A former associate recently sued Clifford Chance for discrimination under New York City’s Human Rights Law for discrimination based on race and gender. She claimed that the firm targeted minorities and women when it laid off six associates in November 2007. According to her brief, the plaintiff, an African American woman, was part of an eight-lawyer group, whose exclusive work was reviewing the documentation Standard & Poors had used to rate mortgage-back securities (the “S&P group”). The S&P group was part of Clifford Chance’s financial products department and was disproportionately black. Of the 37 associates in the financial products department, 4 were black and all worked in the S&P group. The complaint alleged that shortly before the lay offs, the two white male attorneys in the S&P group were transferred to another group. The remaining six associates, four black attorneys and two white women, were all laid off.
Assuming the facts in the complaint to be true, the first question friends and I asked was, “What WERE the partners at Clifford Chance thinking when they made that decision? The fact is that more likely than not they didn’t think much about it at all – rather, it may have been just the result of the greater facility of the partners working with the S&P group to identify and make a close connection with the two white male associates, so that when jobs were in jeopardy, they, and not their black or female counterparts, were considered valuable enough to keep.
As so many psychologists and other scholars have noted, we make connections much more quickly between pairs of concepts or ideas that are related than those that are not. Among other measurements, Harvard’s famous Implicit Association Test comparing assumptions based on race shows that most people in the U.S. taking that particular test bring with them the unconscious assumption that white people are better – brighter, more accomplished, less scary, more reliable — than black people – which reflects the cultural messages we experience daily. And so many other studies have shown that this presumption, and the assumption that men are more “go to” employees than women, plays itself out in the workplace in so many ways – in who is hired, who gets sought-after assignments and who is retained and promoted. The mind boggling truth is that our unconscious preferences may often conflict with our stated values. And the unconscious preferences, time and again, are the more accurate predictors of our behavior. Over the next few weeks, I will be continuing to chat about the impact of unconscious bias in the work place and what some professionals have done to weaken the strength of their and their teams’ unrecognized preferences. I hope others will also chime in.