Diversity and Inclusion

Making an organization more inclusive takes deliberate action, and the reason is that the obstacles are largely invisible to the people who have them. Good intentions are not the issue. Awareness is.

A Useful Example

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has described tackling pay equity at his own company. He was aware of the gap in other organizations and worked hard to prevent it in his.

When Salesforce ran an internal audit, they found a pay gap between equally performing men and women anyway.

That is worth sitting with, because it was not a failure of intent. It is a demonstration of how thoroughly these patterns operate below the level anyone is monitoring.

Where Bias Comes From

Our brains are constantly assessing, judging, and predicting. That process is fast, automatic, and built from everything we have ever experienced. Most of the time it serves us well.

The question is whether the resulting narrative is accurate. And much of the day we are running on autopilot, unaware of the beliefs producing our decisions.

Three patterns do most of the work.

Negativity bias. The brain scans for threat and holds onto what it finds. That kept our ancestors alive when the cost of missing a danger was everything. Today it means we weight the negative signal disproportionately and decide from an exaggeration.

Unfamiliarity reads as risk. Anything different, however small, triggers a caution response. Again, useful once. Poorly matched to a modern workplace.

In-group and out-group. When we perceive someone as unlike us, our empathy for them drops. David Eagleman and colleagues demonstrated this in 2018. Participants watched videos of hands apparently being stabbed with a needle, and empathic brain activity was low until group labels were added. Then responses rose sharply when people watched a member of their own group.

The critical finding is that the effect was not tied to any particular group. Atheists showed stronger responses to other atheists. What drove it was simply the recognition of shared identity, whatever that identity was.

The differences that trigger it can be anything. Race, religion, politics, background, whether someone eats meat.

What Awareness Actually Buys You

We cannot stop the mind from assessing and producing a narrative. That is not on offer.

What we can do is notice the narrative and question whether it holds. Being aware of the body, then the emotion, then the belief underneath, and pausing long enough to reflect, is what makes a decision deliberate rather than automatic.

That pause is the whole mechanism. It is not large. It is enough.

Preference Is Not the Problem

This part matters, because it is where discussions about bias usually go wrong.

Having a preference is fine. I dislike mushrooms. That is allowed, and I am not a bad person for it. The same is true of preferences about people. If you are quiet and find quiet people easier company, there is nothing wrong with that.

The problem is not the preference. It is the preference operating without your knowledge, in a decision where it is not relevant.

Say you are interviewing someone with a lot of energy. Knowing your own bias lets you check in and ask whether your read on this person is being shaped by something unrelated to whether they can do the job.

That is a very different exercise from trying to have no preferences, which is neither possible nor necessary.

Step four is not a nicety. Given what the research shows about recognized similarity, it is the most directly effective part of the exercise.

Why This Connects to Team Performance

Inclusion is often framed purely as a fairness question. It is also a performance question.

Google’s study of 180 teams found the strongest predictor of effectiveness was psychological safety, meaning whether people felt able to speak up, ask questions, and admit mistakes without fear of judgment. Teams with that consistently outperformed teams of more technically skilled individuals who lacked it.

Someone who reads the room as unsafe for them contributes less, regardless of what they are capable of. The cost of exclusion is paid in ideas that never get said.

It Is Trainable

Reducing the influence of bias is a skill rather than a moral achievement, which is a more useful way to think about it. Awareness is the foundation, and compassion practices that build empathy across perceived difference do the rest.

The compassion practices in the Meditation Library work on this directly.

Related Reading

Mindfulness and Teamwork, Compassion, and Mindful and Compassionate Leadership.