I saw Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point fame speak on his newest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (available January), last week. One example he gave that seemed to strike the rawest nerve is as follows:
He recounts the story of Abbie Conant's audition for the Munich Philharmonic in 1980. Luckily I found another recounting on the Web to share with you:
In 1980 Ms. Abbie Conant applied for eleven trombone positions advertised in Germany. She received only one audition invitation: a letter from the Munich Philharmonic addressed to a Herr Abbie Conant.
She auditioned on June 19, 1980 and competed against 32 men. The first round was held behind a screen. She was sixteenth to play and no candidates who played after her were selected for the second round. When the finalists’ numbers were called, there was amazement that trombone sixteen was a woman. In the second and third rounds, done without a screen, she clearly defeated her male opponents, and the orchestra voted to hire her.
According to orchestra chairman Deinhardt Goritski, general music directo Celibidache was opposed to employing her, but he was new with the orchestra and not yet in a position to overrule it...
In the thirteen years since then, no more Munich Philharmonic auditions have been held behind a screen.
Gladwell stated that since orchestras started to use the screen method, the composition of orchestras shot up from 5 to 50 percent females within the last fifteen years.
He states that had you asked the selection committees they would have been instistent that they harbored absolutely no preconcieved bias against women. Men were simply inherently better at classical music and many scholarly articles were crafted to explain just why this was so.
In another example, Gladwell cites research that shows that selected CEOs (to be distinguished from founding CEOs) are three inches taller than the average American man. (The study is just in U.S. and doesn't factor in the female CEO.) In fact, you had a much better shot at the CEO slot if you were black than if you are 5'6" tall. And every inch in height above 5' 9" grants you a $700-$1000 premium in annual income. (I should mention that Gladwell himself is short - but please don't hold that against him.)
I'm looking forward to Gladwell's Blink because it brings a topic near and dear to my innovative heart to a much wider audience - the role of intuition and instinct (which I sharply differentiate) on decision-making.
However, I sincerely hope that Gladwell sticks to stories and examples as he did so eloquently in The Tipping Point, and shies away offering conclusions. In all fairness, I say this because I vehemently disagreed with the solutions he offered during his presentation.
For instance, he proposed something akin to a "screen" during every hiring process. (I could hear the VCs at my table mumble and groan: what! the whole Valley hinges on a foundation of trust networks).
I had the opportunity of changing my last name to an Anglo-Saxon (perhaps I should also mention I was living in Utah at the time) surname after my marriage in 2000. I remember writing my resume after the next round fell through and something in the back of my mind wondered if Evelyn Rodriguez or perhaps Evelyn Vincent would be the ticket in the door. I decided if someone was going to nix me from an initial interview simply because my first name was a woman's or my last name was Hispanic-sounding, then realistically could I truly ever thrive there? It became my little employer audition.
The rest of the Abbie Conant goes like this: While internationally acclaimed, she endured over ten years of discrimination from her orchestra-mates and ultimately ended up having to take the battle to court.
An external solution such as the equivalent of audition screens for all our hires will never effectively wipe away the very internal problem of unconscious bias and filtering information through our preconceptions.
So how does one erase blind spots and exactly how do we drop biases we aren't even aware of? (Thanks to Bill Tobin , Director of Emerging Company Services at PricewaterhouseCoopers whom was sitting at my table for asking the $64,000 question.)
I didn't attempt to answer this weighty question at the table, but it's the topic to be dwelved into and explored throughout this week (although some of you might rightly suspect this is the topic of my blog anyway).
None of this subtle discrimination surprises me. I work for a firm that is very conscious of not being discriminatory. A few months back I was asked to hire an admin (not for me--for someone much higher in the org). After sifting through hundreds of resumes and making two dozen phone calls it occurred to me that I had chosen all women to come in for an in-person interview. Even I thought that a woman should be in the position. Realizing this, I added a male to the mix and was later told not to bother--men don't work well with this manager, I was told. I don't think this was blatantly chauvanistic, but it showed how companies make natural determinations of who will be more successful in a position. Women, in my experience, are almost always the ones handling the admistrative aspects of a job. I'm often asked to organize events and to plan logistics outside of my job role, I think, because I am a woman and supposedly know how many croquettes to order. Nothing could be further from the truth!
Posted by: Jory Des Jardins | Nov 16, 2004 at 03:22 PM