns on racial and gender quotas in the organization. To its dismay the institution had discovered that the ‘gap’ between pay of people of the majority ethnicity and that of racial minorities was insufficiently close. Would the individual then mind their own salary being significantly upped in order to better satisfy the year’s-end differentials? Being a perfectly wise and sane person the relevant employee graciously agreed to take the higher salary to help their employer out of this otherwise tricky situation.
The Madness of Crowds Page 11
