Inclusion, Inc.. Sara Sanford

Inclusion, Inc. - Sara Sanford


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goals, and I concluded with a firm handshake. I left the meeting with the kind of adrenaline high I had only felt in athletic competitions. Whether or not I had persuaded, I had stuck to my guns, and my script.

      I got the call: I would be getting a new title and a new salary. At the time, I felt a sense of success beyond myself. It felt like a mini-victory for women, a tiny step toward closing the pay gap.

      Years later after I had left that role, I reconnected with a former co-worker from the same company. She had just moved on to a new employer and wanted to share something with me she had held on to for years: The salary I negotiated for myself that day was actually below the bottom of the range for that position at that company. I had leaned in to a starting salary below what they would have offered me, and they said nothing. The amount employers had paid me in the past influenced what I felt comfortable asking for in my negotiation, and this employer took advantage of my own biased baseline. I might have done more to help close the pay gap if I had said nothing at all. By leaning in, I had sold myself short.

      Holding background factors constant, the data sets demonstrated that males and females ask equally often for promotions and raises, but women are less likely to get them. Over a lifetime of salary negotiations, this adds up, and the un-likeability risks women take each time compound.

      Every time a woman negotiates, she runs the double risk of not getting what she asked for and being liked less by her peers for asking in the first place. While she may be passing up a raise if she doesn't ask, she may be putting herself in an even worse position if she does, especially if her negotiation is unsuccessful.

      We're not used to women asking for pay raises or advocating for themselves, so when they do, it feels extreme. Once again, because of our biased baselines, we feel a sense of disruption to our unconscious expectations. What often gets misdiagnosed as a “confidence gap” when women don't negotiate may actually be an acute awareness of how advocating for oneself can be perceived and how that friction can harm one's career, rather than advance it.

      This limit to leaning in is not specific to gender. Expectations we have of what people will do, how they will react, and where we expect to see them impact how we treat them. When these norms are disrupted, we perceive actions committed by one person differently than actions committed by another. This empowerment double-bind extends to workers of color, and Black employees most severely.

      If the research so clearly shows how bias is sabotaging these interactions, it seems that training to build awareness around our biases would be the obvious solution. Bias, unfortunately, can't be trained away.

      On February 11, 2018, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz was asked at a town hall meeting about the arrest of two Black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks the previous April. He stated, “As somebody who grew up in a very diverse background as a young boy…I didn't see color, and I honestly don't see color now.”

      And yet, almost a year later, Starbucks's chief executive couldn't understand why “I don't see color” is off the mark at best, and more likely, harmful. Starbucks is just one of many US companies that spend a total of $8 billion a year on diversity training, only to have it backfire.

      As noted in chapter 1, one of the most pernicious aspects of bias is that learning about it doesn't make us any better at recognizing it in ourselves or stopping it from impacting our behavior. As I experienced through the Harvard Implicit Association Test, being faced with my own biases over and over didn't make me any better at countering them in the kinds of split-second decisions that make up most of our lives.

      But why do these trainings backfire? Why are white men who are asked


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