Tennis, Ukraine, and your workplace
What does media coverage of tennis have to do with social media coverage of the war on Ukraine?
And how does it relate to your workplace?
The answer is erasure.
Screenshot via Instagram from @the_female_lead
In 2016, a reporter congratulated tennis player Andy Murray, saying "You're the first person to ever win two Olympic gold tennis medals."
Murray replied, "I think Venus and Serena have won about 4 each."
Sports Illustrated said, "Andy Murray reminds reporter that women exist."
Both the reporter and Murray are white British men.*
This kind of erasure is incredibly common.
Biased mental models + selective attention = forgetting that other kinds of people exist. Especially their positive accomplishments.
It is like the dial is turned up for both people with power and people like us. We pay attention to them, we amplify their words, we amplify their accomplishments.
And the dial is turned way down for people without power and people who are not like us. We may speak as if they don't exist, they don't get uptake, their accomplishments and even existence are forgotten.
This includes people like Serena Williams, argued by many to be one of the very greatest athletes of all time.
But female. And Black.
On February 26th, a few days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine begain in earnest Paul Massaro, an advisor to the US Congress, tweeted:
"I'm racking my brain for a historical parallel to the courage and fighting spirit of the Ukrainians and coming up empty. How many peoples have ever stood their ground against an aggressor like this? It's legendary."
And there it is again - the same erasure. A person who seems to be of European descent is focused on a European conflict where most of the people look white.
And to him, this feels like the whole world. It seems unparalleled.
But of course it is paralleled! Once you expand your vision. For example, Native American resistance to European and European American invasion of their territories.
Once again, we see the tendency to look only at people like you and extrapolate as if they are the only people in the world that matter.
And the conclusions are inaccurate. Demonstrably false.
In my research on bias at work, I see this same pattern again and again.
The accomplishments and potential of men, especially white men, are what matters. What gets paid attention to. The dial is turned way up for them.
And other people? The dial is turned way down. Their accomplishments are ignored or forgotten. They aren't seen as candidates for development or promotion or succession planning. Their names aren't spoken in the rooms that matter. They are erased.
This is why we need anti-bias protocols, bias interrupters, and people in the room with different perspectives.
Erasure is an easy trap to fall into. So the more we're prepared for it, the better we can correct for it.
Because erasure leads to inaccurate assessments of the world. And biased - and bad - outcomes.
*Time for my usual disclaimer:
There is nothing wrong with being a white man. And white men have accomplished some really great things!
We just want to avoid the trap where biased mental models set us up for false extrapolations.
The male experience is not the default or universal. And the white experience is not the default or universal.
So the more we can avoid viewing the world through a lens where white men = everybody who matters, the better it will be.
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