The ABC's of Inclusive Language: C is for Culture Fit
Circe 1946 Delaware Company photograph by Jerry Cooke—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty
The interview panel was discussing the most recent candidate, a Latinx engineer. She had top scores for the technical components of the interview, but they still had some doubts.
🔪 “She was so loud! It felt aggressive. Like, turn it down a little.”
🔪 “Right? And her lipstick was so red. This isn’t the barrio.”
🔪 “I don’t know, I just didn’t click with her.”
🔪 “And she seemed defensive when I brought up the taqueria down the street. Is she a person who gets mad when you’re just trying to be nice?”
🔪 “I mean, it seems like she writes good code. But I don’t think she’s a good culture fit.”
And the panel, made up entirely of white men and Asian men, decided that this engineer wasn’t a good fit for the company, and that they wouldn’t recommend making her an offer.
____
A phrase I like a lot is “ambiguity is the door that bias walks through.” (I’m not sure who said it first – I’d love to give an attribution.)
What this means is that when you’re making decisions at work and the criteria are ambiguous, it’s highly likely that bias will distort your decision making.
(And this can be a cognitive bias, like recency bias. Not just biases related to identity categories.)
There’s a good chance you’ll make a decision based on bias and then work backwards to cherry pick justifications for your decision.
For example, researchers ran an experiment on gender bias in hiring. There were two imaginary candidates for police chief: one male, one female.
For one group, the male candidate had more experience and less education. For another group, it was the reverse, and the male candidate had more education and less experience.
And again and again, across the board, people chose the male candidate. When asked why, they’d work backwards to justify their decision.
“Well, he had more experience,” said one group.
“Well, he had more education,” said the other.
They were more comfortable choosing the man, and then rationalized their decisions. What's more, people who thought they were being truly objective demonstrated extra strong gender bias.
Then the researchers asked new groups to predefine criteria and decide in advance which was more important, education or experience.
With clearly defined criteria, most people ended up preferring the candidate that met the requirements, regardless of gender.
____
The idea of “culture fit” is so ambiguous that it is just an invitation for biased judgments.
It is often used for gatekeeping, and to justify not hiring someone who is different in some way. It is a safe way to express discomfort with someone’s difference, and to shut out diversity.
In other words, the phrase “culture fit” is used again and again to keep people out of jobs that they are well-qualified for.
And that’s not inclusive language.
Problematic language lowers profitability. Our Worthwhile solutions can address your company's inclusive language training needs.
Copyright 2021 © Worthwhile Research & Consulting.