On perception and evidence

I’m still digesting the results of the A List Apart web survey, along with the conclusions drawn by the report’s authors.

I haven’t yet analyzed the numbers myself (and since the last time I touched statistics was sometime around the mid 1990s), so I won’t make any conclusions. But I do want to talk about bias, perceptions of bias, and how you can have bias without having evidence of bias — if “evidence” is defined solely as “compensation.”

It’s culture.

If you work with people who routinely make you prove that you know your shit, that’s bias. If you have a manager who respects your skills — and rewards you for them — but wants you to “be more assertive” (translation: participate in regular pissing contests with the men in your office), that’s bias. If you work in a company where it’s acceptable to make jokes about boobs, balls, hood speak, and Asian stereotypes, that’s bias. If you work in a place where you’re expected to be the resident expert on fried chicken, ribs, greens and/or hip-hop because you’re black, that’s bias.

Those are nuances that can make an office environment annoying, unpleasant and in some cases intolerable (although boob jokes are often LOLFR funny). But it’s stuff that won’t necessarily show up in your paycheck. It may however, show up in your lack of a network when you try to find a new gig. It may show up in a lack of diversity in a workplace with such a culture. It probably explains why black respondents feel such dissatisfaction or perceive bias and yet are still fairly compensated.

It is not, however, something that can be quantified in survey numbers, which may give people the impression that it isn’t there.