#21 - Objectification, Stereotype Threat, DEI in the Workplace

Getting at a deeper sense of individual humanity in the work place and some antidotes to objectification and stereotypes.

A Grecian Urn. Image Credit

Objectification dehumanization and lower performance

OBJECTIFICATION (noun): the act of treating a human being as an object.

In our society we are most familiar with the notion of physical or sexual objectification; the reduction of a complete human being to the attractiveness of a person, the color of their hair, their height or body shape. Visual traits are simple to objectify as eyes have evolved convergently to rapidly provide a useful model (but at times wrong) for assessing another human being for in-group identification, threat detection or mate selection. Objectification is primordial and instinctual and has been linked to activity in the older, limbic parts of the brain such as the thalamus and hippocampus.

It is believed, at times, that objectification can highlight some positive attribute of a person. For example, referring to one “as a tall drink of water,”¹ or “as such a brain,” is a comment on a physical attractiveness and mental acuity.

At its worst, objectification flattens another human being into a numerical score, for example 1-10. This flattening depersonalizes; a person’s uniques abilities, proclivities, hopes and dreams are erased and silenced in lieu of a mono-parametric number.

In both cases, and ultimately all objectification causes harm (clever use of metaphor and synecdoche be damned) . According to Fredrickson and Roberts, who coined the term Objectification Theory², being objectified leads to increased anxiety, shame, body dysmorphia and lower self esteem, with data backing this up. It also propagates self-objectification, where the objectification is imputed on one’s own self, which is linked to decreased cognitive performance.

Physical and sexual objectification of women is one of the clearest and ubiquitous examples in our society. There is much progress to be made here, including in the work place, but it is far from the only form. There are insidious manners that objectification can creep into the workplace. Had a manager who ignored your illness, bereavement, sick child to demand you show up to work? You’ve been objectified as a tool and turned into a “pair of hands.” Been referred to by your badge number, as opposed to your name? You’ve been objectified and are merely a part of an excel spreadsheet. As part of mass layoffs, did you find out you lost your job via email or when you found your key no longer worked? You’ve been objectified into a balance sheet line item³ that needs to be liquidated. This workplace objectification has, like physical objectification, significant negative effects on motivation, performance and satisfaction.

Objectification, alongside its cousin, stereotypes, pose significant challenges for productivity, happiness, fulfillment and meaning. So what should we do about this?

Antidote 1: “What do you do?” to “What do you love?”

Chances are that when you meet someone new, perhaps in an interview, you begin with small talk; comments about the weather, a current event, or perhaps the traffic⁴. Inevitably, when reaching a lull in the conversation, the question of profession arises: “What do you do for work?” It makes sense; we spend half of our waking hours earning our daily bread and creating meaning in our productivity. Looking for professional commonality with others can enhance a career network or establish a shared interest. Saying “I’m an engineer,” or “I’m a writer,” or any number of other careers is shorthand for human depth, belying a passion for math, etymology, problem solving, or story telling.

But at work, especially as part of a functional department (such as accounting, human resources, legal, engineering), these work descriptions can conflate a human being with their work function. Over biasing on work identity can lead others to consider them a work tool whose existence is to generate work product. The clip from the excellent movie Office Space below, highlights, what happens when a human being is solely defined by their utility and function. By the way, Milton the Red Stapler guy, gets the last laugh.

Adam Grant suggests asking an alternative question: “What do you love?” This is not incongruent with work as people often do enjoy their professions. But this question drives the metamorphosis of an action or role into a reason and, as Grant puts it, “It [does not] limit what people share about themselves to a job description, [instead] ignites curiosity and invites people to express their distinctive interests.”

For me, I am a chemical engineer and I love chemical engineering. I like it for its utility, being able to employ knowledge of chemical reactions, processes, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. But I love chemical engineering because of how it enriches the way I observe the world. To me, the beauty of chemical engineering is guided by two principles: interactions and scale. By interactions, I mean how individual components interact to form something wholly new and emergent, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. By scale, I mean that our understanding of phenomena on a microscopic scale can also describe things on a macroscopic scale and vice versa, in a size invariant self-similar fractal harmony, as alluded to in a previous discussion on the Lennard Jones Potential for relationships.

Stereotype Threat

Stereotypes are related to objectification in that the individual is abstracted away and substituted for broad brushstrokes of gender, sex, ethnicity, nationality or other traits. Stereotypes can be negative and lead to significant harm. Indeed Steven Spencer, Claude Steele and Dianne Quinn, whose work is highlighted in the book Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg, coined the phrase Stereotype Threat in a 1999 paper examining the stereotype of women being worse at math than men. Stereotype threat emerges when a person, who is aware of a stereotype that they themselves may fall into, behaves or performs to the stereotype.

In their clever study, they took engineering and science proficient college students, split the cohort into women and men and gave them a challenging math exam. In the first arm of the study, the women, noticing that they were surrounded by only other women, performed worse than men, falling prey to the stereotype of women being worse at math than men⁵. In the second arm of the study, students were given a few minutes to write down their most basic identities, for example: student, employee, volunteer and sister, prior to taking the test. Again the female students performed worse than the men. In the third arm of the study, students were given ample time to describe as many aspects of their identity, as they could⁶.

From Duhigg’s Supercommunicators

In this experimental arm, the gender differences in performance observed in the previous arms were completely eliminated. The authors suggested that being cognizant of all the identities in particular individual, diluted the effects of the stereotype threat, eliminating the negative effects on performance. These stereotypes are especially pernicious, because they are self-fulfilling, realizing implicit biases, even within ourselves!

When I was at Stanford in the 1990s, students were lumped into fuzzies (humanities oriented) and techies (STEM oriented). While I was always interested in fuzzy topics (poetry, philosophy, communications) it seemed I underperformed in those classes. I am curious now about how much of that were ability, or stereotypes I harbored including, I am a techie or I am a Gen-X Asian American and thus can’t write well.

This likely holds in the workplace too, with missed opportunities for improving performance. A financial analyst, facile with excel spreadsheets, may be reticent to share a memo they drafted. An administrative assistant may hold themselves back from offering a suggestion on strategy. Even stereotype boosts, caused by a commonly held positive stereotypes, can lead to negative emotional and psychological impacts. Which brings me to Diversity Equity and Inclusion.

Diversity Equity and Inclusion vs. DEI

At Chimera, we believe that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are critical values that drive better performance.

• Diversity: of experience, background, education, interests, hobbies and social networks are critical for generating novel ideas, problem solutions and create a rich environment for growth, learning and connecting.

• Equity: of opportunity is the celebration of an individual’s rights to what we believe to be key motivational drivers: Community, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

• Inclusion: to the community, a feeling of belonging, being a Chimeran, is key to bring about psychological safety, which enables diversity and equity.

These values are different than what has become of DEI. My grad school, MIT’s statement on DEI is to “support people of varying backgrounds and different viewpoints, experience, talents, and ideas,” and be inclusive of “differences in race, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, age, physical and language abilities, culture, religion, veteran status, sexual orientation, and other identities.” The most hopeful and aspirational aspect of this statement is sadly only captured in two words “other identities” representing the remaining expanse of humanity. What we know from the stereotype threat is that while race, gender and the other listed differences are important considerations in hiring, it is crucial to not limit diversity metrics to these observable characteristics. Instead MIT is backtracking and missing the chance to really invest in and construct a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community.

Perhaps the problem lies in checkbox diversity. For example, consider the lists below; the checkboxes on the left highlight certain characteristics that DEI groups tend to consider. Contrast this to the checkboxes on the right. Which column would you care more about in your colleagues? Which set might be more fun to learn about or enhance in a collegial relationship?

Incidentally, having diversity in gender, race, political views, etc. is not a bad thing; indeed some Chimerans have expressed our visible diversity made some feel comfortable applying to and joining the company. But these should not be the only attributes that are considered in diversity.

As DEI loses momentum, diversity, equity and inclusion do too, sadly. Three limitations in the current implementation of DEI are restraining progress:

1. Efficiency, short-termism and quantification over depth and quality: It is dangerous to cleave to certain metrics of diversity that don’t necessarily correlate with the value of diversity. Spending the time to get to know someone on a human level can unveil true thought, perspective and character partnership and growth opportunities. It’s like looking for the diversity metrics under the streetlamp, when the value of diversity is everywhere else.

   

   This cartoon, one of Gus’ favorites with regards to problem solving, ironizes when we look for diversity in only certain metrics, “underneath the street lamp”

2. DEI exists as a program in Human Resources (HR): HR departments serve important functions in an organization: handling benefits and compensation, providing information for employees and ensuring compliance with workplace regulations, like OSHA. But HR is also a legal liability mitigation system. DEI implementations don’t feel like they are there to enhance the experience of the employees, but rather to protect the company from potential legal action from discrimination. The reason why it feels this way is because …

3. Diversity Equity and Inclusion should be a key responsibility of the CEO: It is said that the CEO has three jobs: 1. Set the vision and strategy of the company, 2. Ensure the bank accounts are full, and 3. Recruit, Retain, Build and Lead the highest performing team possible. If as we’ve highlighted above, diversity, equity and inclusion are critical elements to maximizing team performance, this job should fall squarely on the shoulders of the CEO. And it is often not.

Antidote 2: Be Indiana Jones, get curious and dig in.

To address objectification and stereotypes, one must be an archaeologist of people. By unearthing how we think of others, reframing our biases through the tool of metacognition, we can work to mitigate consequent psychological harms. Spending the requisite time, eschewing the efficiency and speed that is default in work places, to listen to, care for and know your colleagues as human beings, will pay dividends. Those dividends are higher performance, greater psychological safety and closer relationships, each reinforcing the other in a virtuous cycle.

Some ideas we’ve implemented at Chimera:

1. Hump gathering: this is the gift that keeps on giving. This celebrates an individual’s interests and provides a forum to share it with others. Hump gatherings have unveiled the wide, unending diversity of our team.

2. Diamond: this is subtle, but we don’t call our team meetings, all-hands meetings (which has the potential to objectify), but instead refer to them as all-diamond meetings. The diamond reminds us of the humanity of a Chimeran, their mission, motivation and character. This is also integral to our interview process.

An idea we have yet to broadly implement is to leverage Arthur Aron’s 36 questions to Generate Interpersonal Closeness, where the questions are designed to increase personal disclosure, to aid getting to know one another. I discussed this in friendship and we’ve considered this as a team building exercise as well as part of an interview process. Stay tuned for how it plays out. After all, jumping right into the “big talk” yields intimacy and excavates our differences, like precious artifacts at a dig. These differences can be cherished by one another.

Antidote 3: Poetry

Poetry is the opposite of objectification and stereotyping, ripening the beheld. The urn at beginning of this post is a reference to John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, a masterful poem that celebrates an artistic, but simple object. Poetry, ironically, has the power to take a literal object (not an objectified object!), request of it, converse with it and transmute it into transcendence. Consider these excerpts, that out of a container:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

AND

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

AND

When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Let us inquire of your story. And let all your sweetness move to the song unheard. And in this we will uncover a beauty and truth together. This is how we orient appositely to each other’s swelling humanity.

The antidote is concentrating, texturing, respiring, living another human as self. 

The human condition

We likely will never perfect diversity in the workplace. As long as we are human we will harbor stereotypes and objectify others, despite our best attempts to avoid them. Be compassionate to these mistakes, as these responses evolved and stuck with us through the older parts of our brain. We may not be acting on these shortcuts actively.

Grace Paley warns us of “people without imagination… say with that denigrating tone, multiculturalism or diversity or political correctness.” She then exhorts us with “This is what the imagination means to me: to know that this multiplicity of voices is a wonderful fact and that we’re lucky, especially the young people, to be living here at this time. My imagination tells me that if we let this present political climate defeat us, my children and my grandchildren will be in terrible trouble.”

Because in the end we share so much more in common than we differ. The human experience, the human condition is more alike than not: we are born, we live, we try to make meaning, we hold onto relationships and we die. Our lived stories are what make us unique and objectification and stereotypes miss the truth and beauty of this. And perhaps more succinctly, from Walt Whitman: “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

An early team picture of Chimera. Diverse in who we are, which we could only discover by patiently connecting to and being with one another.

1. This is an ambiguous idiom, but typically used to refer a tall, long-limbed attractive person.

2. Published in 1997, the paper has been cited nearly 8,000 times.

3. My friend Krista highlights that “human capital” (ugh, what a term) is listed as a liability on balance sheets, making people less valuable than assets like a copier or fax machine.

4. As I get older, I am less inclined to engage in “small talk.” Simon Sinek argues that small talk is lubricious for deeper talk. Adam Grant argues for just hopping into big talk.

5. This strength of this stereotype is so strong, as girls tend to outperform boys throughout elementary and middle school but the outperformance erodes by the time they reach college

6. Think about the most esoteric ways you could identify yourself: close up magician? double jointed? fashion blogger? missing an ACL?