Is It Bias, Prejudice, or Bullying?
When you’re faced with behavior in the workplace that’s discriminatory or offensive, it’s not always clear whether you’re facing bias, prejudice, or bullying. Part of what makes it hard to respond when someone says something offensive is the uncertainty about where the person is coming from. Is this unconscious bias talking? Or does the person mean what they said? Or is the remark a power play of some kind, intended to intimidate?
Here is an anecdote that illustrates just how complex even the briefest of interactions can be. In one sense, it was a trivial encounter, lasting less than 60 seconds. In another, it speaks volumes.
I was just about to give a Radical Candor keynote, based on my book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, to the founders and executives of some of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. A couple of hundred men were at the conference. I was one of only a handful of women. Just as I was about to go on stage, one of the participants approached me, his lips pursed in frustration. “I need a safety pin!” he hissed at me. He was clutching at his shirtfront — a button had popped off.
Evidently, he assumed I was on the event-staff team. To prevent this situation, the conference organizers had given the event staff bright yellow T-shirts. But all he could notice was his need and my gender.
I didn’t know what to say. He was being rude and seemed almost panicked about his exposed belly. More striking than his rudeness was his utter certainty that it was my job to solve his problem. I was about to give my presentation, so I was a little agitated. Let’s slow the moment way down and explore why it was hard to know what to say.
I wanted to believe that Mr. Safety Pin was manifesting garden-variety unconscious gender bias when he assumed I was staffing the event. Not a federal offense. Most of us have made an incorrect assumption about another person’s role based on some personal attribute, and these moments are as painful as they are common. In these situations, often the best tactic for someone in my position is to lightly correct the error and move on — the classic “Sorry, I don’t work here” moment.
But maybe his comment had sprung not from unconscious bias but rather from conscious prejudice. Maybe he believed women should have support roles and not write books about leadership.
Perhaps if I explained, “I need to prepare for my talk right now, so I can’t help you out,” he’d reply, “Oh. You must be the Radical Candor lady. I don’t believe in that soft, feminine leadership bullshit.” Unlikely, but certainly not impossible: That kind of thing has happened to me, more than once. If my attempt at a courteous response prompted him to reveal a conscious prejudice against women, it would piss me off, and that would make it harder for me to focus on my talk. I didn’t want to risk that.
Plus, there was a third possibility: bullying. What if I corrected him and he escalated, saying something like “Hey, lady, no need to get your panties all in a wad”? I wasn’t sure I would be able to resist the temptation to respond to that sort of obnoxious remark with something equally obnoxious: “I am here to teach you to be a kick-ass boss, not to fetch your safety pins!” And then I’d go onstage roiling mad at him, and at myself for losing my temper. I’d be knocked off my game.
There was another confounding factor here beyond gender: power and privilege. The man assumed he had a right to be rude to the people staffing the event. Perhaps when he realized I was a speaker, not a staffer, that I had the same economic and network privileges he did, he would apologize and snap into polite mode. But talking to anyone the way he’d talked to me was objectionable.
All this felt like too much for me to deal with in the five minutes before I walked onstage. So I said nothing, and the man stomped off, evidently wondering why I was refusing to do my job, muttering something about complaining to the event organizers about the unhelpful staff.
Correcting his misapprehensions at that moment shouldn’t have been my job. In another sense, though, I was a potential upstander: my failure to correct him meant that he might complain about the event staff — people who were more vulnerable than I was. But perhaps most
importantly, as a speaker, I was there in a leadership capacity, so I had an obligation to speak up.
My silence was bad for everyone: bad for the staff; bad for me, because I hadn’t lived in accordance with my own beliefs, and even bad for Mr. Safety Pin. Because by not pointing out his bias (if that’s what was behind his request), I was making it more likely that he’d repeat his mistake.
This is why it’s important to know how to identify the root causes of workplace injustice — and confront them effectively.
THE ROOT CAUSES OF WORKPLACE INJUSTICE
Bias, prejudice, and bullying — and how to confront them effectively
What gets in the way of basic fairness at work? In my experience, there are three root causes of workplace injustice: bias, prejudice, and bullying. Each is different and must be considered separately if we are to come up with the most effective ways to combat each. When a power imbalance is present, things get much worse quickly — discrimination, harassment, and physical violations occur. Let’s start by examining how to root out the root causes.
PROBLEMS
Before we begin, let me offer some super short definitions and a simple framework to help keep us oriented in a problem that can be very disorienting.
Bias is “not meaning it.” Bias, often called unconscious bias, comes from the part of our mind that jumps to conclusions, usually without our even being aware of it. These conclusions and assumptions aren’t always wrong, but they often are, especially when they reflect stereotypes. We do not have to be the helpless victims of our brains. We can learn to slow down and question our biases.
Prejudice is “meaning it.” Unfortunately, when we stop to think, we don’t always come up with the best answer, either. Sometimes we rationalize our biases and they harden into prejudices. In other words, we justify our biases rather than challenging their flawed assumptions and stereotypes.
Bullying is “being mean”: the intentional, repeated use of in-group status or power to harm or humiliate others. Sometimes bullying comes with prejudice, but often it’s a more instinctive behavior. There may be no thought or ideology at all behind it. It can be a plan or just an animal instinct to dominate, to coerce.
RESPONSES
The most effective responses match the problem we’re trying to solve. To root out bias, prejudice, and bullying we must respond to each differently. In my experience, when people’s biases are pointed out to them clearly and compassionately, they usually correct them and apologize.
Prejudice, however, is a conscious and ingrained belief. People don’t change their prejudices simply because someone points them out. Holding up a mirror doesn’t help — people
like what they see. What’s important is to draw a clear boundary between people’s right to believe whatever they want and their freedom to impose their prejudices on others.
Bullying has to incur real consequences to be stopped. If bullies were swayed by being aware of the harm they are doing to the people they are bullying, they wouldn’t be treating other people badly in the first place. Usually, they are trying to hurt someone. Pointing out the pain they are inflicting doesn’t make them stop and may even encourage them to double down.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU’RE FACING BIAS, PREJUDICE, OR BULLYING?
Trust your instincts
When I’m not sure whether it’s bias, prejudice, or bullying I’m confronting, I usually start by responding as though it’s bias. If I’m right, this puts me in the best position to point out the bias without eliciting a defensive response. I can always escalate from an “I” statement to an “It” or “You” statement if the person’s initial response indicates that I’m dealing with prejudice or bullying.
My freedom to default to bias may be an example of privilege. The Black Lives Matter protests have highlighted what mainstream white America has long refused to notice: how frequently what we call bias is not unconscious bias, but rather conscious prejudice; and how both
bias and prejudice turn violent in the blink of an eye. Treating racism as though it were simply unconscious bias puts people in harm’s way.
I do not want to put anyone in harm’s way by giving advice that is not relevant to the situation the person is in. My advice to you is this: trust your instincts. If you respond to a remark as if it’s evidence of prejudice or bullying when it was in fact bias, that’s OK. It’s still useful feedback. It communicates that what they’ve said suggested to you that they hold prejudiced beliefs or that their goal was to be intentionally hurtful.
That’s good for people to know so that they are in a better position to understand the harm and correct themselves in the future. It’s not your job to dance around other people’s defensiveness or denial. It’s also not your job to educate others. Choosing not to respond is a legitimate choice when you’re being harmed by bias, prejudice, or bullying. It’s not a legitimate choice if you are a leader or an upstander, though. In those cases, you have an obligation to intervene.
Finally, if you respond imperfectly, cut yourself some slack. Beating yourself up for not responding the “right” way just adds insult to injury. Self-forgiveness doesn’t mean ignoring our regrets. It means acknowledging how hard it is to confront workplace injustice, forgiving ourselves for missed opportunities, and doing our best to learn and do better next time.
Kim Scott is the author of Just Work: Get Sh*t Done Fast and Fair as well as Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. Trier Bryant and Kim co-founded the company Just Work LLC to help organizations and individuals create more equitable workplaces.
Kim is also the co-creator of an executive education company and workplace comedy series based on her best-selling book, Radical Candor. Jason Rosoff and Kim co-founded the company Radical Candor, LLC to help people cultivate caring and candid relationships at work by implementing a feedback-first culture.
Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. She was a member of the faculty at Apple University and before that led AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. Earlier in her career, Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow. She lives with her family in Silicon Valley.
