What does the movement for workplace equity and inclusion look like today? This week, Our Body Politic guest host and acclaimed radio journalist Celeste Headlee interviews Reshma Saujani, CEO of Girls Who Code on her new book PAY UP: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think) and how equal pay for moms is the next frontier. Then, Headlee speaks to author and Franklin Covey inclusion and bias thought leader, Pamela Fuller, on how unconscious bias continues to plague workplaces and what might be done about it.
Celeste Headlee:
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Celeste Headlee:
This is Our Body Politic, I'm Celeste Headlee, sitting in for Farai Chideya. The pandemic wiped out tens of thousands of American jobs and not surprisingly women as a group continue to be the hardest hit. Millions of women are newly unemployed, sparking debates about how far back these losses could push women's progress in the workplace and exacerbate already dire gender disparities across the board. What's more, mothers in our new pandemic normal are experiencing much higher rates of anxiety and depression. A new study shows that postpartum depression tripled for new mothers.
Celeste Headlee:
In the face of what appears to be a starkly, grim reality. One woman activist and founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms, argues that now is actually a moment of opportunity for women. That's Reshma Saujani, author of the international bestseller, Brave, Not Perfect, and Women Who Don't Wait in Line. She has a new book out titled, Pay Up. The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). I spoke with her about the new work and how she sees this moment. Hi Reshma.
Reshma Saujani:
Hi. How are you?
Celeste Headlee:
I'm doing well. Let's start with this moment. How would you describe the present landscape for working women? I guess not only the current realities, but the outlook.
Reshma Saujani:
Women are in crisis. Millions of us are missing still from the workforce. When we started the pandemic in 2020, 51% of the labor force was female. We were flying our feminist flags high, right? That was the first time in the history of our country that had happened. And then the pandemic hit. And millions of women were pushed out of the workforce because they had to supplement their paid labor for unpaid labor because schools were shut down, daycare centers were closed. You were terrified of bringing your grandparents in your home to look after your kids because you didn't want them to get COVID-19.
Reshma Saujani:
And so that entire structure of care dissipated, and it was already on a shaky ground. And so now two years later, women have made gains, but we're still not at pre pandemic levels. Some of this is attributed to the fact that workplaces are finally open to remote working and flexibility. And so knowledge workers who are still facing a childcare crisis can actually work and have a child. But for many women who are working in retail, manufacturing, that's not possible. And so we are in crisis. And you're not just seeing this in our labor market participation, but in our mental health. 51% of mothers say that they're anxious and depressed. Moms don't break, but we are broken.
Celeste Headlee:
When we're talking about this moment. I read this Amazon review which raised my eyebrows, because it was clearly from a boomer mother. And she said this, quote, "The challenges faced by working mothers today are the same challenges I read about back in my graduate school days in the early 1970s, the fact that these same issues remain unresolved some 50 years later is disheartening." And so we're talking about what's different in the new pandemic normal, but many of the things are just exacerbations of what existed before, right?
Reshma Saujani:
That's right. But what's different I think in this pandemic I'll say for myself is, I had an awakening. I found myself with two little kids, running an organization and it nearly broke me, and I have help. I had spent the past 10 years telling my Girls Who Code students to barnstorm the corner office and to lean in and to girl boss their way to the top. I remember Celeste, I would be speaking at a panel and I'd get to the Q&A section. I may have just literally left the green room breastfeeding my son. And a young woman would say to me, well, Miss Saujani, Miss Saujani, how do you balance having a kid and being a CEO?
Reshma Saujani:
I would look at her almost annoyed and wave my hand and say, don't worry about that, just focus on the hustle, on working real hard. We all bought into this corporate feminism that all you had to do was get a mentor sponsor in color culture calendar. We bought into the fact that we were being taught that it's our fault. It's not the structure. It's not that we don't have paid leave or affordable childcare, or we live in a work culture that is literally built around men, it's our fault. And so to me, that was my big aha and what I'm really trying to share with people in this book.
Celeste Headlee:
You're honest in the book about being wrong, about discovering that you were wrong about some things. I wonder, what was it that brought that aha moment? What did you see specifically that changed your mind?
Reshma Saujani:
School closures and the design of hybrid schooling. For me, a lot of my executive leadership team were working women of young children. And so a lot of us depended on the schools, the public schools, right? To be able to work. And when schools closed and they came up with this idea of hybrid learning, where you would have to log on your kid at nine o'clock, 10 o'clock at 11 o'clock all the while maintaining your full time job. I remember thinking, aren't they going to ask us? Because here's the thing, we do time and use surveys in America. We knew in March, April, May and June, whose labor was being used to school, and who was going to actually face an economic backlash, if they had to literally homeschool their kids while they maintain their full-time job.
Reshma Saujani:
And so to me the shock and that millions of women's potential dreams, health could be demolished in one policy decision that did not even consider us. I don't even think they probably talked about us when they made that decision. And that was terrifying to me, because this could happen again. And so all of this, all of this fighting, all of this organizing all these policy changes, all of it is in vain if we actually don't change the structure. What I mean by that is we live in a country, the only industrialization that doesn't offer paid leave. The vast majority of women go back to work 10 days after having a baby. You don't recover from that, physically or mentally.
Reshma Saujani:
Secondly, we don't have affordable childcare in our country. Most people pay more for their childcare than their mortgage. And so it is literally the largest cost center of families. Most women work to work, right? School days are eight to three, work days are nine to five. Why? Until we make some of these structural changes, we as working women are constantly going to have to navigate being a mother and caretaking and having a job. And then when our kids get older, our parents are going to get older. And then we go from our kids to our parents.
Reshma Saujani:
Honestly, when I talk to my friends whose kids are older but now who have 80 year old parents that need help, it's the same struggle. And it's the same lack of understanding from society in their employers. Because the reality is two thirds of caregiving work is done by women.
Celeste Headlee:
Men are doing more of it, but it's not even close to equal.
Reshma Saujani:
Men are doing more of it, but also we gaslight when they do.
Celeste Headlee:
That's really true.
Reshma Saujani:
We live in a culture, right? People say to me, well, what are we going to do about the men? I'm like, what do you mean? They're with me. They want the same things, but we live in a culture where when you say I'm going to take paid leave, you will literally be, what, are you breastfeeding? We ridicule men when they participate in this way. And so that has to change too.
Celeste Headlee:
As I was reading your book, I started to think of some of the headlines that have come out. I saw a press release from one of the ride share companies saying, look at this woman, so dedicated. She was in labor and she took one last ride on her way to the hospital. And then of course there was that all those headlines made by that state Senate candidate in Minnesota, who was actually in labor while she was giving her speech. And everyone was talking about her being so tough. I remember one woman's comment being, God, I feel terrible for having complained that I was on bedrest. Right? What do you make of the way media handles these stories about working mothers?
Reshma Saujani:
We've made moms feel like they have to be martyrs, that they have to do it all, and that they can't ask for help from their partners, from their government or from their employers. We make it seem there's all these women out there, they're balancing it all. So what's wrong with me? And it becomes a personal problem and not a societal problem. And that's what's toxic. Again, I own up to this. I have the t-shirt in my closet about being a girl boss and being a fierce mom. We have literally got to throw all them in the garbage. All the way that we have been culturally-
Celeste Headlee:
Are you going to throw all your t-shirts in the garbage?
Reshma Saujani:
Yes, I am. I am. They're cute. I don't want to, but I have to, because I think the thing is we have to ask ourselves, why do we think we have imposter syndrome? Because we're wearing a t-shirt that tells us that we're good enough, which subliminally is telling us we're not good enough. 72% of high school valedictorians are young women. The majority of those graduating from college are women. The majority of those with their PhDs and their master's degrees are women. We are the most educated, most prepared, most qualified. So then what happens to us? They tell us that all of a sudden we're not ready and we buy into it.
Celeste Headlee:
Is there still advice from your previous work, your I guess lean in phase, your girl boss phase that you think is still relevant and helpful?
Reshma Saujani:
Yeah. Listen, a lot of what I was talking about in Brave, Not Perfect is still relevant, because it is true. Part of this problem that we're talking about is the socialization of perfection. And it's heightened when you're a mother and that you have to basically do it all. And so I do think that unlearning and becoming imperfect and actually finding time for yourself and actually demanding, asking from your employers, I'm really obsessed with organizing in workplaces. We are not going to get paid leave.
Celeste Headlee:
You mean union organizing?
Reshma Saujani:
What is the 21st century way that we organize moms in corner offices and in retail to ask for paid leave, to ask for remote work, to ask for flexibility, to ask for affordable childcare, especially when we're in the middle of the great resignation, where there are so many open jobs, that we actually have leverage in the workforce. I think that for a lot of women they don't know how to ask for that. Your HR is not going to teach you how to do it. There's this missing space I think that exists where there's an opportunity I think to build community and to build teaching on how we actually create power.
Reshma Saujani:
If you look at the whole picture today, from abortion to the fact that our babies are dying, number one, guns, to the baby formula shortage, all of it is interconnected in the sense of that, our work is not valued or respected. We have got to change that, and we can't wait for someone to basically say, I'm going to respect you now, I'm going to value you now. We have to demand it.
Celeste Headlee:
That's Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code and author of the new book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). Coming up next, more with activist Reshma Saujani on what we can do to support working moms in the new pandemic landscape. Plus author and unconscious bias expert, Pamela Fuller explains how bias continues to thwart DEI initiatives in the workplace. That's on Our Body Politic.
Celeste Headlee:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. If you're just tuning in, we're talking to Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code an author of the new book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). Saujani is a long time advocate for gender equity in the workplace. And when recently thrust into being a working mom from home because of the pandemic, she found her formerly championed motto's like girl boss, and lean in, no longer had the same appeal. Saujani is now calling to end the stigma of motherhood in the workplace and get support for her viral initiative, to provide a salary for motherhood or what she called a Marshall Plan for Moms. Let's hear more of my conversation with her.
Celeste Headlee:
I want to read just a paragraph from your book. You say, "There is a one in a generation opportunity that must not be missed to redefine the future of women in work, a future in which the work of labor in the home is valued and compensated on par with the labor in paid jobs, in which quality affordable childcare and paid parental leave are understood is essential, to preserving the innovation and diverse capital women bring to the workforce. One in which workers wellness is valued, just as much as their output and women no longer have to hide their identities in order to succeed." What does that last part mean about having to hide your identity in order to achieve success?
Reshma Saujani:
Think about, if I go speak at an event right now, and I say, how many of you waited to the last possible second to tell your employer you were pregnant? Every hand was raised. There's an article in the New York Times about how Zoom's so great, because you can hide your pregnancy all the way till month eight. And so why do we hide our pregnancy? Because we know that when we tell our employers that we're pregnant, we'll suffer motherhood penalty. Opportunities will be taking you away for us. We might get fired. Right? The implicit deal that we make with the workplace is like I'm going to hide being a mom. And it starts literally before the baby is even born.
Reshma Saujani:
And so I think that we have to stop doing that. And I tell people, tell people you're pregnant when you're pregnant, right? Don't say sorry when your kid interrupts your Zoom call. Walk into your employer's office and say, you're paying for my gym membership. I need support in my childcare. Basically leading with our motherhood as part of our identity, instead of hiding it. What would the world then look like, and men do this. I say to people it's not caretaking, it's about who's doing the caretaking.
Reshma Saujani:
So many more men I see now say, look, I got to leave this meeting early because I got to go pick up Johnny from school. And we're like, you're such a great dad. Thank you. We don't have a problem with it when men are doing it. But when we do it, it's different. It's all of a sudden we're not committed to our jobs. We're distracted. We're not as economically valuable. We have to really culturally root out the motherhood penalty. But by doing that, I think that we have to also stop participating in a system that makes us hide our identity and penalizes us for it.
Celeste Headlee:
That's so much easier though when you have some leverage and power in your organization. One of my friends down the street, she was applying for a promotion and she hid her pregnancy because she knew there was a chance she wouldn't get the promotion. And it's one thing to say to her, no, don't hide it. Go ahead and do it. But the reality is it might cost her the promotion. That could happen. What do you say to someone who's lower on the totem pole who doesn't feel that they have the leverage to be able to back up that boldness?
Reshma Saujani:
It's up to us to fight for them, right? I think that's right. I think it's up to, if you're a partner or if you're a manager or if you work at a place that you quite frankly could sue your company, you should not be hiding your pregnancy up until the last second. It's up to us to change culture for our most vulnerable sisters, period, because it is true. You read the story about a mom who didn't have childcare, worked at a pizza parlor, left her kids at her apartment and she gets put in jail for child endangerment. Women who get fired because they were leaving their employer to basically go pick up a laptop so their kid could learn at school. This type of discrimination is happening every second.
Reshma Saujani:
But it's so interesting Celeste, we've spent a lot of time as a culture, not successfully of trying to root out discrimination on race, on sexual orientation and even on gender. I would argue that the problem in many ways is not a gender discrimination, it's actually discrimination against motherhood. And even when I started the Marshall Plan for Moms, people were like, well, what about the dads? I'm like well, what about them? Right? Dads are not discriminated in the workforce for being dads. Mothers are. Women in 22 states make more than men, childless women, but the minute you become a mother the discrimination begins. I think if we actually focused on that and tried to root that out, we'd get to a quality quicker.
Celeste Headlee:
As we move into an environment in which it seems, where at least many jobs especially in the knowledge jobs will have hybrid work or at least partially remote work as an option. Do you see that as a net positive for women?
Reshma Saujani:
It's absolutely a net positive if we design in a way that doesn't create more inequality. What I say is, who's coming into the office? Who's not coming into the office? How are we making performance reviews? Are we still valuing face time so that when women are not coming because they're doing childcare and they're doing the laundry between their Zooms, they're getting penalized for it? I think that we have to be very intentional about flexibility and remote work. I think the second thing is we have to really at the same time we're building this, we have to really support our hourly workers with building predictability around their schedules.
Reshma Saujani:
Walmart, for example, started building an app that would help hourly workers change shifts between each other, which allowed them to manage their childcare situations. As we're thinking about design, it can't just be about the woman in the corner office, it's got to be about everybody. Listen, there's still going to be resistance. We saw this with Elon Musk, we've seen this with Jamie Dimon, there's still resistance because there's this perception that people are at home watching Netflix, even though if look at the productivity, it's actually not true. People are more productive, you know what I mean? At home. But there's still that narrative. So if we're the ones at home, all of a sudden we're the ones that are lazy and not committed and not productive.
Celeste Headlee:
Let's talk about solutions because you lay out some very specific solutions in your book. We might as well begin with the title of the book, which is, Pay Up, and that refers to the unpaid work that mothers take on. You say up to 20 hours a week above what fathers do. And of course it's likely more than 20 hours for millions of single mothers as well. Let's talk about the pay for the unpaid work. How would this work?
Reshma Saujani:
I think the bottom line is we have to acknowledge that women are doing caregiving work, caretaking work that is basically the equivalent of a job and that allows society to be functional. And so how can we value this? The second piece of that is, how are we going to change that ratio so that it's not two thirds of women, it's 50, 50? And how do we build quite frankly for single moms who don't have that second partner at home? I think we should always be building for the most vulnerable. We built workplaces for men who had a stay at home partner instead of building workplaces for a single mom. And so if you were to build a workplace for a single mom, what would that look like?
Reshma Saujani:
One, I think it would ha be a workplace that had flexibility in remote work in a way that was designed that didn't penalize against her when she took that benefit. Secondly, it'd be a workplace that offered paid leave, but also incentivized men to take it, so that we truly were shifting the gender ratio of work at home and shifting the cultural perception of who does care work and who doesn't. The third piece, and this is a piece that we're very focused on at Marshall Plan for Moms right now, is affordable childcare. Listen, the childcare model in our country is broken. And so someone has to provide a subsidy, that's either going to be the government or the private sector.
Reshma Saujani:
The government unfortunately has made it clear that they're not going to provide the subsidy. Even though literally in America, you cannot work, the vast majority of Americans cannot work without childcare. We don't live in the 1950s where there's a stay at home partner. Both people need to work and they're still barely making it. I read somewhere that the average cost of taking care of two kids for a family is $240,000. Nobody has that. Right? So someone has to provide the subsidy. It's got to be the private sector. Right now about 10% of companies provide some childcare benefit.
Reshma Saujani:
We launched the National Business Childcare Coalition to start making the case that childcare is an economic issue, and is a benefit that companies should be providing to workers. We've got a lot, a lot of support for this. My mission literally in the next three to five years is to make it the norm that most companies are providing both hourly workers and salaried workers some childcare benefit to help reduce the cost.
Celeste Headlee:
This is another wrinkle in that the epidemic we have of people who are not employees, but independent contractors. That even if we do make this part of the private sector, it's going to be difficult to convince corporations to not just make everyone an independent contractor, right? We're in the age of the freelancer, the age of the side hustles, right? If you're going to use the private sector as your solution, how do you get past this trend of not hiring people?
Reshma Saujani:
Well, I think that they're realizing and they should realize that the cost of attrition is really high. And in fact it's more expensive to keep losing people and to keep turning people over than to start actually investing in them. Something happened along the way where we stopped actually valuing our workers. We basically started treating them like widgets. And when that happened, people started also being like, all right, I'm going to work here for eight months, nine months, one year, two years, people stopped staying.
Reshma Saujani:
When I think about my parents, they stayed at their employers for 30 years, and it's because their bosses knew my name, knew where I went to school, came to my graduation, organized family picnics. And so I think the way that we're treating people right now is really causing a tremendous amount of turnover and a tremendous amount of economic loss. Some of the partners in our coalition like Etsy, for example, they've been providing these benefits for a long time and they've seen basically them pay themselves back by being able to retain employees.
Celeste Headlee:
Since we're talking about pay, we might as well stay with pay. In 2020 you wrote an article that went viral in which you advocated for the Marshall Plan for Moms. And that would include a $2,400 monthly paycheck to support mothers. Can we talk a little bit about how that would be paid for and how it would help?
Reshma Saujani:
We put that number out there just because that was the number that people were getting for stimulus checks. And part of it was just to put an idea out there, and did people have feelings about it. This idea of paying mothers for their labor was incredibly controversial, even though in many countries that's exactly what they do. It's called a parental income. They do that in the UK. When you have a child, the government sends you a check. Because any country that doesn't have a growing population is a dying country. And the reality is, is that, America's had the lowest birth rate in 50 years. I think it ticked up a little bit recently, but it's because it's too expensive.
Reshma Saujani:
And so we have got to start valuing the labor that caretakers do and literally put a number on it. We put that number, $2,400 a month on it and it really ignited a lot of conversations. And part of what I talk about in the book is I think we need to ask ourselves, why does it make us feel so uncomfortable? We need to recognize how that uncomfortability has gotten us to this place where our government is bailing out airlines, but not bailing out moms. We're literally having a baby formula shortage that we should have done something about months ago, but we're expecting moms to just scour the aisles of Walmart. We're not valuing the work that they do and we're not supporting them for it.
Celeste Headlee:
I think that some of this discomfort nationally traces back to the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and his apocryphal stories about welfare queens, which turned out to be based on nothing. But I think that we have as a nation subliminally accepted this idea that if you pay mothers to help offset childcare costs, they're going to have more babies in order to get more money.
Reshma Saujani:
Or as Joe Manchin said, which was why he didn't want to support the child tax credit, is that they're going to use it for drugs. But it's the same narrative that they made in the 1980s. Again, it's the sense that women can't be trusted. Same thing that's happening with Roe v. Wade, that immediately we want to decide who can be a mother and who can't be a good mother, and the government should basically control that. And so we're not going to give you any resources, any support, any help.
Reshma Saujani:
Even if you think about the tax code Celeste, the way that's designed, it's designed to have wealthy women be able to stay at home, because it's much cheaper to stay at home than to work and have really poor women have to constantly work and never see their children. Because again, we have very racist views about who is and who is not a good mother in this country. It's not right.
Celeste Headlee:
What do you make then of the 2021 child tax credit? How significant was the passage of that? And could it lead to better things?
Reshma Saujani:
Huge. I was really hopeful. We pushed hard for that. I was hopeful that it would be renewed and it wasn't tied to working in the workplace. That's right, that is exactly the way that it should have been done and structured. We were very, very, very, very hopeful. And it is a huge, you put 40 million kids in poverty overnight when didn't expand it.
Celeste Headlee:
Are there other things now that you're hoping will come as a result of the successful passage of that tax credit?
Reshma Saujani:
Well, I mean it got expired so unless they do it in reconciliation, that moment has passed. Same thing with, we had a minute of paid leave, right? Emergency paid leave. There were talks about affordable childcare and creating that 7% ceiling, which would've been game changing for families. All of the things that we should have done, are seemingly unlikely to pass and we have to still fight about. It goes back to this point though, about private sector. The private sector can't do it alone. It's got to be the private sector and government, it's a both and.
Reshma Saujani:
I think in many ways right now, if we could basically demonstrate, this is where the private sector I think is helpful, is that if you can demonstrate that there's an economic benefit in providing these benefits, then maybe some of these senators and Congress people can get their heads around the fact that you just can't have a functioning economy if you don't provide childcare supports, or if you don't have paid leave, or if you don't have a child tax credit. It's not a freebie or a handout.
Celeste Headlee:
I want to ask this about activism, because the book is literally asking people to join a movement. I wonder if you think that's more likely now, we seem to be in an age of activism, not just with the women's marches, but the Black Lives Matter movement. We seem to be an age when people are ready to literally take to the streets. Are you calling people to a literal movement?
Reshma Saujani:
I am. I'm calling us to rise up and take our rage and put it into power. But you're doing it with a group of people that are the most exhausted, beaten down and have the least amount of time. I don't know if that's a march. I don't know if that's a protest. What I say in the book is I want you to advocate for one thing for yourself. We need to build that muscle where we realize that we deserve to be valued and we can ask for what we need, and we don't have to be martyrs. And that is a deep conditioning, deep conditioning that has to change. But this is our once in a lifetime moment, this really is. I deeply feel that way.
Reshma Saujani:
I do want women to see all of the interconnections between everything that is happening in the world right now. Six out of 10 women who get abortions are mothers. What's happening in our schools on gun violence, those are our babies. What happened with baby formula, paid leave, is all tied together. And so we need a wholesale cultural shift and a realignment about our value. We can't just sit and wait for them to see us. We have to make ourselves be seen.
Celeste Headlee:
Reshma, thank you so much.
Reshma Saujani:
Thank you.
Celeste Headlee:
That's Reshma Saujani, CEO and founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms. She's author of the international bestselling book, Brave, Not Perfect. And now out with the new book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think). Coming up next, DEI initiatives are finally gaining a little traction in the workplace, but why aren't we seeing better results? We invite Pamela Fuller, FranklinCovey thought leader on inclusion and bias, to help us understand how our unchecked biases can even hinder the best laid plans. You're listening to Our Body Politic.
Celeste Headlee:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Celeste Headlee, sitting in for Farai Chideya. We just heard from Reshma Saujani, a leading voice in the movement to close the gender wage gap. She believes that now is a critical time for businesses to rethink and reshape the way they support their employees. On one hand, the pandemic's disruption to the economy, workforce and traditional office practices, really gives us an opportunity to hit the reset button. But on the other hand when we've tried in the past to recreate our workplaces to be more diverse, equitable, inclusive, progress has been slow or non-existent. We try for change, but quickly return to the same work habits we've been using for generations.
Celeste Headlee:
And that's despite the fact that diverse organizations are more likely to succeed, and the consequences for companies that lack diversity continue to grow. What's the disconnect here? Joining me now to talk this through is Pamela Fuller, co-author of The Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias: How To Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection, and Create High-Performing Teams. She's also FranklinCovey's thought leader on unconscious bias. Hi Pamela.
Pamela Fuller:
Hi Celeste. Thanks so much for having me.
Celeste Headlee:
There's a lot to dig into here, but I want to start by asking you how it could be that we could invest so much money into DEIB efforts and they don't work? I looked it up and a study from The Society for Human Resource Management reported that among Fortune 1000 companies, they spend on average 1.5 million per year on DEI training. But every time they do a research study, there's no evidence that shows these standard initiatives actually reduce bias and discrimination. So what's going wrong?
Pamela Fuller:
I think that many organizations are still looking at DEIB as a check the box exercise. This whole field really comes from compliance and risk mitigation. If you think about lawsuit suits about harassment and discrimination, that's the history of this space. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging are supposed to transcend that. It's not supposed to be just a check the box activity or initiative. If we think about real substantial change, if you think about any change you've made yourself or a mindset shift that you may have made, it didn't happen in a one hour keynote.
Pamela Fuller:
It's not a TED Talk that's going to fix the problem, as profound as TED Talks can be. It is a series of learning and then implementing that learning and really pulling that learning into the infrastructure of the organization and asking more critical questions, not just where might bias exist in the organization, but what biases are impacting my decisions as a leader or as someone who has influence in the business or in the employment of others.
Celeste Headlee:
I was interested to see that in fact some research shows the standard diversity initiatives. It was the one that you were just describing, actually are prone to increase the chance for bias and acts of discrimination after people take that training. I found this study, this study out of Stanford, that showed, when they gave them tasks hire, decide who to hire or decide where this money in the city budget goes, if in the initial questionnaire they allowed white people to say, I voted for Obama, they were significantly more likely to do discriminatory things.
Celeste Headlee:
They were significantly more likely to hire the white person instead of the black person, significantly more likely to allocate money, to initiatives that benefit white people instead of black people. I wonder what you make of this inoculation problem, this idea that when somebody goes through diversity training, they think, I'm not racist now. How do we get past that?
Pamela Fuller:
We all want to think of ourselves as good people. Dolly Chugh talks about this. She talks about this idea that we all define ourselves as good people. And when you are so busy defining yourself as a good person, you're never looking at opportunities to improve, right? You're in that defensive mode. And so what she advocates is that we instead define ourselves as good-ish people, that if you acknowledge that you have room for improvement, then you're more likely to make better decisions. This is the controversy around unconscious bias training specifically, is that so much of unconscious bias training is focused on devilifying bias, is getting the defenses down for people saying, we all have bias, it's a natural part of the human condition. It's how the brain works.
Pamela Fuller:
And then we leave, right? Because that's all you can do in an hour. And so people they're like, great. I'm not a bad person if I have bias, and then they're more likely to lean into their biases, right? Or if you prime the pump and say, well, I voted for Obama, as a white person I voted for Obama, then you've done your good deed and so you are then infallible, right? You're not going to make poor decisions. What changes that is if we say, yes, we are all humans and humans all have bias and bias impacts every decision that you make.
Celeste Headlee:
This can be tricky though, right? Because when we start talking about how universal bias is, and it is universal, you are not a conscious and living human being without being biased in some way. This can make some people of color say, don't blame us. Why are you saying we're biased? Or it could make a white person do a both sidesm, right? Like, see everyone's biased, this is everyone's problem. And that can also get in the way of making changes in organizations. Don't you think?
Pamela Fuller:
Absolutely. And what's important to think about is that we all are coming at it through our own lens, right? I'm a black woman and I also have bias, and my bias may not be about race, it may not be about gender, or it may even be in favor of the marginalized groups as a black woman, but I have other biases. I talk about this in the book. I give examples of education bias or thinking about socioeconomics. I think one thing that lots of people of color run into is they find that managers of color hold them to a higher standard than they might hold other people. That whole idea that we have to be twice as good to get half as much. And so then you find yourself as a manager of color, holding your employees of color to an even higher bar or not making decisions based on the same criteria across race.
Pamela Fuller:
It is true that black people also have bias. It doesn't mean that white people get to ignore the biases they have about black people, right? It means that each of us needs to do an examination of the lens through which we're looking at a situation and ensure that our biases are not hindering performance. Is my bias getting in the way of someone feeling valued and feeling a sense of belonging? And if the answer to that is yes, then I have to do something about it. That's my responsibility.
Celeste Headlee:
So then what works? If the average training in this area doesn't get to the problem, or as you say, just starts with one hour and doesn't stay with it until you can actually affect change. What have you seen? Have you seen companies responding, especially in the past couple years, responding to racial turmoil and conversations about equity and doing it right?
Pamela Fuller:
I think what I'm seeing, if I were to articulate it differently, is that I am seeing lots of companies doing some of it, right? I think lots of companies are doing maybe one or two good things, but not necessarily, I don't know that I could identify a company that's doing all the things together that would create the systemic big wave push of change that we'd like to see. I do think when we think about best practices, my approach and Franklin Covey's approach, and if you read The Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias, is really focused on the individual. Each individual needs to be able to articulate to their team, if you think about leaders, why this matters to them. And that's the only way it stays at the forefront.
Pamela Fuller:
They also need practical skills. So what is it that I can do in the day-to-day? And there are best practices around that. Are we making hiring decisions by panel versus by individual decision? Are we elevating, for example, if the best practice is three people on a hiring panel, right? It's an odd number and it's all people who've received some education around diversity and there is identity diversity in that panel, there should also be hierarchy diversity, right? If I'm hiring on my team, I should pull in one of my team members to be part of the interview, not just management, because the team member is going to have a different perspective. It's important to have some format to interviews, ensure that we're asking each candidate the same questions.
Celeste Headlee:
This is Our Body Politic. I'm Celeste Headlee, sitting in for Farai Chideya. I'm talking about DEI in the workplace with Pamela Fuller, co-author of The Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias and a FranklinCovey's thought leader. You have said, and I want to quote you here. You say, "Talking to executives about diversity has basically been the equivalent of telling kids to eat their vegetables. They will begrudgingly do it, but without any real enthusiasm and mainly just to stay out of trouble." This is what you have been talking about. How do we do that differently? How do we engage with executives on diversity and transform them from a kid having to eat broccoli to somebody who's enthusiastic about dessert? How do we get them excited?
Pamela Fuller:
I think it takes multiple approaches. So it's not just education, because the reality of education is in a group setting, an executive in particular is only going to be so forthcoming. We implement what we call reinforcement coaching. And it's important for those executives to have a one-on-one relationship where someone is really pushing them on their own biases and their decision making and helping coach them through how to make unbiased decisions and how to really be more inclusive in their decisions.
Pamela Fuller:
At Franklin Covey we have a saying, we want everyone who works in an organization to be able to say, I'm a valued member of a winning team, doing meaningful work in an environment of trust. Individual coaching can really help them be more vulnerable and implement the practices that a training might recommend. Whereas when you just recommend something in a training and then everyone goes about their business, there's no accountability and there's no space to experiment and try and fail and try again.
Celeste Headlee:
Your approach is really founded in the best knowledge we have on psychology and neurology, right? And you have mentioned in a number of pieces you've written that at any moment, "Our brain faces 11 billion bits of information and can only actively process 40." Why is that particular data point important in these conversations about DEI?
Pamela Fuller:
Because our brain focuses on what it wants to focus on or what we've built as a habit in terms of how we make decisions. When we're aware of that, then we notice things that we may not notice otherwise, being able to evaluate where I might be making a knee jerk decision or thinking of confirmation bias where I go into a circumstance already knowing the answer and then I only look for information that confirms the answer. We have to hijack that automatic processing in the brain and implement best practices and behaviors that help us see something that might not be automatic to us.
Celeste Headlee:
I'm so glad you said hijack these automatic processes, because in a number of ways we're really fighting against some very ingrained tendencies, right? The ingrained tend that we all have to group people together. The very ingrained process of being attracted to and comfortable with people who look like us and have the same experience as us. Then there's the whole thing of unconscious bias. It's very difficult to fight bias when it's literally unconscious. That's the definition of it. Can you give us some tips on how we can A, become aware of our unconscious biases when they are unconscious and then what do we do then?
Pamela Fuller:
I share an example in the book of making a hiring decision. I hired a young woman and I was very excited about this young woman. And she says, I'm so excited to work for you and Franklin Covey, also I'm pregnant, what's your maternity leave policy? And in that moment, my heart sank. I was like, but that's very inconvenient for me. It was really an example of my unconscious biases coming to the surface and slapping me in the face. I have three children, I have worked my whole adult life. I've taken maternity leave. I've been the beneficiary of paid leave, right? That is more generous than the federal requirement.
Pamela Fuller:
And in that moment, I had a bias that I never would've said I had. You know what I mean? If you would've asked me, do you have a bias against pregnant women? Absolutely not. As a mother of three, how could I? But I did in that moment. So there is this vulnerability that is required of leaders to just think about when someone says something to me, what is it that I feel? It's pausing between stimulus and response. Because if I had reacted to her with what I felt, that would've been a really poor first message from me as her new boss, right? But I had to own in that moment that I had a negative thought and then behave differently.
Pamela Fuller:
It's like, okay, I am going to give this person all of the support that they deserve and require. I'm going to lean into all the research I've read that says supportive work environments for families and parents make for better results and working conditions. And then that is what occurred. But I had to have that self-awareness. I think as leaders, each of us should create some space in our day to think about the decisions that we made after the fact. It's as simple as putting 15 minutes in your calendar before a meeting to think about what you're coming into that meeting with, what assumptions do I have? Think about facts versus feelings and what is a fact and what is a feeling?
Pamela Fuller:
And then after a meeting or after decisions have been made, giving yourself some space to think about, why did I make that decision? And have I been in circumstances like this before? And is there a trend in that decision making? Right? It's metacognition, thinking about your own thinking and evaluating your decisions before and after they occur, that helps us start to retrain our brain to be more cognizant of the automatic assumptions it's making.
Celeste Headlee:
Since you're talking about supporting mothers, I wonder how these conversations are going with you now as we try to recover from the disruption of the pandemic. And I say that in light of some of the research that's coming out showing that black women in particular they're happier when they're not at the office. They're not subject to microaggressions all day long. That parents, mothers or fathers want more flexibility in their schedules, so they can achieve a better work life balance. And yet we have a lot of leaders being quite resistant to that, saying, come back into the office full time or you're out. What advice are you giving to leaders on what to do going forward?
Pamela Fuller:
My belief is that we won't be able to ever return to a fully in-person workplace. I just think all the things that people said couldn't be done remotely, the pandemic showed that they could, right? So many things happen remotely. I think one of the things that's important for leaders, a lot of organizations are moving to this hybrid approach where people can come in if they want and don't need to come in if they don't want. And that can create a circumstance where the people who do decide to come in have an inherent advantage, right? It's a little bit out of sight, out of mind.
Pamela Fuller:
I think leaders need to operate, especially if they have those hybrid environments as if everybody is remote, right? Even if people are in the office, everyone should be logged in from their computer to the meeting. There shouldn't be some people around a conference table, and then some people logged in, because without intending the conversation around the conference table is going to be more engaged and the people on the line are going to miss some things. I also think that if a manager feels so compelled and says, everyone has to be here, they have to acknowledge that they're going to lose some good people because not everyone is in a circumstance where they can come in. And especially right now with the great resignation, people have choices and they're voting with their feet.
Pamela Fuller:
So if a manager digs in that way, I would say that's an opportunity for some coaching and for them to think critically about why that matters so much to them, right? Why does it matter so much to you that the people are in-person? And is it that you feel that the work has to be done in-person or is it a fact that it must be done in-person? And I think there's a trade off there if they do make that determination, they're making a pretty conscious decision to lose good talent because employees don't have to do that anymore. There's plenty of remote opportunities for them.
Celeste Headlee:
Pamela Fuller is author of The Leader's Guide to Unconscious Bias: How To Reframe Bias, Cultivate Connection, and Create High-Performing Teams. She's also a FranklinCovey's thought leader on unconscious bias. Pamela, thank you so much.
Pamela Fuller:
Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure Celeste.
Celeste Headlee:
Thanks so much for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm today's host, Celeste Headlee, and Farai Chideya is executive producer. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister and Traci Caldwell are our bookers and producers. Emily J. Daly, Steve Lack, and Teresa Carey are our producers. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers.
Celeste Headlee:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas.Today's episode was produced with the help of Lauren Schild and engineered by Adam Rooner and Archie Moore.
Celeste Headlee:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.