http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/technology/exposing-hidden-biases-at-google-to-improve-diversity.html 2014-09-24 20:25:39 Exposing Hidden Biases at Google to Improve Diversity The tech giant is undertaking a long-term effort to make its employees aware of how unconscious biases can affect hiring and promotion decisions. === Google, like many tech companies, is a man’s world. Founded by a pair of men, its executive team is Men make up 83 percent of Google’s engineering employees Google’s leaders say they are unhappy about the firm’s poor gender diversity, and about the severe underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics among its work force. And so they are undertaking a long-term effort to improve these numbers, the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google’s culture more accepting of diversity. There’s just one problem: The company has no solid evidence that the workshops, or many of its other efforts to improve diversity, are actually working. In some ways Google’s plan to fix its own diversity issues resembles many of its most ambitious product ideas, from self-driving cars As in those efforts, it has set a high goal in this case: to fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business. Tech Google is attacking the problem with its considerable resources and creativity. But it does not have a timeline for when the company’s work force might become representative of the population, or whether it will ever get there. “I think it’s terrific that they’re doing this,” said Google says its plan isn’t one-shot. It points out that it has been trying to improve its diversity for years by sponsoring In May after Google’s disclosure prompted a wave of similar reports across the industry, with Google’s diversity training workshops, which began last year and which more than half of Google’s nearly 49,000 employees have already attended, are based on an emerging field of research in social psychology known as unconscious bias. These are the hidden, reflexive preferences that shape most people’s worldviews, and that can profoundly affect how welcoming and open a workplace is to different people and ideas. Google’s interest in hidden biases was sparked in 2012, when Mr. Bock Mr. Bock wondered how such unconscious biases were playing out at Google. “This is a pretty genteel environment, and you don’t usually see outright manifestations of bias,” he said. “Occasionally you’ll have some idiot do something stupid and hurtful, and I like to fire those people.” But Mr. Bock suspected that the more pernicious bias was most likely pervasive and hidden, a deep-set part of the culture rather than the work of a few loudmouth sexists. Improving diversity wasn’t just a feel-good goal for Google. Citing research that shows Google’s human resources group, which goes by the name People Operations, The lecture begins with a dismal fact: Everyone is a little bit racist or sexist. If you think you’re immune, take the The effect of bias is powerful, and it isn’t softened by Silicon Valley’s supposedly meritocratic culture. In the lecture, Mr. Welle shows a computer simulation of how a systematic 1 percent bias against women in performance evaluation scores can trickle up through the ranks, leading to a Finally, Mr. Welle points to research showing that we aren’t slaves to our hidden biases. The more we make ourselves aware of the role our unconscious plays on our decision-making, and the more we try to force others to confront their biases, the greater the chance we have to overcome our hidden preferences. Google offered several anecdotes that seem to indicate a less biased culture as a result of the training. Not long ago the company opened a new building, and someone spotted that all the conference rooms were named after male scientists; in the past, that might have gone unmentioned, but this time the names were changed. And during one recent promotion meeting in which a group of male managers were deciding the fate of a female engineer, a senior manager who had been through the bias training cautioned his colleagues to remember that they were all men — and thus might not be able to fully appreciate the different roles women perform in engineering groups. “Just raising the awareness was enough for people to think about it,” Mr. Bock said. The woman was promoted. Another time, in an all-company presentation, an interviewer asked a male and female manager who had recently begun sharing an office, “Which one of you does the dishes?” The strange, sexist undertone of the question was immediately seized upon by a senior executive in the crowd, who yelled, “Unconscious bias!” Mr. Bock saw all of these actions as evidence that the training was working. “Suddenly you go from being completely oblivious to going, ’Oh my god, it’s everywhere,’ ” he said. But whether that will lead to a long-term change at Google and, in turn, the rest of the tech industry, remains an open question.