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OVERCOMING IMPLICIT BIAS
It's a tough pill to swallow, but Dushaw Hockett believes recognizing this in ourselves is a positive step forward for the industry
By Natalie Bruckner
“Right now, your hidden brain is doing many more things than your conscious brain could attend to with the same efficiency. The brain sacrifices sophistcation to achieve speed. If you missed the spelling error in the last sentence, it is because your hidden brain rapidly approximated the correct meaning of “sophistication” and moved on.”
—Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain
We all have implicit bias: you, the person next to you, your colleagues, even your family and close friends. You just might not know it yet.
This statement may seem antagonistic, especially considering SMACNA and SMART have been working so hard to fight for equality and collaboration in the industry. But according to Dushaw Hockett, founder and executive director of Safe Places for the Advancement of Community and Equity (SPACEs) who equips leaders with skills in the area of bias reduction and bias interruption, “Having implicit bias doesn’t make us bad people. It makes us human!”
So what exactly is implicit bias? During the 2022 Partners in Progress Conference in Las Vegas, Hockett presented a talk on this very subject during the session entitled, Bias and Belonging. He describes implicit bias as “a preference for or prejudice [or aversion] against a person or group of people, and one that operates outside of our conscious awareness.”
Hockett says implicit biases are triggered through rapid and automatic metal association of other groups of people, and he says they are both social and structural (i.e., TV, news, friends, family, radio).
Bias is a subject that the construction industry has been working to overcome for many years now—tackling issues of gender, generation, and race—but Hockett says implicit bias goes much deeper than that. “The science of implicit bias says that you can be a school administrator, for example, and say that you are deeply committed to nurturing and building up young people, and yet be the same school administrator who leads your school in high rates of suspensions and expulsions of young people. And both of those things would be true. Consciously, you’re deeply committed to building young people up. Unconsciously, you’re doing harm in the process.”
To better understand implicit bias in the sheet metal industry, Hockett says we need to look at the three characteristics that make a bias implicit.
Characteristic number one is that implicit biases operate at the subconscious level, outside of conscious awareness. “We don’t know that we have them, and they can’t be accessed through introspection. In other words, the science of implicit bias says that none of us can sit here in this room right now, scratch our heads, and wonder out loud, ‘Do I have a bias against men, against women, against Black people, against white people, against immigrants?’ and expect to accurately answer that question. Because the nature of an implicit bias is such that we don’t know that we have them,” he says.
Studies back this idea up, as they have shown that the human brain can only consciously process around 40 items per second, but as many as 11 million unconsciously.
Characteristic number two, says Hockett, is that implicit biases often run contrary to our conscious stated beliefs about who we are as human beings and what our values are. He cites one example as someone who may be consciously committed to a cause, such as gender equality in the workplace, but unconsciously think that the women in the industry have different skills—they may feel women are great, say, in the office, but not so great out in the field. Even if you find yourself hiring on a gut feeling, you’re unconsciously hiring based in bias.
The third characteristic that makes a bias implicit is that it is triggered through rapid and automatic mental associations that we make between people, ideas, and objects, and attitudes and the stereotypes that we hold about those things.
A big problem with implicit bias in the workplace, explains Hockett, is that it can be extremely damaging: on the more obvious level it can result in lawsuits, but on a more subtle level, it affects morale, productivity, and retention—a person may be alienated and feel like their voice isn’t being heard.
That can even impact recruitment efforts. Research has shown that some of the words used in job postings can play into the unconscious biases of people in the job market. Job ads encouraging women and millennials to apply, for instance, implicitly discourages others to apply.
Once implicit bias has been recognized, Hockett says there is a tendency to engage in self-shaming. “[People tend to think] this is who I am. I’m a horrible human being. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m going to always be this way.” But that attitude, he explains, is self-defeating.
The great news is, implicit biases can be changed and unlearned. “It’s about taking preventative rather than reactive strategies,” he says. “If we want to move to a better place we have to pay attention to implicit bias.”
To outsmart our own bias, Hockett says commitment is needed from the top, and SMACNA and SMART are doing just that. Last year, Joseph Sellers, general president of SMART, released a joint statement with SMACNA’s Angela Simon that said: “One of the biggest problems we face is unconscious bias, which is prevalent and extends into training, and it must be dealt with. So, when SMACNA approached us to set up a joint diversity and inclusion task force, we were eager to participate.”
The joint effort also included the CEOs of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA), the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA), the presidents of the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada (UA) and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW).
As part of this commitment, SMACNA and SMART are developing, with the help of experts, a coordinated strategic plan with long-term and short-term objectives that will be evaluated and adjusted as necessary.
The unified goal is to shift the mindset of management, labor leaders and respective memberships to recruit, welcome, and retain the most competent and skilled workforce available while embracing differences in age, ability, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, national origin, language, marital status, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, and other characteristics that make individuals unique.
Hockett says efforts to learn more about the types of biases like this helps identify and interrupt them, but that everyday practices can also undo implicit bias. “The first step to overcoming implicit bias is to slow down the pace with which we engage with other people that are different than we are. This removes ambiguity,” he says.
Other great exercises that can be practiced in the workplace to undo implicit bias include “seeking out opportunities for intergroup contact and to alter your perspective by finding ways to walk in the shoes of the other,” Hockett says. “Seek out opportunities for intergroup contact that are friendly versus hostile; intimate versus superficial; sustained versus oneshot deal. Then, to better understand someone, read a book by or about someone from a marginalized group, and watch documentaries and TV shows or movies based on true stories. All these are preventative strategies rather than reactive strategies.”
Ultimately, bias reduction work is not just about reducing harm—it’s about the helping us to be more effective on the job, improving relationships, and improving team performance. A win-win-win, really.
“Taking an implicit bias approach like this changes the central question from, ‘Are you racist or not racist, are you sexist or not sexist?’ An implicit bias approach makes the central question, ‘How do we align our actions and behaviors with our consciously held egalitarian beliefs?’ Or at least for those people who do hold egalitarian beliefs, and my belief is that many people do,” Hockett concludes. ▪ Natalie is an award-winning writer who has worked in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the United States, and Canada. She has more than 23 years experience as a journalist, editor, and brand builder, specializing in construction and transportation. When she’s not writing, you will likely find her snowboarding, mountain biking, or climbing mountains with her rescue dog.
