Friday, September7, 2007
Biases Can Keep Us from Making the Smart Choices at Work
By Linda S. Wallace
On occasion, some curious soul steps forward at a diversity workshop to ask the question few people dare to answer in public: “Why should I go along with diversity? What’s in it for me?”
Fear, you see, is a rope that keeps people tied to their old beliefs. If lots of good folks are afraid to ask that question, they won’t get the opportunity to open their hearts and minds.
“I am not asking you to embrace diversity to help women, gays or minorities,” I always tell those skeptics. “I am asking you to do it because in the long run it is going to make your life easier and help you to prosper in your career.”
The media is full of stories regarding diversity challenges and missteps. Rarely does it add up the extra costs citizens pay as a result of other people’s biases.
Scientific research now suggests that prejudice or bias actually make it harder for workers to make quality decisions at the office. Experiments conducted with brain-imaging equipment at Dartmouth College found some prejudiced workers became mentally drained as they tried to manage their biases. After a brief chat with an African American, some white test subjects who exhibited bias could no longer perform well on tests of cognitive abilities.
"Just having a prejudice makes you stupider," John Gabrieli, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, told the Boston Globe in Nov. 2003. "It is really interesting."
"I think people are getting caught in this trap where they are trying not to do the wrong thing, rather than trying to act natural," Jennifer A. Richeson, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, told the Globe. "Somehow we have to get past this awkward phase."
As the unfolding crisis in the mortgage industry continues to swallow up stock market profits, this research ought to scare the heck out of profit-conscious investors on Wall Street. Sub prime mortgages have been tearing away the financial foundation from communities of color for years. In the most extensive study of its kind, the Center for Responsible Lending found that African Americans and Latinos are commonly almost a third more likely to get a pricy loan than white borrowers with the same credit scores. The study examined 50,000 sub prime loans.
So, a fair-minded person might ask: What role did racial bias play in the current mortgage meltdown, and how much is it going to cost us? The NAACP wants an answer. It has filed suit in Los Angeles federal court against 14 of the country’s largest lenders, alleging systematic, institutionalized racism in sub-prime home mortgage lending. Organization officials said that African American homeowners who received sub-prime mortgage loans from these lenders were more than 30 percent more likely to be issued a higher rate loan than Caucasian borrowers with the same qualifications.
In 2003 and 2004, I served as coordinator of Philadelphia Sheriff John D. Green’s foreclosure prevention campaign. The sheriff delayed scheduled auctions for all homes for 60 days in February 2004 and invited homeowners to meet with lenders and default counselors at a forum.
During this Save Our Homes campaign, I met an elderly African American woman who had refinanced to get equity out of her home. Her monthly income was approximately $800 a month; her mortgage payments were $700. Keep in mind that she still had taxes, utilities, food and perhaps healthcare costs to pay.
It sort of makes you wonder if the brainpower of the woman’s mortgage broker was impaired. Would he or she have offered those terms to someone he loved or respected? Did this business decision reflect racial prejudice or greed?
When foreclosed homes are auctioned, all the neighbors pay a price as well as home values decline. Now the guy next story has less equity and fewer workout options should he lose his job. The ultimate cost to the African American community has been staggering: the rate of homeownership for African Americans fell to 47 percent in 2006, down from a high of 50 percent in 2004.
In the face of mounting evidence that bias can reduce our ability to make quality decisions, diversity programs take on new significance. They are not just there to help minorities get ahead. They are needed to help companies and investors avoid the mounting business costs associated with their workers’ biases.
The cost-conscious medical profession is already grappling with its challenges. In medicine, a doctor’s reaction to or experiences with people of color might influence the quality of the choices he or she makes.
African Americans in the midst of a heart-attack are far less likely to receive life-saving treatments, research has found. Trainee doctors in Boston and Atlanta were given a survey designed to detect hidden biases and then asked to prescribe a course of treatment for a middle-aged man with chest pains. In some scenarios, the man was white, while in others he was African American.
"We found that as doctors’ unconscious biases against blacks increased, their likelihood of giving [clot-busting] treatment decreased," said the lead author of the study, Dr. Alexander R. Green of Massachusetts General Hospital, in a July 20th article in the Boston Globe.
What will happen to the stock market after African Americans begin filing lawsuits demanding comparable medical treatment? Ultimately, everyone with healthcare coverage stands to pay more if we don’t keep our biases in check.
With healthcare costs spiraling out of control, and white homeowners with good credit now forced to pay for the discriminatory treatment of minorities, perhaps it is time to decide that our need to build a secure financial future is stronger our combined cultural fears.