Why All The Business Bias

The state of bias in the business world, a brief history of why it exists, and what's being done to change it.

I love this guy, he's me to a tee.

If you've spent any amount of time living anywhere that doesn't happen to be beneath a rock, you'll know that one of the latest buzz words we've begun to hear floated in conversation is "representation." When I first started hearing this, I must ashamedly admit that I was worried that it was just another phrase that would eventually become overused, appropriated for some purpose other than its intent, and then get swept under the rug of history only to ever be addressed in civics classes and among intellectual circles. As a natural extension of this perspective, I found myself wondering about the relevance the recent representation hype. I guess after a life of seeing history repeat itself far more often than I'd like to admit, I've become a bit of a cynic. A hopeful cynic, but a cynic none the less.


Before completely writing off the idea of promoting representation, I did something I think more people should do; I simply started paying attention. I noticed that I was hearing people talking about representation everywhere, especially in the entertainment and technology fields. This sparked my interest as all of my professional qualifications fall in one of these two arenas. I guess you could say the "representation conversation" figuratively hit closer to home. That being said, I decided to do more research and what I found was intriguing, but nothing I didn't already know at my core. According to Fortune, the demographic disparities among Fortune 500 executive leadership help give some context to why so many people are talking about representation. I'm a very data-driven person and, as such, I found myself unexpectedly and painstakingly cobbling together this spreadsheet over a couple of hours as part of my attempt to excavate the context of the statistics. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission keeps track of these stats so anyone can go and look at the raw data, but I needed to break the numbers down to actual readable percentages in order for things to come together. I included the link to my simplified demographic percentages if you're curious to see what it actually looks like in simplified form, but honestly after a few pages it all becomes rote and repetitive as all the numbers echo the same message. If the stats are to be believed, they indicate a pronounced reduction of opportunities for upward mobility depending on where you stand on demographic landscape.  Regardless of what industry you look at, you seem to find that the distribution of executive / management positions seem to be disproportionately skewed along demographic lines. The tech industry has rightfully earned the reputation for hiring biases, but this trend is surprisingly exaggerated in the entertainment industry (not surprising, but surprisingly exaggerated).

2018 Grammy Academy Luncheon Guests

Although my college experience would have led me to believe differently, there are large swaths of homogeneity within the entertainment industry. Anyone who's heard the recent debates surrounding the representation (or lack thereof) amongst academy award nominees / winners can attest to the fact that Hollywood, despite it's alleged liberal leanings, continues to have a diversity problem.

The Grammy Academy's Sci-Tech award recipients

The tech industry doesn't fare much better. Several tech companies have recently seen a flood of bad press over lack of diversity among their hirees. Indeed, the perceived lack of intelligence of women has even begun to be held by women as well. According to UNESCO, women comprise less than 30% of the world's researchers, despite the fact that they make up just under 50% of the world's population.

So how did things get to this point? As I typed that last line, I realized that my line of thinking was skewed. The question I should really be asking is how do we analyze where things currently are. Context is everything and, as my elders were always so fond of saying, you have to know where you've come from to know where you're going. I propose that knowing where you've come from is also an important factor in determining where you currently are as well. The history of the progress of civil rights in this country is no secret for all but the most stubborn doubters of the well-known and even better-documented facts. The myriad consequences of the scar left on our country's collective subconscious by the sins of our colonial heritage have been analyzed by people far more intelligent, well-spoken, and better qualified than myself. These consequences range from where we end up living, which then affects the schools we end up attending, the medical care receive, and, lest I stray too far from our core topic, the type of employment we end up having (which also inevitably determines our income level, which determines where we live, and the circle goes on).

Based upon the above concept now being popularly referred to as the "cycle of poverty" It's easy to see how toppling just one of those dominoes in that cycle can have a downward ripple effect on those who lack the social / economic / educational capital to recover from the fall of the first domino. The converse of this is true as well. Once someone has acquired wealth and the knowledge of the principals of the cycle of wealth, it's pretty easy to continue growing said wealth incrementally. Of course, some wealthy individuals who know this won't say it simply due to the fact that it just makes one feel better to talk about how much hard work and effort they put into their success and how much they deserve it.

If you happen to be fortunate enough to not have to endure the consequences of having the "wrong" heritage, you still have to be concerned about being the "wrong" gender. As in the previous example, the history of gender equality is also well documented, and as such can help give us a pretty good idea of how the country got here, how its job market evolved over time, and how so many biases became so deeply embedded. The sad truth is that for many people, their biases have been learned from an early age by watching and mirroring the example of those closest to them. What's even sadder is that one of the negative impacts that said biases can have on those subjected to them is the creation and reinforcement of these same biases within the people who fall victim to them.

This is an honest, no-lie screenshot of what happens when you
perform a Google search for the phrase "beautiful woman"

So what can be done about it. We know that biases exist and that we all to some extent have had them programmed into our subconscious. We also know that said biases can impact the life and / or death of large segments of the polis. We know the statistics and we've examined all the numbers. So the important question is will it spur anyone to action. The answer of this hopeful cynic is a tepidly optimistic "Looks like it, but we'll see how it goes." The tech giants are starting to wake up. It's no longer a secret that increasing diversity will have a positive impact on those who do it right. Many of silicon valley's recent efforts haven't resulted in ideal solutions, but I believe that to be more a result of not exactly knowing how to approach such a complex and ubiquitous problem than not caring to try. I know tech, and I know tech people. Difficult problems motivate us... sometimes to the point of obsession. If you tell an ambitious tech professional that they can't solve a particular problem, it's highly likely that the response will be some derivative of "Watch me!" followed by days of cursing, throwing the mouse across the room, walking across the room to pick up said mouse and repair it, almost got-its, and finally a "Eureka!" moment... and then maybe some sleep.

The entertainment industry is another thing entirely. Despite the fact that it's much more visible to most people, the majority of the tech industry is far younger than the entertainment industry and was in many instances born out of a culture that opposed the mainstream and embraced agility and thinking forward. Although the artists get younger, and the sound and visuals get more polished, at the core the entertainment industry is the same old industry repeating the same message it has for decades. I regularly see news articles with headlines proclaiming a great media crisis as a result of lost viewership / listenership (not sure if that's a word, but I'm going with it). The heads of industry usually blame said losses on various factors (music and movie piracy, streaming services, cord cutting, etc) but I submit that the problem is that the country is maturing and moving forward while the entertainment industry is playing the same old tunes with synth instruments (both literally and figuratively now that I think of it). There have been numerous instances that have proven that embracing media that resembles what our country currently looks like pays dividends, but the entertainment industry powers that be seem to be too staunchly set in their ways to hear the coins falling.

Where does that leave us. I suspect that the entertainment industry will either evolve or become another casualty of the overarching disruption being caused by the tech industry; we can already see tech entities beginning to consume the media industry as a whole. Media companies are beginning to get folded into tech companies and and become just another service in the ever so popular
"As a Service" model. I personally don't have a problem with this if it leads to the paradigm shift needed to see these depressing statistics erode away into the annals of history only to resurface in lectures and Civics classes.