Power and consciousness scale

- One of the biggest forms of pushback against diversity and inclusion efforts that I hear in my work is the issue of fairness. There's a misconception that by focusing on strategies like diversifying recruitment and hiring or even bolder ideas like tying leader compensation to DEI outcomes, we're somehow being unfair to people with more privileged identities. Even using the word privilege can prompt accusations that we have a political agenda and that diversity and inclusion efforts constitute reverse discrimination. One of the key reasons we have so much conflict around these issues is because we have not agreed on a basic set of concepts that can help us communicate more clearly about what we mean. Pause the video now and write down these four words: bias, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, and come up with your own one-sentence definition for each. Use the notebook section of this page to journal your entries. Don't worry about right or wrong or looking up an official answer. This is your own personal understanding at this moment right now. (soft upbeat music) How did you do? Did you have a little trouble making a distinction? Listen, even after having been in this industry over 25 years, I still find myself coming back to these key principles and refining what they mean to me at any given moment. And having worked at a university for many years, I often joke that I don't like to focus on definitions because students will argue with you on everything from Wikipedia to their mom's dissertation. I don't think we need more definitions for our terminology. There are already plenty of those. I think we need more conversations about what these core concepts mean in our everyday work. To stimulate the conversation, I like to use frameworks and metaphors. Here are a few that have come in handy. Bias is not the shark. It's the water. Every single one of us is biased by all the millions of data points we have taken in throughout our life, in our home, in our education, in our news, even with our friends. Our brains take in this information and create shortcuts or assumptions so we can make faster decisions about what a thing is or isn't. This biological adaptation works great on objects but not so great with people. Bias shapes our view of the world unconsciously. It does not mean we are bad. It means we have a brain. Now, prejudice is when we go from the unconscious state of bias to more consciously making judgments about entire groups of people based on stereotypes and assumptions. Anything you think you know about a whole group of people, including your own, is a stereotype. Discrimination is when you have the power to use that prejudice in a way that negatively impacts other people. Maybe you own a store or you have hiring authority at your job. That gives you the power to consciously or sometimes unconsciously discriminate. Last but not least, there's oppression. That's when discrimination happens across systems and institutions over time to negatively impact specific groups of people. While we're all biased and all have prejudices, we must have power in order to discriminate or oppress. Most of us have faced some form of prejudice, but not all of us have had the experience of being a member of a systematically oppressed group. So what does all this have to do with your company? Well, throughout this course, I'll take you through a variety of resources that can help you make a compelling case for both the historical and contemporary impact that bias, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression had and still have in the workplace.