These biases lead to shockingly high rates of unemployment and poverty among transgender people in America, twice the rate of unemployment as our fellow citizens. Yet we are almost twice as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree. This means that hiring managers are uncritically ruling out highly qualified transgender candidates—and their businesses pay the price of that bias.
Even among those who are well intentioned, unconscious bias expresses itself. When someone who never knew me as a male slips and uses a male pronoun to describe me, that pronoun opens a window into his or her thinking about me. Conversely, when someone to whom I’ve just disclosed my transgender status responds with, “I never would have known if you hadn’t told me,” he may feel as if he’s paying me a compliment. In reality, they’re telling me they expect people like me to fall short of their standard for womanhood or manhood.
As a general rule, we are more attentive to our identity and the feeling of otherness when we are in a nondominant group. It is worth noting, for instance, that the people who committed the acts on September 11, 2001, are generally referred to as “Arab” or “Muslim” terrorists. Yet Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two U.S.-born, white, Christian men who were convicted of the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, are rarely referred to as “white male” or “Christian” terrorists.
This phenomenon can even affect our own perception of our identity. Depending upon the circumstance we are in, our group identity may be more or less present to us. Let me describe a personal example.
My wife and business partner, Leslie, and I were asked to conduct a half-day workshop for an annual gathering of a group of Muslim leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom. The group’s mission statement says it is “dedicated to promoting social integration and mobility.” The group of nearly one hundred people included a member of the British Parliament, a top official from Al Jazeera, imams, academics and business leaders, and many other people representing various professions.
There is nothing unusual about my being asked to lead a half-day workshop on unconscious bias; after all, it’s what I do for a living. It’s why I am writing this book. I’ve conducted thousands of workshops during my career, but in the days approaching this particular workshop I noticed there was something different going on in my internal conversation about this one.
What bugged me was that I couldn’t stop being concerned about how they would react to the fact that I am Jewish.
Now, I’ve been Jewish since the day I was born, and I have definitely been Jewish since I began my career. And I can’t remember ever before having it be something I was consciously thinking about when going into a workshop. The circumstances, the context shifted my perception. I ended up sharing this very insight with the group and the session ended up going well.
This tendency to determine quickly “us” and “them” is foundational to our survival, as I have discussed earlier. Knowing whether “they” are one of “us” keeps us safe. We, quite logically, are likely to be more positively disposed toward people who we feel safer around, and more negatively disposed to those we don’t. However, those we identify with as “us” or who we see as “them” may be subject to very fluid interpretations because all of us have any number of different identities. I am a man, I am Jewish, I am white, I am of a certain generational group, and so on. My friend Dan Egol, who is of mixed race, describes such fluid interpretation this way:
For people who are of mixed race or multiracial/ethnic, that can complicate the way we experience otherness. Our physical representation may not coincide with how we identify and how people view us may not match how we identify. We may not have an “other” or everyone may be the other, depending on the situation. For example, when I am walking around Columbia Heights—a predominantly Latinx[1]/African American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I “pass” as white and know physically how I come across since I am light-skinned. People who don’t know me can mistake me for a white person based on my appearance, but I prefer to be in Columbia Heights because the Spanish language and culture is very comforting to me. There is a disconnect between how I relate to the space and how people see me as a racial outsider. The “us/them” paradigm gets complicated because my physical traits betray my cultural connection to the community. While I see myself as similar to the majority community, I doubt I am ever seen that way by that same majority community.
Regardless of what situation we are in, the tendency toward the “us versus them” way of seeing the world is strong within us. In fact, researchers have discovered that this tendency begins early in life.
Neha Mahajan, a psychologist at Temple University, and Karen Wynn, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and director of Yale’s infant cognition laboratory, have studied the development of this “us/them” phenomena in relation to young children.[2] Mahajan and Wynn chose thirty-two babies, all of them just under one year of age. The researchers gave the babies a choice between three foods, Cheerios in one bowl, or graham crackers or green beans in another. They noted which snack each baby preferred.
The babies were then shown two researcher-controlled puppets that were given the same food choices the babies had been given and were simulated to appear as if they were making a choice between the foods. Finally, when the infants were given a choice between the two puppets, twenty-seven of the thirty-two babies chose the puppets that had made choices similar to what the babies had picked. Even at this early age, we have developed the capacity to identify “us.” In fact, in other studies, Wynn was able to see that children have a sense of a moral code, identifying “right” and “wrong” when they were as young as five months old. Other researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China have demonstrated that babies demonstrate preference for people of their own race when they are as little as three months old![3] Wynn and her team conducted an even more remarkable second experiment. They took the puppets the babies had chosen and those that weren’t and play acted that each of them was treated either well or not by another set of puppets. The babies were then offered a choice between the second set of puppets. They chose the puppets that treated the one they had earlier associated with more positively, and also the ones that treated the ones that they had earlier rejected more harshly!
They were demonstrating bias against the “other” and they were not even a year old!
This is not to say we are born without the facility for empathy. On the contrary, we have the capacity to feel so closely aligned with people that we can almost feel their pain or sadness in our bodies. Most of us have had the instant reaction to seeing somebody have an accident, either in person or while watching a movie or television show. We can feel the reaction in our body, a visceral flinching as if we were feeling the pain ourselves.
We know that something similar happens when we see very young babies relate to their parents. There is a natural tendency for the babies to imitate parental behavior, to “mirror” the actions that they see. The Austrian Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz was one of the cofounders of the field of ethology, which is the biology of behavior. Lorenz was particularly interested in studying how animals began to develop their identities and their way of being “imprinted” to their parents upon birth. Lorenz famously showed this in various experiments. One of the best known involved Lorenz substituting himself for the parents of goslings upon their hatching. He found that they related to him as their parent throughout their lives.
But if connecting to “our people” is so important, how do we connect so deeply with others? The answer may lie in a discovery that occurred in Parma, Italy, in the late 1980s.
Five University of Parma neurophysiologists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, were observing a group of macaque monkeys to attempt to understand how certain neurons controlled hand and mouth movements. Food was placed close enough to the monkeys so that they could reach for it. Electrodes tracked the ventral premotor cortex of the monkeys’