Claude Steele’s first book Whistling Vivaldi gave me one of the most useful framings I have for bias. Stereotype threat: in a situation you care about, the worry that you’re about to confirm a negative stereotype about your group degrades how you do. So when I saw he had a new book – Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It – I bought it immediately. And then it sat on my Kindle unread for months; I finally started it and by chapter one I could see why. It named something I wasn’t ready for before.
Stereotype threat is the impact. Churn is what happens inside you while it’s happening.
He opens on a parent-teacher conference. Black parents, white teacher, everyone arrives braced. The parents are wondering whether their son is going to be stereotyped. The teacher is wondering whether her constructive feedback will land as racism. Everyone has good intentions and cares deeply. Churn isn’t manufactured by prejudice; it’s the concern and expectations of it.
Prove it again
At a previous job you would get hired for your experience and then have to prove it again. Pretty common, I’ve found, in environments that pride themselves on uniqueness, and it makes sense – it’s well documented that many executives fail because they try to apply the same playbook in a different context. I recognised it quickly and just went with it. A male colleague was really annoyed about it. He left some time before I did.
The phrase belongs to bias research – Joan C. Williams’ Prove-It-Again, where women and people of colour re-establish credibility that everyone else gets on credit. Whilst my male colleague was mad about it, his anger made me more relaxed – I wasn’t having to prove it again because of who I was, this was the standard applied to everyone.
Which aligns with an experiment from the book: both Black and white students got critical feedback on an essay from a white evaluator. The white students took it at face value. The Black students had no way of telling, from the inside, whether the notes were about the essay or about assumptions concerning their group. But when evaluators added a line: high standards, and I think you can meet them, those students trusted the feedback and were more likely to action it.
What it’s like without it
I’m much less stressed lately and now I’ve got a label for why.
I work primarily with very competent women, with coaching clients who sought me out, with people who opted in to DRI. There’s no competition, no drama, no behaviour where I have to wonder whether or not it is sexist and as a result – no churn.
Combined with Claude (a non-judgemental answer to any question I have), it’s been helping so much with learning. So much of that is things I used to be afraid of – financial accounting, SQL, infrastructure… I feel like I can make mistakes because if I do it will not reinforce the stereotype. No one taking a mistake as a reason why I’m actually completely worthless.
Which sounds dark, like I used to work with horrible people. I didn’t. But there was enough bias and shitty gendered behaviour that I got really in my head about it for a while, and then, to insulate myself, built a set of coping mechanisms that I do still believe were necessary and am not convinced were healthy.
Coping mechanisms help you cope. Nowhere is perfect. Taken too far they become harmful, the thing, I think, is to realise when it’s heading in that direction and create space to untangle yourself from them.
A break, not an exit
I wondered whether it’s unrealistic to opt out of something this inherent to the industry. But honestly I’m inspired by King Richard. Richard Williams didn’t subject Venus and Serena to the junior circuit. Everyone told him that was the way to do it, but he saw the psychological cost, and wasn’t willing for his girls to pay it.
We don’t get the counter story, the version where they went through it on schedule. Or perhaps we do, given how few Black players there have been in tennis.
Steele’s own answer isn’t exit, it’s trust built inside the settings you’re already in. Maybe the reason why I’m lower in churn isn’t just because I’ve created my own, more homogeneous environment, but because it’s an environment higher in trust.
I don’t know that it’s viable forever. I’m probably too ambitious for that. I knew I needed a change and I got one, and the label turned up afterwards to explain why there is such a difference. What I can say is that I needed some respite from what I can now call churn, and it’s made this period of change a lot easier to learn in.
Leave a Reply