VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, I’m Andrew Fitch. I’m the Community Engagement Manager for the MFN, the Massachusetts Founders Network. We’re here to talk a little bit about DEIB and the value it brings to our organizations today. Diversity, Equity Inclusion, and Belonging is what the stands for. Now, you will often see different organizations or people add on an A for Accessibility, or a J for Justice, or reconfigure entirely and that’s all fine. It all means roughly the same thing, however, so I often say DEIB. Some organizations say DEI, that’s okay. But this is what it means here.
And now getting DEI or DEIB right from the start and focusing on it from the start of your startup adds value to your startup, especially over time, but even right from the beginning. And this isn’t just my personal opinion here, folks, you know, of course, focusing on DEIB is the right thing to do. The vast majority of us really care about it. But it’s also imperative to the success of your organization to focus on this. And again, I’m not just making this up. McKinsey and Company is behind this data, several other global consulting firms have published studies that prove that the more diverse, equitable, and inclusive an organization is, the more profitable it will be over time, Sometimes even up to 30% more profitable for Fortune 500 companies that have been studied over time as well.
So this exists and happens for a whole bunch of different reasons. But for one, more diversity brings in fresh perspectives and ideas creating a more interesting working environment. It adds strength to teams because teams are making better decisions, better-informed decisions, and more robust decisions, and they are more innovative as a result, and also across an organization at the board level and all across the organization better decisions are made, and thus, better profits come over time.
Today we’re going to talk about unconscious bias. What does unconscious bias mean to you, to your startup to our industry in general? So first of all, bias, some definitions here are bias involves attributing stereotypical beliefs about a whole group of people to an individual associated with that group. Now, explicit or conscious bias is the most noticeable of biases that says, you know, some common examples here would be overt racism, overt sexism, overt transphobia. This is the kind of thing that people see in the media or in films, that kind of thing.
Unconscious, or implicit biases, however, are what we’re talking about today. So those are our unintentional people preferences. They’re formed by our socialization, the life experiences that we’ve had the people that we’ve been around, and our exposure to the media. For example, what TV shows did we grow up watching when we were kids? What books did we read? What kinds of movies did we watch? And how do these impact our brains severely the answer to that unconscious biases are a result of our limited cognitive capacity, the little beady red thing is called the amygdala. That’s one of the earlier formed parts of our brains. One of the more primitive forms part of our brains, often nicknamed the lizard brain. This is responsible for kind of fight or flight responses quick, let’s get out of danger. It’s also where our brains categorize you know, based on danger or threats. It’s also where our biases exist. If we want to get our thinking out of our amygdala and make more rational and informed decisions, we want to activate our prefrontal cortex that’s toward the front of our brain there.
The thing is, with biases, they’re pervasive, we literally all have them. We have different levels are different kinds of biases, but we all have unconscious biases. They’re automatic and they’re rapid because they’re all about categorization in our brain, and they exist and our personal bias blind spots. We are not aware of these biases. Some of us might have a hunch, or we might be told by other people, but they are blind to us until we can build more awareness about them in our brains.
Microaggressions: some definitions first, like what is a microaggression? What are some types of microaggressions? Microaggressions are the constant and continuing everyday reality of slights, insults, indignities, and invalidations visited upon marginalized groups by potentially well-intentioned people they interact with. Now, I intentionally said, potentially well-intentioned because not everybody is well-intentioned, but most of us are, however, most of us do also utter microaggressions at some point.
There are three types of microaggressions, we don’t have to get deep into the definitions right now. But I do want to point these out to you micro insults, micro assaults, and micro invalidations. A quick kind of overview of what this looks like. So, the acid rain effect is one of my favorite ways to explain the effects of microaggressions on people. So let’s say that there’s a drop of corrosive rain and acid raindrop that falls on a skyscraper. Let’s assume that one corrosive raindrop is probably not going to make the whole building crumble. It’s just going to affect a little portion of it. Not that big of a deal. But let’s assume that every day, rain storms of acid raindrops falling on that same skyscraper over the years. The building’s going to decay. This is the same thing with people and with microaggressions. You know, if one microaggression is something that is just slightly offensive, or rubs somebody in the wrong way, comes at them, they can probably shrug it off without too much trouble.
However, if there is an everyday reality of slights, insults in indignities, and invalidations microaggressions being hurled at somebody, that’s probably going to affect them emotionally, that’s probably going to affect them over time and even in that day, and that’s probably going to make them want to leave your organization if this is happening at your startup. So this is kind of the reality of microaggressions and how they affect people.