Use Other People’s Biases Against You to Your Advantage
How to help others see you the way you want to be seen
How to help others see you the way you want to be seen
Not too long ago, I was setting up slides in my classroom to teach a new MBA course when a student mistook me for the IT support specialist who was ostensibly setting up for the professor. Classic stereotyping: Asian woman equals tech support, not professor.
I’ll always need to acknowledge that there are stereotypes that I face as an Asian woman. And in fact, we are all susceptible to stereotypes and judgment, no matter who we are. Even as we strive for more equitable systems and a more inclusive culture, we bump up against the psychological shortcoming of personal biases — our own, and those of others.
What if, rather than expecting others to rely on stereotypes to size us up, we helped them see what we want them to see? Rather than beating our heads against the wall about other people’s judgments, we can empower ourselves to do something about it.
We can use the biases that others have against us in our favor.
A few years ago, the venture capitalist Paul Graham generated major backlash for saying that a “really bad indication” of a startup’s viability “is a CEO with a strong foreign accent.” He went on to elaborate his view that an accent might hinder an executive’s communication.
Soon after, I learned that, in the United States, people with foreign accents were much less likely to be promoted to middle- and upper-management positions. The most common hypothesis for this phenomenon appeared to align with Graham’s assumption: A belief that people with nonstandard accents were not able to communicate as well as native speakers.
I decided to test this stereotype. In a research experiment, I had people randomly assigned to listen to a message delivered by either someone with a foreign accent or someone with a standard American accent. I found that there was no difference in what they understood, nor in what information they gathered.
The same random study participants were then told to pretend they were in a position to offer workplace promotions to some of the various speakers. They knew that they could not (openly) discriminate based on things like gender, race, ethnicity, and, in this case, accent. But it was widely accepted that attributes like interpersonal influence, being a team player, and “thinking outside the box” were important. Every single person with a foreign accent was assigned a lower score in those areas — which in turn led to them being the least likely to get promoted to management positions.
But our most fascinating discovery was that even though those with a non-native accent were less likely to get promoted to leadership positions, and entrepreneurs with non-native accents were less likely to get funding — in both cases because they were deemed less “interpersonally skilled” — there were ways for individuals to preempt those perceptions. Recognizing that others would form judgments about them based on their accent, they could redirect misattributions about their competence to give themselves an advantage.
When one of our candidates in a job interview said, “I know it might seem like I’m not able to communicate impactfully, but let me tell you about a time when I fought for resources for my team…” this individual was actually rated higher than those with no accent. When one of our entrepreneurs mentioned how she was able to “politically navigate a crowded supplier market in order to receive preferential pricing terms,” she redirected the perceptions that investors had of her and obtained far more funding than her counterparts.
We realized that when a “disadvantaged” person acknowledges a common misattribution in a nonreactive way, and links it to specific qualifications that they bring to the table, their selling points stand out. It’s important to emphasize the nonreactive; the acknowledgment of bias should be general, not personalized.
Confronting people directly about their presumed biases, on the other hand, puts them on the defensive, which creates backlash. “Don’t assume I’m bad at engineering just because I’m a woman,” or, “You think I’m a bad driver? Is it because I’m Asian?” are examples of how not to effectively redirect bias. (I may or may not have said both of these things at some point in my life.)
Remember how I was mistaken for an IT specialist? The next time I was set to teach a new MBA course, I preemptively did some reconnaissance to assess how students perceived me. Speaking with current and former students and colleagues, I discovered that I didn’t fit some people’s perceptions of what a professor “should” look like — I was too young and too female.
And so, I helped redirect their judgments. I started out the class by saying, “I know it may look like I’m here to sell you Girl Scout cookies,” redirecting them away from my youth and my femininity to my credentials. By anticipating their biases, I was able to guide them to the attributions that I wanted them to make.