Episode 82: Why Companies Need to Interrupt Bias to Truly Create Inclusion (Interview with Joan C. Williams)

This week’s podcast guest is Joan C. Williams, distinguished Law Professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, and Director for the Centre of WorkLife Law, and author of a brilliant new book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good.

Joan is dedicated to propagating an approach to Diversity and Inclusion that delivers real impact for the business and ensures real change is made.

Throughout this episode, Joan and I discuss:

• How to connect D&I initiatives to business metrics that matter, with case studies from companies around the world

• The five patterns of bias that repeatedly emerge across organisations and industries

• The concept of bias interrupters, what they are and how to use them in everyday scenarios, to reduce the impact of bias

• The ethical and legal challenges of measuring diversity data and why these challenges are not a good enough excuse for not doing the work

Support for this podcast is brought to you by Degreed, to learn more visit degreed.com.

You can listen to this week’s episode below, or by using your podcast app of choice, just click the corresponding image to get access via the podcast website here.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Joan C. Williams, distinguished Professor of Law at the Hastings College of Law, at the University of California, and the author of an eagerly anticipated new book, Bias Interrupted: Creating Inclusion for Real and for Good, which is published in November, to The Digital HR Leaders Podcast. 


Welcome to the show Joan, it is great to have you on. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your work?  


Joan C. Williams: Yes. Well, I'm a law professor in San Francisco and I've studied social inequality for pretty much 40 years.

What this book is, designed for people working in organisations, that have been working to create diversity and inclusion, many of them for over a decade, but sadly have seen very few results. This book is a roadmap to actually produce results.  


David Green: And the book I believe, is out on the 16th of November, which is in a few weeks’ time and is available to pre-order now.

What is the key message or messages that you want to leave readers with, having read the book?  


Joan C. Williams: The key message really reflects this, if a business had a problem with sales, they wouldn't address it by holding a series of deep, sincere, conversations about how much everybody values sales and declare national “celebrate sales month” and expect anything to change. That's just not how businesses do things, but unfortunately, a lot of Diversity and Inclusion efforts have been essentially that. When businesses have problems with sales, they use evidence, metrics, and persistence, to solve the problem. And to solve D&I problems, you have to use those same business tools because if a business has a problem with D&I, typically it's because subtle forms of bias are constantly being transmitted day after day after day, in the business systems. People are going to have the best intentions in the world, but if those business systems remain unchanged, the business is going to remain unchanged and that is what we have seen.


David Green: In the book, you actually pose a number of questions which you describe as unspoken.

A lot of our listeners are working in HR roles, maybe in D&I roles within organisations. In some respects, what we say on this discussion is we are preaching to the converted a little bit. We are going to talk about how they can get buy-in as well. But some of these unspoken questions are probably questions that they might get sometimes from very senior business leaders, so I thought we would tackle a couple of these now, and you give your response to these and maybe help guide our listeners around what to do when they get these questions.

So, maybe the first one is, why do some groups need to be politically savvier to succeed?


Joan C. Williams: This reflects two of the five basic patterns of implicit bias that commonly play out in organisations.

The first I call the tightrope. That is really that college educated white men, typically they need to be ambitious and authoritative in order to succeed, but every other group has to find ways of being ambitious and authoritative that is seen as kind of appropriate, by white men and that is harder. That is harder because for example, just to give one example in the US, Latinas in the US are often called feisty. Now feisty is a super interesting word, it basically says you are behaving in an authoritative way and I'm finding it cute. 
So, you have to find a way to be authoritative, that actually is coded by the recipient as authoritative and that is harder. That's one way in which some groups have to be politically savvier than others in order to succeed.

The other way is really obvious. It is just, if there are open racial stereotypes that people have to be savvier in order to succeed for example, a common stereotype of Asian Americans is that they are really great at technical tasks, but not really for leadership. And so, they often find that they get kind of stalled, in technical roles, but find it very difficult to gain leadership roles. They have to be politically savvy and work behind the scenes in order to make that happen. 


And in a way, white men also have to be politically savvy to go into leadership, but often there is kind of a presumption that they are a pretty good fit and so they end up often being less astute in order to smooth their way.  


David Green: Yeah. Some of the other questions that you talk about in the book, I'm sure you have heard this, and I hear this from people in companies that I have worked in, isn't it natural and inevitable that people who work harder go further. It sounds like that is not the case. 


Joan C. Williams: Employers really have to ask themselves how they are defining the ideal worker. If you define the ideal worker as someone who is always available for work, you are really describing two sets of people. One is men, men married to homemakers. That works great for men married to homemakers and that works great for people without children.


So, if you want to select and promote only those two groups, based on their ability to be always available, rather than the level of talent in your workforce, then definitely define the ideal worker in that old fashioned way. But if you do that, you will be systematically excluding women and less commonly recognised, you will be systematically excluding many younger men who really feel that being involved with children's daily care is part of being a good father. And you know what, if that isn't possible, they will not tell you that they are leaving for work family balance, they will tell you they are leaving for a great opportunity.


Whereas women actually, who are leaving because they feel they have hit the glass ceiling, they will tell you they are leaving for work, family balance. 

Each sex gives an explanation that is expected from that sex and so it is no wonder companies are confused and they think, women value work-life balance and men don’t, because the companies are getting very confusing information.

Research shows that younger men will leave if they feel they can't attain their family goals at the same time as they pursue their careers.  


David Green: And I imagine this is becoming or will become even more complex as we move more to hybrid working. We have got to be careful that people who maybe work more remotely more often, aren't penalised versus those that are in the office. You almost get presentism.  


Joan C. Williams: That is very astute, David, that is one of the challenges.

The transition to hybrid work can really enhance diversity because studies show that men and women actually prefer hybrid work at the same rates, but more women prefer full-time hybrid, a full-time remote, than men do.

In the US, it is also true that people of colour, especially African Americans, prefer remote work. And so, by being able to offer people remote work, far more commonly than was true before the pandemic, employers can really enhance the diversity of their workforce.

But as you point out, although well-managed remote work can enhance diversity, poorly managed remote work can decrease diversity because of what we call onsite favouritism. 


If the people who are working remote are out of sight out of mind, and the people who are working on site are predominantly a very specific group, then you are going to just go in the wrong direction from a diversity standpoint.  


David Green: It is a real minefield, isn't it? Because I guess a lot of organisations as they move to whatever structure of hybrid work that they want, and let's be honest one size isn't going to fit all.

It is almost going to be like an experiment in terms of, they are going to have to be looking at these aspects and intentionally managing them so that they don't create more bias.  


Joan C. Williams: They are. And one thing that will really help in that regard is something that organisations should be doing anyway. One of the things that our data shows again and again, is that white men report fair access to career enhancing assignments at stratospheric levels, like 80 to 90% of white men say I have fair access to career enhancing assignments, but other groups don't feel the same way.

For example, in one group only 53% of black women said, I have fair access to career enhancing assignments. So that is a big difference.

In order to address this issue, which is really an endemic issue, companies should be keeping track of who gets those plum assignments in order to make sure that there is equal access. 


And now with the transition to hybrid, this is even more important. Companies should be keeping track by demographic group, of who gets access to these plum assignments, and they should be keeping track by remote versus onsite as well, to make sure that the people who are on site aren't getting the lion's share of what is really the choice work.


David Green: You talked about the research that you have done, and you touched on one of the five patterns of bias that you have found through that research. So, let's dig into those now. 

I think a lot of this research comes from your Workplace Experiences survey, and you have been doing this research for over a decade, so you have got some great longitudinal data there, surveying almost 18,000 people. 


What have you learned about bias through this work? And I think that, as I said, gives us an opportunity maybe to dig into those five patterns as well.  


Joan C. Williams: Well, we found quite simply that it is the same five patterns that emerge over and over, and over, and over, and over, again. In company after company and in industry after industry.

The Workplace Experiences survey is a 10-minute survey, will give you a read on whether the five patterns are playing out. Where they are playing out, is it in performance evaluations or in access to opportunities. And the impact on outcome measures like performance and intent to stay. So, it is really quite different from the ordinary climate survey or even the inclusion survey of like, do you feel included at work? This one starts out from the social science on precisely how bias commonly plays out. And as you know, we have been studying this for 10-15 years.

So, there are the five basic patterns. The first we call, prove it again. Some groups have to prove themselves more than others. And the group whose experience diverges most from white men’s, is typically women of colour, with men of colour and white women in between. But in one sample, for example, one-third of white men said they had to prove themselves more than their colleagues of similar education and experience, but two thirds of women did, and two-thirds of people of colour did. So that is the first pattern.

The second two we have mentioned, the tightrope and racial stereotypes. 


The fourth pattern is the maternal wall, gender bias triggered by motherhood, which is actually the strongest form of gender bias.

Then the final pattern, which once again is triggered both by race and by gender, is what we call tug of war. Which is when highest against a group feels conflict within the group. 
For example, if really there is only room for one, then of course, that group of people will be very competitive with others of their group in order to get that one choice spot. Whereas for certain other groups, there is not just one.

So those five patterns very commonly play out. And the challenge for employers is that you have to interrupt all five. If you interrupt only one, for example if you interrupt prove it again, but still the tightrope trips people up, that is not going to help.  


David Green: Interesting. Have you seen any of these biases trend up or trend down over the 15 years or so that you have been doing this work, or has it been so bumpy that there is no real pattern in there? 
  

Joan C. Williams: Well, I’m sad to report that actually tightrope bias, has increased for women in recent decades. The sense that the good woman is modest, self-effacing, and nice, a good team player and the good man is competitive, ambitious, and direct, a real leader, that has actually increased in recent decades.

And unfortunately, we do not see a diminution in these patterns, partly I think because the tools that people have been used using in the DEI context, have not been really designed in a scientific way to excise these specific things that we now know are going on.  


David Green: And I think we are going to dig into a lot of this now. I think, let's get those five bias types out, as we have, let's then dig into how companies can actually tackle this. But I think one thing that was really interesting there is that you look at the impacts on performance measures, which as you said, you don't get from the typical employee engagement, diversity and inclusion surveys.

That leads on nicely to the next question, around the business case. 
People often treat the business case for tackling bias in the workplace, as fairly self-explanatory and a given. But has your work shed any light on the urgency for tackling bias? For example, have you uncovered, or can you demonstrate any new business benefits? And how can chief diversity officers and HR get buy-in? 
We said that chief diversity officers in HR, they get this, they are trying to move the dial within their organisations. How can they get buy-in and deliver on their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals?  


Joan C. Williams: This is such an important question, in many ways the key question, because of course, people in heads of DEI and HR have been diligently trying to do this for many, many years. 


The business case for diversity is important but the first thing to recognise is that even many companies that are convinced of the business case, flounder because it is a very complex organisational challenge to actually deliver on diversity goals. So just believing that the company would be better off with more diversity, is not enough. 


But it is important that the CEO understand and be able to articulate many, many times, as Cotter has taught us, what the business case is. And I give examples in the book, for example in Clorox, the head of DEI worked with employee resource groups to open up new markets among Asian-Americans and among Latinos, in the United States, for Clorox products. Because they understood that people at Clorox from those groups understood what kinds of products their communities would buy.

That is a really good example. You have to be very concrete in the business case and say, not in general companies make more money if, but this is how diversity is crucial to our mission. And I give many more examples in the book.

But the second question, once you have that business case, is really to help persuade people, in companies it often differs with who you have to persuade but often the CEO or down, why you need to apply this bias interrupter approach of evidence, metrics and persistence, rather than just hiring me to come give a speech for tens of thousands of dollars and call it a day. And the way to get that kind of buy-in is where the importance of metrics come in. You need to be keeping very specific metrics that document that problem.

I will give you one example. This example is from a law firm in the United States and in law firms the coin of the realm is billable hours, how many billable hours have you worked. And so really important for young lawyers is to be able to show that they have worked a lot of billable hours. Well, one company that we were working with looked at what had happened under COVID. They found that white men were actually getting 200-300 more billable hours a year than people of colour and 100 more hours a year than white women. That basically means that, you can do everything else perfect, but you are not going to retain and advance your women and people of colour. 
That is a metric that, kind of, says it all.

The core of the bias interrupters model is to pinpoint exactly those kinds of metrics that we have found are really persuasive in bringing people along. I will give you another example from another company. We did an analysis of their performance evaluations and we found that only 9.5% of the people of colour had leadership mentioned in their performance evaluations and that was over 70 percentage points lower than white women.

And so, we did a really simple bias interrupters intervention. We redesigned the performance evaluation form and we helped them develop a one-hour training. We had absolutely dramatic results because again, we started out with the evidence. In year two, a hundred percent of the people of colour had leadership mentioned in their performance evaluations and that predicted promotion. 


This is the power of evidence and the power of metrics, suddenly you are not just talking about some vague thing that might or might not exist, when you have the right metric people see it in black and white, oh, we have a problem.  


David Green: Even if someone's got a hypothesis or an opinion, let's get some data to actually evidence that.

In the last case that you said, it highlighted clearly a big problem. So, let’s make the intervention and let’s measure the impact that it has and that is quite a big impact.  


Joan C. Williams: And that is how to build, that is how to get buy-in, is by figuring out what that metric is, the book will provide a lot of guidance, and then gathering that data.  


David Green: And in terms of the work that you do, the stuff I read about bias, people talk about conscious bias and unconscious bias. Are you looking at looking at both? Also, maybe you can address why do typical approaches to tackling bias in the workplace fall short? I don't know if it covers both those types of bias.  


Joan C. Williams: I just don't think that's a useful distinction. At some level, what the research shows is, that privileged groups know a lot less about less privileged groups than vice versa.

So being unconscious of bias is literally part of being a privileged group. It is not an excuse for why you remain clueless. 

One of the challenges to approaching bias is first of all, people have been very focused on what is called the implicit association test, which is one specific social science instrument. It is an online test that measures response rates of like, people associate an oven mitt with a woman, faster than a man, but a baseball mitt with a man faster than a woman. So that is a measure of bias, but the problem with the implicit association test is it doesn't necessarily describe what is going on in the workplace. The Workplace Experiences survey describes what is going on in the workplace.

And increasingly what companies do is that they give their workplace experiences survey to everybody and use their own data when they are training for bias, and that is very persuasive. Rather than just some abstract test online that doesn't describe workplaces in general or your workplace in particular. 


There are a couple other problems. Number one, people have treated the problem of bias as something that can be trained with a one-shot training or a once-a-year training. You can't change your company culture by doing anything once, even if straight from God's lips, you cannot change a culture by doing anything once. 
So that has been another problem.

And the last problem really is that a lot of these bias trainings are just like a college lecture, or they are just talking about how we all need to be more sensitive to each other. Neither of them provides to-do’s tomorrow. And so, when we do bias training, we typically use data, and we give people really concrete scenarios of how bias commonly plays out in everyday workplace interactions, that resonate with their workplace. 
And then have people sit around in groups of six and brainstorm how they would feel comfortable interrupting the bias the next time they see it. The research shows that that kind of bias training can have an effect and is particularly effective when it is combined, again, with interrupting bias in your organisational systems, that kind of approach can work.  


David Green: And everyone in the organisation needs to be intentional about tackling bias. But and I ask this question as a middle-aged white man myself, but white men have a really important role to play in this, don’t they? It is not about letting others do it, you have got to get involved and highlight some of these challenges because, particularly as you said, a lot of these white men are in leadership roles, so they have got a really important role to play.

What would you say to a white man in an organisation, who knows there is a problem but maybe is a little bit too afraid to get involved because they think that they don't understand the challenges?  
 

Joan C. Williams: Well, I would say read the book because then you will understand what is going on.

One of the basic messages of the book is that we like to think that our organisations are meritocracies, but what the data show is that they are not, actually. That white men very often have to prove themselves less than any other group. That their politics are much simpler than any other group. That they are benefited by in-group favouritism where white men, particularly white men from the same background, give each other the benefit of the doubt and they don't give other people the benefit of the doubt. That kind of in-group favouritism does not operate in the same way for any group other than white men. And so, it is very important to recognise that the central message of DEI is that we need to create true meritocracies. 


The other point I think, to white men, is that the research shows that there is only one group in the workplace that can advocate for diversity without threatening career detriments. And that is white men. 

Then finally, I think it is important to recognise, and to really clearly articulate, that we are talking about social forces here, we are talking about we are all fish swimming up a stream and some people are swimming with the current and some people are swimming against the current. But social forces aren’t everything that makes a human life. It is not as if white men were just born on top and float through the air up to heaven, that is not real life. White men face real challenges. First, some of them are from very different backgrounds than most of the other. Class issues are a really important issue. And some people face psychological challenges, personal pain, we are not talking about everything, but we are talking about whether you are swimming with the current or against the current. And I think that is really important for white men to recognise.  


David Green: It is a really important point. It is white men who can raise these issues, maybe more so than anyone else, as you said, without essentially being penalised. 


Our company, we are very much in people analytics. So, it is about using data to drive performance for the business, and obviously for the workforce, and using it to highlight, as you are doing in your work, issues around D&I that can then be tackled with action.

Your approach, as you said, pretty much starts with tackling the current state of bias in the organisation and that depends on data.

Can you tell us a little bit more about the four key points where we have to measure progress and how organisations should go about this? It is not just about hiring, which is a lot of the answers that I hear.  


Joan C. Williams: Yes. Organisations have been hiring women and people of colour over and over again for decades and diversity has not increased. Why is that? It is because the culture within your organisation makes it impossible for them to thrive and they leave, over and over and over again.

Hiring is really important and there are still some industries that have to work really hard to higher proportionate numbers of women and people of colour and for that matter, people from blue collar backgrounds, because again, class is very important here. So, there is a full set of bias interrupters in hiring.

Just to give another example on metrics, companies should be keeping what we call process metrics. So, with respect to hiring, you should be keeping track of who is in the original pool? Who survived resume review? Who survived the interview? And who got offers and who turned them down? And that is because if your original pool is non-diverse, that is a totally different fix than if no woman ever survives the interview because every woman is either too meek or too much. That is a tightrope problem. Those are totally different problems to solve and so you need to be analytical and figure out which of these problems that you have, or whether you have all of them, in which case you can go one by one.

But in addition to hiring, we and other researchers have found that although performance evaluations are very important and it is very important not to eliminate them, they also powerfully transmit bias if bias is not interrupted. Luckily, we have open access online at the bias interrupters webpage, a simple two page document that when read out loud, we found, increased the performance evaluations of white women, black women and black men. And that takes less than 10 minutes, probably five. 
So, there are effective ways to interrupt bias and performance evaluations, but if you are not doing them you probably need to think about doing them.

Then we have talked also about access to opportunities, and that is women of all races tend to do more of what we call, the office housework, the non-promotable tasks. So, there is also a toolkit online for interrupting bias in assignments. 

And then in many ways, comp is the easy part because interrupting bias in comp, that is just a math problem. And it is a math problem that Salesforce solved, and many other companies have solved. There are many companies around that can look at your comp and see if there are untoward patterns. 


And so, what companies need to do is to really figure out where this bias is playing out and to use evidence in metrics to attack it where it is.  


David Green: And has your work touched on looking at networks within companies? So, looking at homophily for example and also looking at promotions. Looking at networks of, let's say we just look at gender at the moment, but networks of male employees at a certain level versus female employees at certain levels and the impact that they may or may not have on who gets promoted?

Joan C. Williams: Yes. It varies from company to company, but in many companies who gets promoted depends on who is in the right networks. And as you point out homophily, is really a fancy name for just the simple principle that like attracts like. The single strongest determinant of who is in your social network is similarity. 


And in most companies, white men from college educated families are dominant at the top, and in their default mode, who is going to be in their networks is other white men just like them. The research also shows that white men who have what are called entrepreneurial networks, networks where they know a lot of people from different groups, it's called the strength of weak ties. They don't know these people well, but they have a very broad network. Those men tend to get promoted early, but the research also shows that women with identical networks don't get promoted early, unless they have a sponsor, someone who is willing to spend their political capital to help the woman. And so, networks and sponsorship programs are very important.

Now often, if they are the only thing that a company is doing, that is not going to be effective, but as part of an integrated approach, an effective sponsorship program will often be very important, especially for access to opportunities.  


David Green: One of the questions that we get is, what data should we be looking at to support our efforts around D&I? A lot of what you said that data is available, it is just a case of getting the right metrics, understanding what the problem is, if there is a problem, and then actually taking action on it. Which I guess is just classic use of data and metrics analytics.


Joan C. Williams: It is just analytics, data analytics, we do it in every other field. One of the things that is flagged in the book is that sometimes when people in HR or DEI try to get these data points, they get pushback, at least in the United States, from lawyers and we actually have heard the same thing about lawyers in Europe, saying, oh, we couldn't possibly collect that data because the legal risk is too great. 
And actually, in the forthcoming issue of The Harvard Business Review Magazine, I report on how to keep diversity metrics while controlling for legal risk. And so that should be out in probably December, maybe February.

But, very often in the United States, you have kind of a mid-level, in-house lawyer, stopping the head of HR in her tracks. And the bottom line is that there is some risk to keeping these metrics, there is some risk in not keeping them. The risk is that the first time you ever find out, you have a problem, is in a plaintiff's class action brief. Companies typically have protocols for keeping sensitive information and handling it. This is the same as every other sort of sensitive information and if a company is not willing to shoulder any risk for its diversity and inclusion efforts, it has just learnt something important about itself, it doesn't care. Companies shoulder legal risk every day of the week for business goals they actually care about. 


David Green: It is interesting actually, we had Professor Rob Cross on the show a few weeks ago, as you probably know he does a lot of work around network analysis, and he said that no one would give him ethnicity data before the George Floyd murder, last year, now companies are starting to provide ethnicity data.

As I am sure you will cover in this article, there is a way of limiting access to that data to certain people. 
There are ways of anonymising that data, so it is not about individuals, it is about patterns. And as you said, it is the same with any other sensitive data that a company collects, so you wonder sometimes if it is just an excuse.   

Joan C. Williams: Yeah. You wouldn't have a company saying, we are not going to look and see if we have cybersecurity vulnerabilities because that might lead to legal risks. 
Then you just go, what? But that is the kind of thing that is done in DEI, it makes no sense.  


David Green: And as you said, right at the start, when you used the analogy with sales. Not doing well on D&I is a business risk, just as not doing well on sales is a risk to the business and maybe if companies looked at it like that, then we wouldn't be having the challenges where we are.

We talked a little bit about how HR can get buy in for D&I goals and get the support of business leaders. How can HR and D&I departments work together so we interrupt bias in some of the basic business systems?


Joan C. Williams: People at the heads of D&I, are experts in D&I. 
But if you have bias in your business systems, typically the heads of DEI don't own the business systems. They don't own performance evaluations, that's HR. They don't own hiring, that's recruiting. And so, this is part of the organisational change challenge.

I have heads of DEI telling me a lot I have influence, not power. And one of my strong messages to CEOs is that if you are serious about this, as a business goal, you have to set someone up for success and give them the authority and the power they need, to address the problem.

Now, whether that is going to be the head of DEI has power in conjunction with the people who own performance evaluations to interrupt bias in them. Or whether it is going to be the head of HR, or whether it is going to be the Head of Operations, that is going to vary from company to company.

But the strong message to CEOs is just hiring a head of D&I and giving her money for programming, that is not going to be effective, I can tell you right now. It is going to be great for my bottom line, I mean, people bring me in for tens of thousands of dollars to chit and chat, and I am perfectly willing to chit and chat and I think that probably helps a little, but it is not going to solve the problem.  


David Green: Just before we get to the final question, has what happened last year with the George Floyd murder and the climate that seemed to create amongst organisations seemingly paying more attention to this. I hope it wasn't just lip service. Have you seen that acting as a catalyst to drive things forward?  


Joan C. Williams: Absolutely. George Floyd’s murder did change the atmosphere. And the United States, also interesting to hear you think if it also may be true in the UK, there has really been a moment of racial reckoning. Now, you know, it is not as if in the US we haven't had these moments before, and we ain't solved the problem, in case you didn't notice. I am hopeful, but not sanguine. 


But one of the most concrete differences we see now is that people who were apprehensive about using the workplace experiences survey to find out actually what's going on and to share the data, some of it with everyone, a select portion of the data, and all of it with top leadership. That has changed overnight. 
People are now willing to do that and say, okay, we are serious and the first step in being serious is to find out what is happening so we can establish a baseline and measure progress.

And so, I really do think there has been a change. 

I have studied race for 10 years and when I started to study race, I was really aghast at the experiences that some people report. Especially the levels of just raw disrespect, especially, that black people encounter is just shocking and disheartening to me. I think many more white people now have come to the realisation of just what it is like to try to navigate these workplaces as a person of colour. I am hopeful there too.  


David Green: Good. Well, hopefully if we were to talk in two- or three-year’s time, that kind of progress has been sustained and hopefully extrapolated as well.  


Joan C. Williams: If I can add one other point, David. I think one of the things, and another issue I have worked on for decades, is the impact of motherhood on women's careers and the impact of caregiving on people's careers. I also think that the last two years have really brought that home in a very important way. 


And before, that was just like, oh, women make different choices that has nothing to do with the workplace. I think there is far more recognition now that, no, when women leave their jobs, it is often that they are driven out, it is not that they are cheerfully opting out. So, I think that has also changed in the last couple of years. 


David Green: So, moving to the last couple of questions, Joan. We are asking this question of everyone in this series, but I think you can probably tackle it from the lens of tackling bias. How can HR help the business identify the critical skills for the future? And as I said, maybe you can tackle that from the lens of tackling bias and what skills do the workforce need to do that?


Joan C. Williams: I think that HR needs to understand and communicate exactly how bias plays out in everyday ways. For example, other people get credit for ideas, I originally offered. Much lower levels of white men say yes, then women or people of colour. Women tend to get interrupted much more than men do. When the behaviour that, in a white man, would probably be seen as a career enhancing passion for the business, may be seen, in a black man, as intimidating, or in a white woman, as evidence that she has sharp elbows. These are really, really concrete things that happen every day. And it is not enough just to provide an abstract description of the cognitive basis of bias, that is interesting, but it is a college lecture. You need to explain to people precisely what is happening on the ground and then provide a forum where they can work with their colleagues to say, this is how I would feel comfortable interrupting this. And it is usually not going to be, to use Google's phrase, calling out the bias, that's bias. Most people aren't going to do that. Most people have other ways to spend their political capital. What they need is low key, cordial ways, that nonetheless interrupt the bias seamlessly, without antagonising everyone.

What we have found is that if you give people those ways or more precisely, if you allow them to explore those and find those ways with their colleagues, they are just phenomenally relieved that they finally know what to do.


David Green: Great. And finally, is there a question that I should have asked you, but didn’t?  


Joan C. Williams: I think you did a pretty good job, personally.  


David Green: Good, and that is very kind of you Joan. I think what you have done over the past 40 minutes or so, I even more now, want to read the book. I definitely want to get to some of the points that you touched on over the last 40 minutes. 


So, thanks very much for being a guest on The Digital HR Leaders Podcast, Joan. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, find out more about your work, and follow you on social media, if you do that?  


Joan C. Williams: Yes. Well, on Twitter I am @JoanCWilliams. My webpage is www.joancwilliams.com and then I would strongly urge them to look at the bias interrupter’s website, that is www.biasinterrupters.org.

That provides some of the tools that I have talked about today, which are open access, free to use, and proven to be effective. They have been used throughout the world and accessed more than a quarter million times. So, I would really recommend people check them out.   


David Green: Thank you, Joan. And of course, Bias Interrupted, is out on the 16th of November. So, if you are listening to this podcast before the 16th of November, it is available for pre-order probably through Amazon or any bookstore.

Joan, thanks so much for being on the show, really enjoyed our discussion and look forward to reading the book.  


Joan C. Williams: Thanks, David, I appreciate the opportunity.