Let’s start with an exercise: Close your eyes and imagine a CEO. It is highly likely the person you just envisioned was male, middle aged, and white. This is hardly surprising – by now most of us are familiar with the fact that everyone has some degree of unconscious bias and we are predisposed to believe things in the future should be the same way they’ve been in the past. That’s why organizational diversity training has turned its focus in recent years toward driving awareness of and eradicating unconscious bias.
Unconscious biases are not by themselves harmful, except that research shows they influence behaviors and decision making in a way that is not always favorable. For instance, these implicit conceptualizations we hold about what leaders should look like have led to limitations in development and promotion opportunities for everyone else. We see very few women and racial minorities in leadership positions, partly due to the fact that we don’t develop them as leaders and we overlook them in succession planning. Research showing the financial benefits of having a diverse leadership team indicates that this practice is causing us to leave money on the table. And the cycle is self-perpetuating – continuing to support leadership teams that are mostly male and white isn’t doing much to progress our mental models of what leaders should be.
Here is a question about your mental CEO: What is his sexual orientation? If you are taken aback or surprised by the question, you should be. You are likely wondering what on earth that has to do with someone’s ability to effectively lead a company. In theory, it doesn’t have anything to do with it. But in practice, it is both surprising and disheartening to discover that this irrelevant characteristic further influences the decisions we make around developing and promoting employees.
In a recent study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior journal, researchers asked participants to listen to a recording of a voice, then indicate how ready they believed the person speaking would be for a leadership role and suggest an ideal salary range. When participants thought the speaker simply sounded gay, they were more likely to say the person would be ill prepared for a leadership role, and they suggested lower salaries for these individuals. Voices that “sounded gay”, by the way, were saying the same words and had the same hypothetical qualifications as those that didn’t.
Discrimination against LGBT employees is shown not just in the lab but also across the workforce: We see a LGBT pay gap in the United States that is as high as 32 percent in some industries, perpetuated by starting salary offers that are $3,000 lower than those offered to non-LGBT employees. We see a lower likelihood of getting called in for an interview if a job candidate discloses membership in a LGBT affiliation. And although we have seen some very high-profile LGBT leaders in recent years, helping to progress this issue, they are still a rarity in the Fortune 500 and beyond. This is unfortunate for both organizations and the broader economy, as 71 percent of LGBT consumers, a group with a combined annual spending power of $3.7 billion, are more likely to buy goods and services from LGBT-friendly companies. These are the very companies that outperform others in the stock market by 3 percent.
If our biases are truly unconscious, we cannot train or discuss them away. And if our biases are stopping us from harnessing our next great leaders and staying ahead of our competitors, we need to find effective methods to control their influence on how we make decisions. This is why technology is such a powerful tool in this effort – having tools and methods that enable us to make the right decisions in spite of those unconscious biases are paramount in today’s increasingly diverse labor market. We’ve depended on the same processes for making talent decisions for far too long, allowing business leaders to rely on personal relationships and “gut feel” when selecting the people who lead alongside them. But if we truly want to lead in today’s digital, global world, we need to ensure we have processes in place to move beyond bias and equip our organizations for success.
To learn more about how technology enables unbiased talent decision-making, please visit Diversity & Inclusion and check out our e-book covering all the ways SAP SuccessFactors solutions enable the prevention, detection, and elimination of bias from your HR processes.