I am met with raised eyebrows 90% of the time a group of Leaders walk into one of my Leadership Development Programs.
My hypothesis is that there are two reasons for this:
1) I am young and also look 5 years younger than I actually am
2) I am female
I can recount many occasions when a grey haired male has walked into the room while I am setting up and:
a) asked me to make a photocopy of something for him
b) asked me to make him a coffee
c) called me ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’.
This doesn’t upset me. That person is purely making an assumption based on everything they have been exposed to in their life up until that point.
It is simply an observation that there are more young female receptionists than there are young female leadership developers. This observation has lead to an assumption or bias.
I personally take a lot of joy in shifting peoples assumptions and bias, but this comes from years of actively developing my self esteem and confidence as a presenter. Not all young women have done this in their roles, so their response may look a little different.
As we shift into the 21st century where women are in Leadership roles all over the globe, and yes even in places like Solomon Islands (I had a 50/50 split of female/male leadership students in my program this year), we need to start checking our own gender biases and stop pretending like we don’t ALL have them.
Even me.
I was given a list of 3 names once, they happened to all be unisex names. The list looked like this:
Alex – HR Exec
Kim – HR Officer
Cody – HR Advisor
When these three people walked in the room, they looked like this:
a) Man in his 30s
b) Women in her 20s
c) Man in his 50s
Guess what assumption I made when I shook each of their hands?
I actually said to the man in his 50s “You must be Alex” and when he pointed at his female colleague and said “no that’s Alex”, my initial thought was “I must have read the list wrong”.
This was a really cool moment for me. Here I am, a young women in her 20s who has experienced gender and age discrimination through my entire career, doing EXACTLY the same thing to another young female who is clearly killing it in her role.
It is OK to experience bias.
With time, as more people go into roles that ‘we traditionally don’t expect them to’, this bias will slowly start to change. But in the meantime we need to be acutely aware of our own bias and pull ourselves and each other up on it consistently.
So my question is this… Can you commit 9 minutes to actively removing bias in the workplace?
Watch this TED Talk and take a moment to genuinely check yourself.
Author: Anna Pitman – Young Female Leadership Developer (are you surprised? Are you automatically questioning my competency?)