The science and culture journalist explores ways of changing pernicious thought patterns to eliminate unconscious bias for a more just world.
Debbie Millman:
Last year, science and cultural journalist, Jessica Nordell, published her first book. It’s more timely and relevant than ever now. It’s called The End Of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias And Create A More Just World. The Science Of How We Think Without Really Thinking, And What We Can Do To Change The Pernicious Patterns Of Thought.
We’re going to talk about that and about her broad and varied career. She was once a staff comedy writer for A Prairie Home Companion. She’s produced literary radio shows. She’s also worked with Krista Tippett on her podcast On Being. Her science journalism has been published in the New York Times, the Atlantic and other publications. Yes, she is also a poet and an essayist.
Jessica Nordell, welcome to Design Matters.
Jessica Nordell:
Thank you so much for having me.
Debbie Millman:
My absolute pleasure.
Jessica, I understand you are a direct descendant of the very last woman to be tried for witchcraft in the state of Massachusetts. How did you discover this?
Jessica Nordell:
Yes. When I was working on research for the book, The End Of Bias, I took a detour into genealogy, because I really wanted to understand how my own story fit into the story of this country, and the inheritances that we have received, racial inheritances, gender inheritances, patriarchal inheritances. So I really wanted to understand more about where I came from.
I found some boxes in my mother’s home that she had been sent by a distant cousin. While I was going through those boxes, I found the story of this woman who is my, I think, 11th-great-grandmother, and was tried for witchcraft three times in Massachusetts. Acquitted each time. After the third time, she got the hell out of Massachusetts and escaped to New York with her family. She and her daughter were both tried for witchcraft.
Debbie Millman:
Do you know why? Do you know what powers they seemed to have?
Jessica Nordell:
The woman, I believe her moniker was the Witch of Wallingford.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. She and her daughter were accused of having some kind of impact on other women in the town. They were affecting them, making them sick, and were accused of witchcraft as a result.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk a little bit about your more recent background. You were born in Los Angeles to parents you’ve described as a surfer and a conscientious objector, but were raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where you said your house was halfway between a cemetery and a prison. What was that like?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. My mom is from LA. My dad is from New York. They-
Debbie Millman:
Compromised in the middle of the country?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. Compromise. They moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin without any personal connections or family or anything like that.
It was a both very strange place to grow up and a very normal place to grow up. It was kind of this quintessential small town existence, big families, everybody knows everybody else. But it was a strange place to grow up for me, because I’m Jewish, and there were very few Jews, if any, in Green Bay. So I was always this weird, dark haired, nerdy kid in a room of blonde, blue eyed children. So grew up always being a bit on the outside, I think, as a result, which in some ways was a really useful training for the rest of life.
Debbie Millman:
Who was the conscientious objector and who was the surfer?
Jessica Nordell:
My dad was the conscientious objector. He enrolled in the army, and then filed CO status so as to not go to Vietnam. My mom was a surfer. They were, are, as different from one another as you could imagine. My mom has been a lifelong Republican. My dad is a lifelong Democrat. My mom is probably the only college student who voted for Richard Nixon in the country, and my dad was this bleeding heart liberal. So I grew up in a family of people who disagreed a lot about everything, politically and otherwise.
Debbie Millman:
It seems like you might have taken after your dad in terms of being a conscientious objector. I understand, while you were a student at Washington Middle School, you organized an all-school sit-in to protest a policy that gave students only 15 minutes for lunch.
I have two questions. How was having a 15 minute lunch period even possible? How did you rally the entire school to sit in in this way?
Jessica Nordell:
I’m so impressed with your research, Debbie. This was in eighth grade. I went to a middle school called Washington Middle School, which was in Green Bay. I think as an attempt to control a fairly unruly student body, everyone had to put their head on the lunch table and be completely silent for a period of time before we were allowed to get up and get into the hot lunch line or start eating our lunch. But you can imagine, there were hundreds of students in the cafeterias. By the time everyone was quiet, we had 15 minutes left for lunch.
I thought that this was insane and totally unjust. I pulled together a group of friends. We went from table to table, and explained to these different students that we thought this was unjust, and if they agreed with us, they should sit in at the end of lunch for the amount of time that we should have had.
The administrators got very upset about this. We were sitting in. They were threatening students with detention and suspension. Eventually, the students filed out. But I was the last person standing, and got in-school suspension for a week as a result. But we did get the policy changed.
Debbie Millman:
Brava.
Well, by the time you went to high school, you were an active member of the debate and the forensics teams. You were the host of the Alice in Wonderland costume parties. You were also teaching art in your backyard. Where did this range of interests come from?
Jessica Nordell:
Oh my gosh. I think I was always just a very curious kid. I was a big reader. In high school, debate and forensics was an amazing outlet, because Green Bay is a very small town. Debate and forensics gave me the opportunity to travel all over the state of Wisconsin, and meet other kids, meet people.
This was pre-internet, so it was very hard to connect outside of your own little milieu. That’s, actually, how I learned to write was writing letters to these friends, because we would write each other letters, and try to entertain each other and make each other laugh. That was the main form of communication.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote a marvelous essay in the book Before the Mortgage: Real Stories of Brazen Loves, Broken Leases, and the Perplexing Pursuit of Adulthood, titled Another One Rides The Cometbus, in which you share an epiphany after discovering Aaron Cometbus’s zine while you were still in high school. I want to read a paragraph that you wrote, because I think it’s just magnificent. In it, you state the following.
“But then, every once in a while, apropos of almost nothing, a feeling would bloom in my chest. I’d be sitting on my bed, listening to a rock song, and a flame would swirl up and go skittering along the length of my bones. There was something else out there. I felt it. Something sparkly, concentrated, dazzling. Things were supposed to glow. Things were supposed to, I don’t know, happen.
“It had only been a couple of years since I’d shown up at school wearing a green sweatsuit with dinosaurs emblazoned on it in puffy paint, a major strategic error. But that’s another story. And already childhood was fading out of view. I was halfway down the muddy footpath between being a kid and something else. What? Glory? Beauty? ‘Heat death,’ said the days. ‘Orthodontia,’ said my mother. But now, here it was exploding out from the pages of Cometbus number 24. That was something else.”
First of all, I love that paragraph. So encapsulates that feeling of being a teenager and wondering, “What can I be?”
How did you discover Cometbus? How did it impact you? Also, can you describe the zine, and share what it meant to you?
Jessica Nordell:
I love this question. I came across Cometbus through the channel of Sassy magazine from the late ’80s, early ’90s.
Debbie Millman:
Remember that? Wasn’t that Jane Pratt who was the editor?
Jessica Nordell:
The Jane Pratt era. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, yeah.
Jessica Nordell:
Which was sort of like this proto-feminist teen magazine, right?
Debbie Millman:
Yep.
Jessica Nordell:
I think they had a feature called Zine Corner, which would just feature a different zine every month. You could get Cometbus for a dollar. So I sent a dollar in to the post office box and got this zine.
I can’t overstate how impactful it was for me, because like I said, I grew up in this very small town. There just wasn’t a lot going on. This zine was like a window. It was a portal into an adulthood that I didn’t know existed. It was an adulthood of people who were living these outrageous lives on the fringes of society, dumpster diving and auditing random university classes while living in hippie communes in the Bay Area. It was just a world that I’d never … that I didn’t know anything about.
For me, it painted a picture of an adulthood that was an adulthood of creativity and wonder and mystery and magic. It made me feel excited, excited for becoming an adult, and gave me a feeling of possibility, yeah, and wonder.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and study physics?
Jessica Nordell:
Part of it was just a real passion for trying to understand the laws of the universe, and the beauty and elegance of the world that we see around us. That’s one reason.
But I think it would be dishonest if I didn’t also acknowledge that there was a part of me, I think, that was really influenced by deeply internalized patriarchal ideas and misogyny that said, in some kind of whisper, that activities that were more associated with masculinity, with men, with the male world, were more valuable and were more worthwhile than the kind of activities that spoke to my heart, of writing and art and music and language.
I think they were both present. Honestly, there was part of me that was really genuinely very curious and excited, and wanting to understand the world in that way. Then I think there was part of me that suppressed some of my other interests at that age, before the lifelong unpacking of internalized sexism.
Debbie Millman:
You must have been pretty good at physics to get into MIT, especially since then you also transferred to Harvard. You have a degree in physics from Harvard University. What were you thinking at that time you were going to do with it?
Jessica Nordell:
I started out at MIT thinking I would go into science, and transferred to Harvard, where I finished my physics degree, but I started taking classes in all of these other fields that I was interested in. I really didn’t know where I was headed, but I knew that I needed to be involved in something with the humanities, as well as the sciences.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how, after college, you moved home for a while, and for the first time in your life, felt completely at sea. Why?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. The first time, but not the last time.
Debbie Millman:
Well, yeah.
Jessica Nordell:
My goodness. How many times …
Debbie Millman:
Waving from the boat.
Jessica Nordell:
Right. I was completely lost when I graduated from college. It took me many, many years to learn that there’s a career for curious people. It’s called journalism. You actually get paid to learn things, which is amazing, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t have any experience with it.
I was clinically depressed by the end of college, and moved home because I didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t the last time, but I had a crisis of meaning and identity. Yeah. It was the first of several, I would say, restarts to try to really figure out what I was meant to do, and how I was meant to live in the world.
Debbie Millman:
But shortly thereafter, you decided to go back to school, and get a certificate in fine and studio arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After receiving your certificate, you got a job as a staff comedy writer for Garrison Keillor’s live radio variety show, A Prairie Home Companion. You also ended up being an extra in the film that was made after, with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin. I watched it, trying to find you. I couldn’t.
I’m wondering. How did you get that job, going from a degree at Harvard in physics, to then a certificate in fine art, to staff comedy writer?
Jessica Nordell:
The through line, I feel, of my life has been writing. The whole time, I was writing. Not in a professional way, but I was writing letters, and developing these deep relationships with people through language.
When I was looking for a job after I’d moved to Minneapolis, I saw that there was a writing job available at Minnesota Public Radio. I didn’t know, actually, that it was for Prairie Home Companion. It just said staff writer position. I thought, “Well, I love public radio. What could be better than a staff writer position? I’ll apply.”
Then through the application process, I learned that it was for this show, Prairie Home Companion. I was like, “Huh. Okay. Well, I’ll give it a whirl.” They asked for some sample sketches, so I wrote some sample sketches. One of the ones I turned in was a call-in show to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court answered listeners’ call-in questions, or something like that.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God. That would be good now. Wow.
Jessica Nordell:
Right?
Debbie Millman:
For any producers that are listening, Jessica Nordell has an idea for a show.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. Then one thing led to another, and I got hired. It was my first real job that paid a salary. I remember the first thing I did with my first paycheck was purchase a mattress, so I was no longer sleeping on a futon.
Debbie Millman:
That’s always a nice rite of passage. Absolutely.
While you were there, you co-created and produced the five part interview series, Literary Friendships, featuring writer pairs, including Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, Michael Cunningham, Marie Howe, Robert Bly and Donald Hall, among many others. For that work, you won a Gracie Award for outstanding national magazine program.
Congratulations. That’s a hard award to win.
Jessica Nordell:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
After two years, you left and joined the great Krista Tippett as an associate producer for her Peabody Award winning show, Speaking Of Faith, which is now On Being. What did you do with Krista?
Jessica Nordell:
I was an associate producer, so I researched guests, and helped put together interview questions, helped with editing sessions. It was a pretty small crew there. I think, at that point, the show was still part of Minnesota Public Radio. I think there were maybe five or six people on staff, so it was all hands on deck. Yeah. It was a great experience.
Debbie Millman:
This next part of your life really excited me. You decided to go back to school to obtain an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where you were the Martha Meier Renk distinguished poetry fellow, and received an award in the Ilona Karmel writing program.
Now, after studying physics, and working in comedy and public radio, what made you decide to choose poetry?
Jessica Nordell:
Poetry has been very important to me since age 13 or 14, which is when I first encountered the great Adrienne Rich, who has just been a huge influence on my life. Maybe there’s something special about age 13 or 14, when the portals open and everything comes in. That was the time when I experienced Cometbus and got exposed to a lot of the world. It was a moment when her book, Atlas Of The Difficult World, had just come out. I happened to read a couple of her poems in a magazine and was just completely entranced.
I heard about these incredible MFA programs where you get paid to spend a couple of years working on poetry, and reading it and writing it. It sounded incredible, so that’s what I did next.
Debbie Millman:
Your poetry has appeared in FIELD and Speakeasy magazine. It was also included in The Best New Poets Of 2015, and those poems were chosen by Tracy K. Smith, published by University of Virginia Press.
I’m wondering if you could read the poem that’s included in that book. It’s a poem called Girl Running. I think it’s really beautiful.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah, absolutely.
“Along the edge of the park, a girl is running barefoot at the top of a ledge. The girl is four or five. The ledge is six inches wide. She’s moving fast. The trees are rising behind her like dense green thunderheads. On each side of her, pigeons burble and brake, pedaling backward in air. She runs past the screech of the occupied sandlot. The voices split open, distorted in heat. She pulls past the ice cream truck, struck to a stuttering blaze, the screak and crawl of the street. The sun is warming the limestone she runs on. The wind is lapping the grit from her body. The flanks of the truck flicker, heatless and dumb as the televised blitz of a city. The meters are flashing their blank exhortations. The sun is pitched like a snare, beating time. Don’t speak to her. If she keeps her eyes on the stone, she can run this way for a long time.”
Debbie Millman:
Goosebumps. Are you still writing poetry, Jessica?
Jessica Nordell:
I have not written a lot of poetry. I’m trying to decide how much to share.
Debbie Millman:
We don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah, no. I’m happy to. Yeah.
About 10 years ago, I experienced a pretty severe mental health crisis. Over the year or two that it took to recover from that, I found it increasingly hard to access poetry.
Poetry is a little bit like a very shy guest, a very shy and honored guest. I feel like one has to prepare a welcome for poetry to arrive in one’s spirit and heart. I found that very difficult to do. I try to bring poetry into all the writing that I do now, and I am working on opening those gates again.
Debbie Millman:
Good. I can feel the poetry in your writing. I want to talk to you about the writing that you’re currently doing, but it makes me happy to think that you might be writing poetry again.
I’ve talked to Elizabeth Alexander about the going back and forth between writing poetry and being a poet. You’re always a poet. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re writing the poetry.
Jessica Nordell:
I think that’s true. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You taught writing. You taught poetry in the Oakhill Correctional Institution. As you were transitioning to full-time writing, you also worked as a branding and business innovation consultant, which I was really surprised, but also delighted by.
You initially … While you were struggling to be able to work as a full-time writer, you write about how you pitched ideas to editors at national magazines, and mostly got no response. Discouraged, you decided to conduct an experiment with your name. Tell us what you did.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. This was, gosh, probably 2005 or 2006. As you say, I was trying to break into national publications, not having any luck, just having silent … Sending out cold queries, and just having no response at all.
There was a particular essay that I had been working on, was really proud of. It was tied to a particular event that was happening, and so it had a short window of relevance. I wasn’t getting any response. I knew that the window was closing. If it wasn’t picked up by somewhere, it would just die a slow, sad death.
In a moment of desperation, I created a new email inbox for myself. I sent out the same essay using the initials JD. I presented myself as JD Nordell, instead of Jessica Nordell, and sent it to the same outlets. That piece was accepted within a couple of hours and published. It started my career, really, as a journalist. It was the first time my work was brought to a larger audience.
I had a dilemma. Do I continue to use this pseudonym? Is there something dishonest about it, if I am not actually presenting myself as JD in my actual life, this is just something I’m using to get editors’ attention?
I used it for a few years, actually. Then eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. It didn’t feel authentic to who I was. So I thought, “Well, I’ll just submit as Jessica. If I go back to hearing nothing, then so be it.”
That was the first big moment of true confrontation with gender bias in a very undeniable way.
Debbie Millman:
You say that essay started your career. What essay was that?
Jessica Nordell:
Actually, circling back earlier, it was an essay about appearing as an extra in the Prairie Home Companion movie.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. Yes. I read that piece. That was a great piece. Really terrific piece.
Jessica Nordell:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Since then, your essays have appeared in the New York Times and Slate, Salon, many other prestigious publications. You’ve written how that experience gave you the firsthand opportunity to see how bias, and its flip side, advantage, are dynamic and penetrating forces, transforming their recipients from the inside just as they strike from the outside. Those are your words.
As a white woman, you’ve been writing about bias for close to 15 years. What motivated you to dedicate yourself to this topic?
Jessica Nordell:
I think the door was cracked open for me by the experience we just talked about, as well as my experiences as a woman in the workplace. I worked in the marketing and branding field for a while, as I was making my circuitous way as a writer. Some of the experiences I had were so infuriating, but also felt paralyzing. I didn’t know how to get out of this box in which I felt that my work was undervalued compared to my male colleagues.
I remember having a particular experience where I worked on a project for a particular client. The sales at this particular event were 30 times as great after I worked on this project as they had been before. The response that I got from leadership was like, “Oh, well. You just got lucky. It’s because you happen to know this sector really well.” So there was this message I was getting that, “Your success is because you’re lucky, not because you’re skilled.”
Then there were experiences like being told I was too abrasive, when a male colleague behaved exactly the same way or even more so. You’re nodding like this sounds familiar.
Debbie Millman:
Well, especially in the branding world in the ’90s and the ’00s. It’s much, much better now. Still not perfect, by any means. But there were times, in the ’90s particularly, where in the field of branding, I was sometimes the only woman in the room, and heard a lot of those same things, and really was nodding all through reading your book, actually.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. Those experiences really just stayed with me, and made me very curious to understand what the heck is going on. How is it that I am able to be this extremely competent, capable, skilled person, and yet, the people I’m working with can’t see it, or they’re seeing it through a veil? It’s like they’re not even seeing me. They’re looking through … They’re seeing a daydream or a hallucination, rather than a human being, and evaluating me on my merits.
So my professional interest in bias really came a lot out of personal experiences. Then over the years, it morphed into moving beyond thinking about gender bias, but what is this thing that is causing us to see so many different people through a veil, through a gauze, no matter what their social identity. This has been my driving question for the last many years.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. It’s interesting. Particularly in the ’90s, when I was experiencing that, I never really saw it as gender bias, because of my own issues. I thought it was just because I wasn’t good enough. I know that you write about that in the book as well. It just never occurred to me that it was gender based. It was just Debbie based.
Now that I’m married to a woman of color, I actually see, on a firsthand level, almost every day, micro and macroaggressions that are all race based, gender based, body based. It’s really horrific.
Let’s talk about your book. This is your first book. It’s called The End Of Bias: A Beginning. It was published late last year. It is about to be published as a paperback.
It has been shortlisted for the 2022 Columbia Journalism Lukas Prize for excellence in nonfiction, the 2022 New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize, was also named a best book of the year by the World Economic Forum, Greater Good, the AARP, and Inc Magazine.
It is being used by organizations now from newsrooms to startups to universities, healthcare organizations and faith communities, to solve some of their biggest cultural challenges.
It’s also, as you might well expect, listeners, a quite poetic read.
Congratulations, Jessica.
Jessica Nordell:
Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Your book is divided into three parts. I learned so much. How Bias Works, Changing Minds, and Making It Last. In the first part of the book, you outlined the history of prejudice in the United States, and examine implicit bias in stereotyping. The second part includes a section on police violence, and outlines efforts to break the habit of stereotyping. In the last section of the book, you outline the impact bias has had in healthcare and education, which I’ve also seen firsthand.
I want to share some statistical facts. I’m going to read this. It’s rather lengthy, but I think very, very important for people to hear and understand.
“If you’re a prospective graduate student with a name that sounds Indian, Chinese, Latino, Black or female, you’re less likely to hear back from faculty members than if your name is Brad Anderson. If you’re a same sex couple, you’re more likely to be denied a home loan than a heterosexual couple. If you’re a white job applicant with a criminal record, one study found you’re more likely to get a call back than if you are a black job applicant with a criminal record.
“If you’re Latino or black, you’re less likely to receive opioids for pain than a white patient. If you’re an obese child, your teacher is more likely to doubt your academic ability than if you’re slim. If your hobbies and activities suggest you grew up rich, you’re more likely to be called back by a law firm than if they imply a poor childhood, unless you’re a woman, in which case, you’ll be seen as less committed than a wealthy man.
“If you’re a black student, you’re more likely to be seen as a troublemaker than a white student behaving the same way. If you’re a light skinned basketball player, announcers will be more likely to comment on your mind. If you’re dark skinned, your body.
“If you’re a woman, your medical symptoms will be taken less seriously. If you’re a woman seeking a job in a lab, you’ll be seen as less competent, and deserving of lower salary, than a man with an identical resume. Pursuing an academic fellowship, one study found you must be 2.5 times as productive as a man to be rated equally competent.”
Just need to let that sit there for a moment.
Jessica, how much of this behavior do you believe is intentional?
Jessica Nordell:
That is such a good question, Debbie. This is something that I have wrestled with over the course of researching and writing this book. Really, this question. The psychology field tends to group bias into two categories. Conscious, intentional bias, which is overt prejudice, overt racism, sexism, white nationalism, things like this. Then there’s unconscious or implicit bias, which is unintentional, spontaneous, automatic. It happens outside of our conscious awareness.
I think it’s actually more complicated than that. What I’ve come to really believe, over the course of doing this research and talking to many experts and really sinking into the science, is that we are an unknowable combination of conscious and unconscious biases, and that any particular reaction that we have to another person might have both components.
There might be elements that we’re totally unaware of. There might be ways that we’re … I certainly have seen this in others. I know for a fact, I’ve experienced it myself. There are times when we react automatically and spontaneously without awareness of why we’re making a judgment or an evaluation or an assessment of another person.
Then there are times when I think we are a little bit aware of it, or we can be made aware of it if we just pause to notice it. In fact, one of the cruxes of the book, and some of the interventions that I describe, really hinge on the ability for us to become aware of these processes, and to develop more of a practice of noticing our reactions, and then interrupting them through the various approaches that I talk about.
Debbie Millman:
You write that most people do not go into their professions with the goal of hurting others or providing disparate treatment, but those who intend and value fairness, it is still possible to act in discriminatory ways and that contradiction between values of fairness and the reality of real world discrimination has come to be called unconscious bias or implicit bias or sometimes, unintentional or unexamined bias. And I don’t really like those two. I feel like it takes people off the hook, but ultimately describes the behavior of people who think they’re acting one way, but in fact, act in another. How we work to end that is the focus of your book, but did you go into the process of writing this book with the idea that it would be possible to end bias? Because I feel very hopeless right now, even reading your book, which I think is marvelous and I want everybody in the entire universe to read it, because it is so helpful and so enlightening, but I also feel like there are still so many people that want to believe the world that they live in is the world that they should live in, which is all about white supremacy, which is all about women being second class citizens, which is all about people of color not getting the same opportunities and I feel so hopeless. Do you really truly believe that the world can change?
Jessica Nordell:
I went into this project wanting to find out whether it was possible to change, because unconscious or unintentional bias, implicit bias, it seems so confounding. Because how can we possibly address something if we’re not even fully aware of what’s going on? And is it possible to even motivate people to want to put in the effort?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Jessica Nordell:
Because it is work to actually interrupt this. And so, that was my question. Is it possible? And my project was looking at the data, looking at the research, trying to find examples of approaches that had actually measurably changed people’s behavior. So, I mean, it was an empirical question for me. I was like, “I don’t know the answer.” And through the process of researching and writing this book, I found many examples of approaches that did change people’s behavior. There are approaches that, believe it or not, have changed police behavior, there are approaches that have changed doctors’ behavior to eliminate disparities.
There are approaches that have changed teachers’ behavior, to decrease the disparities in suspensions between white students and non-white students. And so, there are these approaches that actually work. Of course, the question is, do we have the political will, the collective will to use them? To actually put them in place? This is an open question. I wish I had could wave a magic wand and make it all happen, but I at least wanted to give people the tools to be able to make a difference wherever they are in their own local communities, organizations, neighborhoods, cultures.
Debbie Millman:
I do know that certain changes are possible. When my wife, Roxanne Gay wrote the book, Hunger, A Memoir Of (My) Body, she talks quite a lot about how doctors treated her, assuming that any ailment was weight based because she was bigger than they thought she should be and didn’t give her the care. And also now, how different her world is after losing a substantial amount of weight. And she now knows for a fact that doctors are given her book to read, are assigned her book to read when they are in school, so that they have a better understanding of how to treat both people of color and people who aren’t living in a mainstream body. You said that there are ways that police are being trained differently, talk about what you’ve seen in the world to give us hope.
Jessica Nordell:
There are approaches that try to tackle bias head on, and then, there are approaches who that use indirect methods to change people’s behavior. So I’ll give you an example from healthcare. There is a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins hospital that were really concerned with blood clot prevention and blood clots are really dangerous. If you get a blood clot, it can be catastrophic or even fatal. And they found that patients were not getting appropriate blood clot prevention when they were being admitted to the hospital. And so, they developed a computerized checklist that took doctors through a series of systematic questions for every patient to determine whether they should receive blood clot prevention or not. Interestingly, this wasn’t actually intended to reduce disparities at all. They were just trying to of improve blood clot prevention for everybody. But later, when they went back and analyzed the data, they found that it had eliminated the disparities between the prevention that men and women were getting.
So before this intervention, women were receiving significantly lower rates of appropriate treatment. After this computerized checklist that really required doctors to use objective standard criteria to make a decision, that disparity was eliminated.
Debbie Millman:
Another doctor example that I found really fascinating was when you talk about how ovarian cancer’s always been considered this silent killer, when in fact there are a lot of things that point to that potentially being what somebody is suffering from that women have been talking about for decades and that’s all but been ignored. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Jessica Nordell:
The history of medicine is unfortunately very much also the history of women’s symptoms being ignored. Women’s pain being undertreated, women’s narration of their own lives, their own experiences being devalued and ignored and sidelined. And in the case of ovarian cancer, it was for many years thought to be a silent killer that had no symptoms, no obvious symptoms. Well, it turned out women had been complaining of things like constipation and bloating for years and these are now seen as actually symptoms of ovarian cancer, but they were just dismissed as being irrelevant. And so, yeah. It’s just one of many examples of ways that women have not been taken seriously, that their reports of their own lives and their own experiences have not been taken seriously by the medical profession.
Debbie Millman:
Since the murder of George Floyd, there’s been quite a lot of… I want to say virtue signaling in the workplace with diversity training and you outline how diversity training is now a multi-billion dollar a year industry and how nearly every Fortune 500 company uses some form of it. You detail how the training has expanded to include unconscious bias training, which is now de rigueur at organizations across business, law, government and have given rise to a cottage industry of trainers, speakers, and consultants. But you state that DEI workshops and anti-racist training can often make bias even worse. How so?
Jessica Nordell:
Well, I don’t know if I would say it can often make it worse. I guess what I would say is that the challenge with these trainings is that they’re often not evaluated, so a comparison would be developing a medicine and distributing it in a community and then not testing to see what effect it’s having or whether it’s actually curing the thing that it’s meant to cure. The problem, I think with a lot of trainings, is that we just don’t know what effect they’re having. Some have been found to cause backlash. There’s some work by a sociologist at Harvard and a sociologist at Tel Aviv University who looked at decades of diversity initiatives in large companies and they found, for instance, that after mandatory diversity trainings, the number of women of color in management decreased.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that? How is that possible?
Jessica Nordell:
The hypothesis that the researchers suggest is that when managers feel like their autonomy is being taken away, that they’re being forced to do something that they don’t choose, it causes backlash and it causes them to do something else to protest and regain their autonomy. That’s the psychological explanation that these researchers give. So I think the important thing is to figure out, well, what are the actual goals? What are we really trying to do? Are we trying to create more psychological safety in the workplace for everyone? If so, how do we measure that? And then, how can we determine whether this training or intervention or year long program is actually getting us closer to that goal? Or is this just a legal liability check box that’s not actually having any kind of meaningful effect? I think that’s the really important question we need to answer.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I was really struck by one respondent who simply stated that he was never going to have a meeting alone with a woman again, because he was so afraid of getting in trouble. It’s like, “Dude, just don’t say the wrong things. Don’t do the wrong things.”
Jessica Nordell:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
And that was really depressing. You also found in one series of studies that lean in type messages lead people to think workplace gender inequality is women’s fault and that it’s women’s responsibility to solve. And I know that my wife, Roxanne, also says that quite a lot when people are asking her, white women in particular, “What could I do different? What could I do better?” And she’s like, “It’s not my job to teach you that.” And that lean in commands are insufficient. There will never be a smile wide enough, a tone unassuming enough to outmaneuver another person’s misjudgments. Given how much gender bias there is in the workplace, how do we overcome this? Do you think that there’s a way for women to be allowed to be as ambitious as men or as aggressive or as bitchy or as bossy? I mean, all of these terms are seen as insulting to women, but yet, commanding to men.
Jessica Nordell:
That is one of the reasons I wrote this book, because I think it takes a change of consciousness among leaders at a company. It’s not women’s fault that they are systematically denied opportunities and I think it’s incredibly dangerous for us to give women the message that if they only did something differently, if they only wore a softer sweater, if they only spoke with a smile, if they only did this, if they only did that, then the doors would open because the goalposts change and shift, and it’s an insane tight rope to ask women to walk. Be feminine, but not too feminine. Be assertive, but not too assertive. There’s no way to solve that problem. It’s interesting, when I was first talking about writing this book, some of the advice I got from people in the publishing industry was to focus the book on things that women and people of color could do to overcome the biases that were being expressed toward them.
And I just feel strongly that is not the problem we need to solve. We need to solve the problem of the expression of bias and that’s where the work needs to be done. At the organizational level, at the leadership level, at the individual level, rather than put the burden on the people who are being most affected.
Debbie Millman:
One of the central pieces of your book is the creation of a computer workplace simulation that you called Normcorp, and you worked with the computer science professor, Kenny Joseph, and designed a simulation to quantify gender bias in the workplace. And this gave you ample real world data upon which to draw. Can you talk a little bit about your methodology and the study and the outcomes?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. While I was working on this project, I had this burning question, which was, how much do all of these daily experiences add up? Because if you look at the research about bias, it tends to focus on a snapshot, a moment in time. A moment that a resume is being evaluated. A moment a doctor is encountering a patient and making a diagnosis. And the truth is bias doesn’t just happen once or twice, it happens continuously. I mean, as you’ve described with experiencing life alongside Roxanne, you’re seeing this daily accumulation of microaggressions and biases. And what I couldn’t find was a quantification of the impact of these experiences over a long period of time, which is how they’re actually experienced in the real world. So I kept asking researchers and experts, what’s the ultimate impact? And no one really had an answer.
And so, I approached a computer scientist about collaborating with me to create a computer simulation called an agent based model, where you create these individual agents who interact with one another over time, according to really simple rules. And then, you watch what happens in the simulation. And what we did was we created a virtual workplace called Normcorp, which is a very simple workplace where very little happens, actually. People just do projects, the project succeed or fail, they get evaluated and then, their score goes up or down and that determines how likely they are to be promoted. And then every so often, promotions happen and the top scorers get promoted to the next level. So it’s a very simplified, abstract workplace. And then, we introduced five or six patterns of gender bias that are really well documented that women experience all the time.
Things like having their work devalued compared to a man’s work, being more penalized for failing or for screwing up than a similar man, getting less credit when they work on a mixed gender team, things like this, or being penalized for seeming too aggressive or to assertive, not communal enough. And so, we introduced those biases with a very small amount, just 3%. We just introduced a 3% bias in how women were evaluated in this simulation and what we found after we ran the simulation over many, many cycles was that in this hierarchical workplace, Normcorp has eight levels of hierarchy. What we found was that after we ran the simulation, we ended up with a workplace where the top level was 87% men. And that was only with a 3% difference, but when it happened over and over and over with enough frequency, it accumulated into a really significant disparity.
Debbie Millman:
You ran the simulation over 20 promotion cycles. Did you always have the same results?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. So we ended up running the simulation over 20 cycles. And then, we did, I think, 100 different iterations of the simulation and took an average of what happened over 100 different simulations and we found that on average, it was about 87% men at the top level.
Debbie Millman:
One of the wonderful things that I learned in your book about this notion of the way in which we learn, you refer to ants as an example, and you say ants interact according to some simple rules. They react to chemical scents, such as those of other ants, larva and food. They leave behind their own scents. They also react to sound. Over time, these behaviors compound and allow ant colonies to solve difficult problems like finding the best forging route to and from food, avoiding traffic jams. As they react to one another’s chemical traces while forging, for instance, they spontaneously form a highway system, a central inbound lane going from food source to the nest, flanked by two outbound lanes from the nest to the food source. These ants are not directed by an ant overlord. They’re merely engaging with one another, according to basic rules. And so, we are behaving in exactly the same way the ants are.
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. I mean the ant example might seem a little out of place, but I think ant colonies are a complex system. So a complex system is a system where you have many individuals interacting with one another over a long period of time and the result is maybe unexpected or large or different from what you might imagine if you only look at the individual interactions. You can have lots of micro interactions and behaviors that if they’re practiced over long enough, can have massive results. I mean, if you think about weathering in the case of race and health, there’s this idea that it’s the accumulated stressors of racism that contribute to the massive health disparities between African Americans and white people in this country, for instance. It’s not one thing, it’s the accumulation and the repetition over time that gives rise to this system that we see.
Debbie Millman:
When we first started talking about your book, I outlined all of those instances of bias and I was heartened as I went through your book to see that you believe that we can unlearn our biases and you outline very straightforward ways organizations can interrupt bias. And these include standardizing criteria for hiring and for promotions. In the field of medicine, doctors can use a standardized checklist for care to ensure everyone is treated the same. Can you talk a little bit about this standardizing criteria and checklists and how they can be created and implemented with as much ease and speed as possible?
Jessica Nordell:
Yeah. So the example that I described earlier about blood clot prevention is an excellent example of this standardized checklist approach to reducing biases. The idea is that you’re taking a decision out of the realm of a black box and really breaking it down into systematic steps. And this approach can be used in lots of different areas. I mean, one way that it can be used in the workplace for instance, is in an interview context. So say an organization is interviewing people for a job. This is an area that’s ripe for bias, because if I go into an interview with you and I’m just winging it, I might ask you questions based on some perceived similarities we have. I might slightly give you the benefit of the doubt in certain cases. I might ask you softball questions because of some affinity I feel.
There’s a concept that I find really useful called Homophily, which means literally love of the same. And it describes the way that we sometimes gravitate toward people who remind us of ourselves. This happens in the workplace all the time. Anytime you hear someone say, “Oh, we hired that person because they were a culture fit.” That’s Homophily, right? That’s like we hired them because they were like us. And so, a way to interrupt this in an interview setting, in a workplace, is by developing a set of standardized questions ahead of time. And so, every person who’s interviewed gets asked the exact same set of 12 questions or five questions. And that way, you can start to compare apples to apples instead of just letting interviewers run wild with whatever biases might be informing the questions and the conversation they’re having with people.
Debbie Millman:
I’ve also read about ways that people are looking at the first screen of resumes without names or locations and just qualifications and that seems to be a way to avoid some of that, “Oh, that person doesn’t look like me.” Or “That person doesn’t have the Homophily that we can sometimes veer to.”
Jessica Nordell:
Right. So if you’re an astronomer, in order to get time on the Hubble Space Telescope, you have to submit an application. And the committee has started to remove identifiers from the application of astronomers to use the Hubble Space Telescope and an analysis of more than 15,000 applicants over 16 years found that before they removed the identifiers from the applications, men’s proposals were accepted at a higher rate than women’s. But after they removed the names from the applications, the disparity actually reversed. Women’s applications were accepted at a higher rate than men’s.
Debbie Millman:
I wonder what that means.
Jessica Nordell:
I mean, I think often it’s that, if a particular group has had more obstacles, has had to face more hurdles in order to get to a certain level, they might have had to have more accomplishments in order to get to that level.
Debbie Millman:
Are there any places that you found where there’s been an aggregation of these types of standardized criteria for questions, for interviews, for checklists? Is there a place, a repository, where people can go to learn about how to create these more standardized lists and criteria?
Jessica Nordell:
That’s an amazing idea, Debbie. We should make that. I don’t know of a specific toolkit as you’re describing that’s specifically around standardization. I’m actually working… I’m partnering with a researcher right now to look at checklist approaches in medicine and try to reanalyze studies to see if this pattern is holding true with lots of different studies, whether checklists are actually eliminating gender and racial disparities across different medical studies. So we’ll hopefully know more soon.
Debbie Millman:
I do think that this type of systemic change is going to require that individuals think that they could make a difference, that they can look at their unconscious bias or their bias and begin to take steps to make changes. And that needs to be something that has to be very conscious. For those that are listening to the show today, what would be one or two things that you think that anybody could do on an individual basis to confront or become more aware of their unconscious bias and make small or large changes to begin to behave differently in the world?
Jessica Nordell:
I think the very first step is to begin practicing noticing the assumptions and predictions that come up in one’s own mind when encountering another person, particularly a person across some social difference. And it sounds really easy, “Oh, just notice what’s happening.” It’s really hard. It takes a lot of practice because it’s a habit. It’s something we’ve been so conditioned to do. So developing the muscle of just first noticing, what is coming to mind when I encounter this person? What am I expecting from this person? What am I predicting? What kinds of assumptions am I making about this person’s background? Their future? Their behavior? Anything, because once you start to notice, then that is the golden key, because then, you can interrupt it. Then you can pause and ask yourself, “Wait a second. Do I know for sure that’s what that person is talking about? Is that where they’re coming from? That’s what they’re going to do. That’s what they intend.”
That’s the first step of human agency, of freedom, being able to actually see what’s happening in your own mind. So I think that’s a really good first step. Another thing that I would suggest to everyone is learn history. This is, I think, a really under researched approach, but there are a couple of studies that suggest that learning history, learning about discrimination in the past, helps us see it in the present and be able to perceive it and understand it better in the present. And I certainly found this to be the case in my own work. I mean, the more I understood the way the policies and practices of the past affected people of the past, the better I was able to really understand the present and how those patterns from the past live on in the present. Medical racism, for instance, the scientific racism that was pervasive in the 19th century was codified in medical journals. I mean, these were professional academic medical journals that systematically disregarded African Americans and saw them as debilitated and less human. And this was taught to doctors. So I think that’s just one little slice of history that if we understand it, we can start to appreciate our present situations so much better. So I would encourage everyone to do as much as they can to understand the discrimination of the past.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said, you’ve come to see bias as a soul violence. An attack, not just on the material conditions of one’s life, but an assault on one sense of self. How do you feel you were changed over the course of your research and writing this book?
Jessica Nordell:
It was a transformative experience for me. It forced me to see how deeply I’d been conditioned by false beliefs about every group in our society. Women, African American people, people of different religions and ages. And one of the things I did over the course of researching the book was try to find out where these ideas came from originally. Where did patriarchy come from? Where did racism come from? One of the things that changed me the most was understanding the way these ideas were developed at specific moments in human history. They’re not ideas that have been with us forever. They’re not natural. They’re not supernatural. They’re not inevitable. They’re human…
Debbie Millman:
No, they’re constructs. Yep.
Jessica Nordell:
They are constructs. They’re human inventions. And for me, really seeing the way that these are human inventions, loosened their grip on me. I began to see them as human creations like the automobile. This is not something that was just dropped from the heavens, it was something that humans built. And so…
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, they’re just bad ideas.
Jessica Nordell:
They’re lies. They’re lies. And so, not just understanding that, but grasping that in the sense that Claudia Rankine talks about the difference between understanding that how the bigotry of the past affects us and grasping it, really grasping that, I think was transformative in that the grip of those ideas began to loosen more and more.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that when you began The End of Bias, you thought you were writing a work of science, but as you worked on it, the original plan dissolved and I’m wondering if you can talk about how and in what way that happened?
Jessica Nordell:
I began the project thinking, like most of us do, I think, I’m probably a little less biased than everyone else. I’m probably a little more objective than everybody else. I thought if I can just find the best interventions, the best approaches, the best science and synthesize that and share that in the most engaging way possible, then I can just kind deliver this tool. What I found very quickly when I began the project was that every bias that I saw out in the world was living inside me and that I couldn’t write a book with authenticity and sincerity if I didn’t address it in me also. So it became this dual project of research and reporting and writing and also, deep internal work and struggle and questioning and making mistakes and screwing up and trying to repair over and over.
Debbie Millman:
Well, thank you for doing that work, because I know that initially, there was someone that very early on in your writing suggested that your work was paternalistic and I know that that was something that hurt you, but then it gave you the opportunity to look inward. How did that change your approach?
Jessica Nordell:
When my own work was described that way by people that I respected, I responded, I think the way a lot of us do when we’re called out on something that we haven’t seen in ourselves, I got really defensive. I got angry. I did a lot of justifying. I realized that that was a grief reaction. Anger, denial, bargaining. That was grief and…
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think under profound anger is always grief.
Jessica Nordell:
Yes. And I think was grieving some lost innocence. I thought that I was one person and what I found was that there were ugly sides of my own mind and heart that I hadn’t seen before, but I came to see that as a huge gift, because it allowed me the opportunity to see things I hadn’t seen about my own thinking, the racism that I had internalized from our culture, the sexism I had internalized from our culture. And I think it’s only when we see those things that we actually have the opportunity to start to shift and change. So it was a huge gift to me, ultimately.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think that those are the moments where we really learned the most about who we are. Part of what I learned as I was even coming out later in life was the fear that I had doing that because of my own inner homophobia. So I think if people begin to see that our biases are something that we’ve been taught, it becomes a lot more urgent for us to unlearn those so that we don’t perpetuate them.
Jessica Nordell:
Mm-hmm.
Debbie Millman:
Jessica, I have one last question for you. You talked about it a little bit, but I want to ask you about what’s next on your horizon. What are you gearing up to do?
Jessica Nordell:
So with this book, one thing that’s been really exciting is I’ve heard from lots of different communities that are using the book. And so, I’m developing some reading guides for different communities, churches, synagogues, different groups that are using the book in their own journeys. So that’s been really rewarding. And then, I’m thinking and I’m developing the next project, which is going to be looking at mental health.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, good, wonderful. Yet another thing so many of us need help with. Jessica, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Jessica Nordell:
Thank you so much, Debbie. I truly enjoyed the conversation.
Debbie Millman:
Jessica Nordell’s book is The End of Bias: A Beginning: How We Eliminate Unconscious Bias and Create a More Just World and it is just out now in paperback. Buy yourself a copy and buy everyone you know a copy as well. You can find out more about Jessica and her many projects on jessicanordell.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the school of visual arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.