7 Ways to Be More Inclusive
I believe in the power of women to build inspiring careers in all types of fields. At least, that's what I thought I believed. It's what my conscious mind thinks, at least. My unconscious mind, however, favors traditional Western gender roles men focusing on careers while women focus on family. I learned about this dichotomy from taking an implicit association test, a social psychology test designed to measure a person's unconscious or automatic associations between types of people and specific concepts or ideas. And I'm not alone The results of more than one million tests suggest that most people have these unconscious associations. So I thought I would search for a few ways I could begin to correct my implicit biases and bring my unconscious mind on board with what the rest of me believes. The book Blindspot The Hidden Biases of Good People the authors are the inventors of the implicit association test has a ton of fascinating science on this topic. One bit in particular stood out to me, So it's especially important to focus on inclusivity in our conscious minds, because our unconscious has already put most of us me included! in quite a deficit. Though this list is by no means exhaustive, here are a few things I discovered that might help us to counteract our own unconscious and get closer to the people we truly want to be. One thing we've been working on lately in Buffer's virtual workplace, where most communication is written, is to be mindful of the language we use and make sure it's as inclusive as possible. For example, many of us have been cracking down on our use of the colloquial "hey guys" greeting as we address the team. It was, of course, never meant to exclude the women on the team and has always been intended as a general greeting. But we value clarity in communication at Buffer, and this greeting, friendly though its intentions might be, can be easily misconstrued. Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou rightly gave us a little nudge on this recently, and we really appreciate it, , It's a great reminder to keep going on this improvement, and being aware of all our language choices. Plus we occasionally get to reference this awesome flowchart from Tech Lady Mafia. Even the creators of the implicit association tests still "fail" them.