Prejudice is real and is screwing us.
Today marks 5 years since I did my ‘on site’ interview to join Google. I remember feeling terribly vulnerable, I remember going shopping for clothes to wear that day (yes, I was stressed even about how I would look despite believing it was a test of my intelligence). I remember telling the universe that I needed a ‘win’. I remember the HR person who received me asking about the traffic in my country, I told her it was bad and she replied “Oh yes, like on all the islands.” I remember every interview, having a burrito for lunch, the conference room being called ‘easy bake oven’, and after the interviews, not even remembering my own name and feeling like I was living the night in delayed mode…the waitress asked me what I was going to drink like 3 times and luckily my friends chose the food <3. I remember the monumental migraine the next day. I remember thinking that I was going to come out of that interview with a stamp on my forehead indicating whether I was smart or dumb. (There’s no way to explain to someone in that situation that a good part of the matter is luck)
If someone had told me that was going to be the easy part, I probably would have said thank you very much and gone to Concepción de Tres Ríos to buy some chips from the Chinese and to Naranjo on weekends to eat olla de carne.
Because in reality, the stamp after the interviews is more like: ‘we give you permission to throw yourself to the lions, we are not responsible for how quickly they eat you.’
It’s been hard to hear that I didn’t actually pass the interviews, but was allowed in because I’m a ‘diversity hire’. When I told them that wasn’t true, they told me “don’t be angry with life when its injustice favors you”.
It’s been difficult to learn that here I’m often seen as ‘the other’, I’m a ‘person of color’, it’s been difficult to hear “who would have thought you’re cool?” (because apparently I give the impression of being very uncool :P), to hear people admit that they didn’t have any faith in me, sometimes because they think I’m there because they’re doing me a favor and I in turn inflate the diversity numbers. (They’ve told me that once they’ve gained confidence)
It’s difficult to hear the number of professions that people think I do before believing that I’m an engineer. And this is important not because the other things aren’t difficult, but because assumptions are powerful and in people’s minds, I have to make two jumps to prove that I’m an engineer…and then that I’m a good engineer. When others are automatically assumed to be good engineers from the outset. Fighting for a promotion when my manager didn’t believe I deserved it (other people helped me even though my manager should have been the main figure in the process), being told they ‘realized’ that in fact I was on the low side of the pay roll when for a couple of years I had gathered the courage to tell them that I thought my salary wasn’t very good.
This is not a complaint, nor am I trying to victimize myself. I always appreciate the privileged position I’m in. I’m always surprised at where I am. But I’m talking about these things today because sometimes we don’t realize the power of words or when we don’t listen to someone because of some prejudice. I’ve spent a couple of years feeling totally incompetent, feeling that I’m in Google because ‘I’m a person of color’, feeling that I know nothing, that nothing I do is worthwhile, because I’ve heard that quite a bit and it’s seeped into my soul.
I don’t have any resentment, 99% of the time when I’ve felt rejected, invisible, out of place, the people who said or did something didn’t realize it, they had no bad intentions, it’s things that happen automatically. Today I told a friend that when I did unconscious bias tests, I myself came out as sexist. But it still hurts that people don’t believe me when I say these things happen and they have consequences.
Because that makes the problem invisible, it turns me into ‘the other’ again. It turns me into an exaggerated person, or a delicate one, or one who lets what people say affect her. And if all I’m doing is having a tantrum, then nothing needs to be done.
But just look at how ‘unconscious bias’ is leading us astray in Costa Rica, how we’re making assumptions and prejudices about people, how we’re judging someone based on a single characteristic of their life, whether it’s gender, nationality, sexual preference, political inclination, economic or academic status, it seems that instead of improving, we’re judging more blindly.
As far as I know, there’s no easy fix against prejudices, but a first step is to accept that they exist and that we all have them, to identify and accept our own, from there on fight to question them, and maybe someday we’ll stop thinking them. Disassociate stereotypes from individuals in particular. Give each individual the opportunity to present their qualities. And then if we’re brave enough, with love and without judging, try to convince more people to do the same.
Some notes:
- Some of the professions they’ve attributed to me: personal shopper, professional translator, admin (personal assistants), sales agent, photographer, and now that I work at Google News, journalist.
- Some studies on unconscious bias particularly towards women in STEM: why does John gets the STEM job rather than Jennifer.why is it that women are seen as less competentscience professors think women are less competent than men