Last year, we saw the media regularly call Black Lives Matter protesters “rioters,” “violent,” or “thugs.” Yet on January 6, those who attacked the U.S. Capitol were often described as “passionate protestors” and “Trump supporters.” Linguistic anthropologist Suzanne Wertheim explains why these language disparities matter—and how biases like these show up in our workplaces, too.
Last year, we saw the media regularly call Black Lives Matter protesters “rioters,” “violent,” or “thugs.” Yet on January 6, those who attacked the U.S. Capitol were often described as “passionate protestors” and “Trump supporters.” Linguistic anthropologist Suzanne Wertheim explains why these language disparities matter—and how biases like these show up in our workplaces, too.
Dr. Suzanne Wertheim is an anti-bias consultant, researcher, and educator. She is also the founder of Worthwhile Research & Consulting, a firm that optimizes workplace culture through anti-bias and communication training. She is an expert in how cultural biases are expressed and perpetuated through language, and trains tech companies to spot and dismantle these biases in their workplaces.
It's not your fault that you were born with a human brain. It's not your fault that your entire lifetime you've been fed garbage distorted data. And it's not your fault you were born into the body you were born into… But it is your responsibility, once you learn things, to make sure that you are looking for problems and then using your power to address them.
—Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, founder, Worthwhile Research & Consulting
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Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara talks self-care, self-confidence, and how to better understand our inner critic. When does that inner critic rear its ugly head? What does it say? Who does it sound like? If you can learn about where that critic comes from, you can start to recognize when it’s not serving you. For all this and more, check out https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Suzanne Wertheim 0:00 I got driven out of tech by bad behavior, and I only recognized it in retrospect once I started analyzing it. I thought it was my own individual experience. And one of the things I like to do is let people know this is replicated. This isn't just you, this isn't in your head.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:24 Hello, and welcome to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. I'm your host Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and today I'm talking with Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, a linguistic anthropologist and the CEO of Worthwhile Consulting. And this conversation, it is just so brilliant. So you see, Suzanne focuses on bias in language, and as you might guess, that is extremely my jam. And she consults with tech companies and media organizations on how bias language shows up in their work. So we're really in the center of my personal Venn diagram and I bet some of yours too. So if you are, let's say, a woman who's ever been called "abrasive" in an annual review, which, well, "hi." Or if you've been wondering why all of those news stories call Black protestors "rioters" and white people literally storming the Capitol "passionate Trump supporters," this episode is for you. There is so much packed into this interview, so I want to get right into it. Quick content warning: we do talk about rape and sex trafficking in here, nothing graphic, but please take care of yourselves.
SWB 1:29 I am so excited to welcome our guest today, Dr. Suzanne Wertheim, linguistic anthropologist, anti-bias researcher, and the CEO of Worthwhile Research & Consulting. Suzanne, I've learned so much by reading your work. Welcome to Strong Feelings.
SW 1:46 Thank you so much for having me. I am genuinely excited to be here.
SWB 1:49 To get us started. I really want to talk a little bit about what you do, particularly this concept of being a linguistic anthropologist. For those who are not familiar with that job title, can you tell us a little bit about what that is and how you became one?
SW 2:02 Sure. So I always think it's funny that people, when I tell them "linguistic anthropologist," there's this look of surprise or a step back, and they'll say, "That's such an esoteric job." But I say to people, I'm like, "Do you talk?" They're like "Yeah." I'm like, "Do you talk to other people? Like, "Yeah." "Do you have social relationships with people?" And they're like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Do you live in a society?" They're like, "Yeah." So basically linguistic anthropology, another way that I talk about it is contextualized language use. My PhD is actually in linguistics and in order to solve some actually grammatical questions, I went and I lived in Russia for a year. And what I learned was the only way to explain some pretty complicated grammatical change that was happening was to look at people. How they thought about themselves, how they identified themselves, how they presented themselves to other people, how they related to their country. And all of that came together to explain historical grammatical change.
2:57 So it's literally about looking at any kind of language in context and trying to figure out what the meaning is and what is going on. So it's incredibly broad because we can look at anything at almost any level. But I focus on bias and interpersonal interactions.
SWB 3:14 So how did you get started focusing on bias in linguistics?
SW 3:18 By accident. I backed into it. In my experience, a lot of people who are academics or who dive really deeply into something are intellectualizing their own experiences, life experiences, something that has bothered them about their own life becomes an intellectual curiosity. So I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but I was a pathologically shy child. And I skipped kindergarten, so I went into first grade, dropped into a class at age five of a group of six year olds who had all known each other. They had all gone to kindergarten together, and I was dropped in on the first day. And I still remember this because it was, I think, very traumatizing. And I looked around and I was like, there are rules to how people are talking to each other. There are rules to how people are interacting with each other. And I better freaking figure out these rules because otherwise I'm not going to survive this. So in some respect, I think it's been a lifelong survival of being, like, "There are these rules for people and I have to figure them out."
4:20 And then from another perspective, from a very academic perspective, it was the answer to these grammatical questions. I kept on just following in grad school what was interesting to me. I started out with historical linguistics. Why do languages change? Then I moved into minority languages. So if you're a member of a minority group, why does your language change when you're bilingual, but the majority language doesn't change? And then I got interested in endangered languages. So what happens there? And so I kept on getting deeper, and then I found myself doing fieldwork in Russia. Provincial Russia, there's this really interesting case study that nobody's looked at. So let me look at that. And then the answer was identity, but then in that answer was also bias because one of the main reasons why young people were changing how they spoke their "low prestige" minority language was because people were so biased against it, that they couldn't be a cool hip young city person and speak only their minority language. Also, I was under secret police surveillance and there was a lot of interesting bias stuff going on. So I had always been interested in bias, and in power dynamics, and power differentials, but that really made it sort of an intellectual focal point for me.
SWB 5:35 Yeah. Well, so after you got your PhD, you were working in academia, but you have since left and you're working in consulting. Can you tell us how did that happen for you and what do you focus on now?
SW 5:46 So, I left academia for a few reasons. I was at Northwestern and then I was at University of Maryland data research Institute with government clients. And then I ended up at UCLA, and UCLA was interesting in a lot of ways, but it didn't pay me enough because LA is expensive. So I started consulting. I had been in tech between undergrad and grad school, and I found myself in tech again, consulting for a serious games company. That was interesting; it was training cultural knowledge through basically video games that had been altered. And a thing that happened was my undergrads who would like to me, they would email me years later and be like, "Oh, you know, I'm at work and I'm having this problem. I know we've talked about language and gender. Can you give me advice on this?" Or there was so much they had taken with them years later. And I also noticed that I had had at UCLA a very, very diverse undergrad population. That I had had these wonderful students who had left and then had not soared in the working world the way it had expected because they had hit these bias obstacles that I hadn't expected. So there were a bunch of things, including the fact that I could see that academia was collapsing in on itself. I was expected to work endlessly, do a lot of work for free, not get paid a lot, have a very high stress job with lots of insecurity in a lot of ways. And I was just like, "I think I'm over this."
7:03 And the other thing was that I very intensely, for a very long time, I've wanted to make the world a better place. All of those things are how I ended up in DEI consulting, anti-bias consulting, because I was like, "Well, how can I make the world better?” Well, maybe it's going to have to be one workplace at a time, or putting information out there that people can use in their own workplaces to make things more equitable, more fair, make it so things that are unjust and unfair can get identified and removed and make it so that the people who are being held behind by these really nonsense, leftover bias things that really get in the way, how can I help people identify them in the move them? And so that's how I ended up doing the work that I'm doing now.
SWB 7:43 Well, to kind of talk a little bit more specifically about some of that work, you know, I first heard about you back in January after the attacks at the Capitol, and you were talking about the concepts of softening and inflating language, and I found that really powerful and really helpful. And I'm curious if you can share a little bit about that.
SW 8:02 I wrote a Twitter thread on January 6th that didn't get a lot of uptake. And then I turned it into a LinkedIn post on January 7th that got a heck of a lot of uptake. So last I checked, it was 1.16 million views. It went very viral. And that was about softening language. So I was very primed for the language of reporting on January 6th and January 7th, because I had been asked by journalists in 2020, especially after George Floyd, to help them debias their language. How could I train them to report on the world in a way that had less bias, in particular in their language? So I had in that training used this term "softening language." And I said, "This is very upsetting to me. And it's a way that people escape accountability, and I want to identify it for you, and I'm going to ask you to stop doing it." So softening language is what I like to call a linguistic distortion. It's a way that language takes an event or a situation in the world, and it brings it to our brain and there's a distortion that happens so our understanding, our mental model, is actually inaccurate. And we use our mental models to make all of our judgments, our assessments of the world, especially our snap judgments, our autopilot. So when there are linguistic distortions that alter our mental models and encode bias in them, they're really very dangerous. And I see softening language as one of the most dangerous.
9:28 So softening language is basically when you use a softer word that has gentler framing, gentler sort of entailments. So framing is the scenario that gets set up in your mind and entailments are what comes along with that framing. So what I noticed on January 6th, I was very attuned to—I'd given them, especially the journalists, I was like, "Let's talk about the word 'protest' and let's talk about the word 'riot,'" because I saw a lot of white people described as "protesting," unless it was about Black people's civil rights. And I saw a lot of Black people engage in very foundationally, peaceful, and reasonable activity described as "rioting." And I saw after a basketball game in LA, you would see, winning or losing, fires, cars overturned. They'd be like, "Oh, an outpouring of strong emotion." Right? And then you would see people standing on the street, holding signs and chanting, and they would say "these violent rioters," right?
SWB 10:30 Yeah.
SW 10:30 So there, all of these distortions come in, and so what I saw was this real humanization of people at the Capitol, so we would empathize with them, so we would take their perspective and their point of view. And they were being described in very gentle ways. So basically “protests,” “protesters,” and “Trump supporters,” were a lot of the language. Finally, it started to be reframed as “sedition,” “coup,” “attack,” “violent attack”—but it took a long time. There were all of these harbingers of violence and dehumanization of people that were being just ignored or left off in the same way that I see for, in particular, sexual predators when they are white and young. And good-looking. Often that language is very, very soft to describe what they did. So I noticed, and I'm still following this language of Ghislaine Maxwell who worked with Jeffrey Epstein, and the words used to describe her were very often as "sourcing girls," and the girls are described as "abused." Right?
SWB 11:36 Yeah.
SW 11:36 This is very, very gentle language, and it's not even part of the indictment language, right? If you can, all you have to do is just report the indictment language, which says things like "sex trafficking" and "raped," right? That is language that allows us to actually make appropriate mental models. So if we undermine how dangerous people are and how harmful their actions are when they've taken place or how harmful their proposed actions are when they're in the process of taking place, if we are constantly gentling what that is, we can't make good judgments about how to hold them accountable for their harm or their planned harm.
SWB 12:20 Yes. I think Ghislaine Maxwell's a great example of this. When you see those kinds of comments like, oh, "sourcing" instead of "sex trafficking," for example, the latter is much more uncomfortable to say and to think about for a lot of people. And I'm curious about, what is it that's maybe subconsciously going into people's minds as they're making these choices to soften language?
SW 12:41 There's a whole field called conversation analysis. And one of the findings has been, about five, six decades of work, is that in the U. S. there is a very, very strong cultural push to agree with the speaker. Not everywhere. I'm from New York. Disharmony is much more tolerated in New York. You can be a lot more direct. You can be in somebody's face. You can push more. So, there's this overall cultural norm of "preserve harmony," but what it ignores is the underlying disharmony, which is that there's bad stuff going on, and it's hidden by the way that we're talking. And if you don't surface it, it can't be addressed. And it's like, it's really just rug sweeping. Right? And then this is complicated by and enforced by power dynamics. So there are two things that come to mind. One plays less of a role when it's sexual harassment, or sexual predation, or sex crimes, and that's organizational power. But I do a lot of, most of my work is focused on the workplace. Right? So there are different kinds of power. There's institutional power, there's political power, and then there's social power, right? And these can all come into play. So for example, in an organization, I'll find that people who have strong institutional power will be described with softening language. I think we all have experienced or know the toxic boss. And so a toxic boss doesn't have to be biased per se, they can be equal opportunity, terrible to people. And you will find, especially if they bring monetary value to a company that their actions are described in the softest, gentlest of terms.
14:15 So back to January 6th, what you have is very strong social power. I mean, I'll just be explicit, although we all know who has social power in this country. Right? So it's the people who are just described as "American" or people who've been president, right? There are more CEOs named John than female CEOs in the Fortune 500.
SWB 14:35 Right.
SW 14:35 And definitely more than Black CEOs. So the majority of people there were white and middle class or upper middle-class, and they were majority male. And these are the people that we have been trained over the course of our lifetimes to speak more gently of because these are the people with power and we speak with sensitivity to power. And there can be real backlash and retaliation when we threaten people's power.
SWB 15:03 Right, so like the toxic boss who screams at his team gets referred to as, "Well, he's just really passionate." Well, so let's talk about what that looks like in the kinds of organizations you're often consulting with: tech companies. What are the kinds of linguistic biases or issues that you see coming up most often there?
SW 15:23 One of the biggest things that I'm seeing as problematic in tech companies is a combination of softening language for people behaving badly and then inflating language for people behaving fine. Right? So, "inflating language" is a term that I have also coined, and this is the converse of softening language. So instead of using gentle language that masks the harmful behavior of somebody with power, we use stronger language that takes what I see as quite reasonable inappropriate behavior by somebody with a more marginalized identity and presents them, inflates it over a threshold into an area of potentially threatening person or "potentially inappropriate person," or "actually threatening person" and "inappropriate person." So in this country, it is most often Black people who are described with inflating language, and there's a direct line right black to slavery, right? Because enslaved people, if they left or caused problems, it was a monetary hit, which was the number one thing.
SWB 16:21 Yeah.
SW 16:21 So you had to keep people in line in order to make them productive and extract wealth from their labor. And then that was replicated with Jim Crow and not just in the South but redlining, there've been so many ways that women of all races and ethnicities: Black people, indigenous people, and I'm here on the West Coast, so also very much Chinese people have had their labor extracted from them. And there were also laws and rules that made it so that they couldn't keep anything. So there's a direct line between what I think of as foundational American issues and the ways that tech companies get set up. Inflating language is one of the biggest things. And particularly if you're at the intersection of these things. So if you're a Black woman, or Latina woman, or Indigenous women have been so removed that that's almost never in tech companies. Or an Asian woman, particularly East Asian women, more than South Asian women. If you do anything but the most traditionally feminine, submissive, self-deprecating—all of the ways that linguistic and indirectional behavior is coded to be very feminine—if you do anything beyond that, there is inflating language to describe you as "problematic" and push back.
17:42 So we were just talking about someone being described as passionate who screams and threatens. Right? I heard that. And then by contrast women who have spoken just with passion about a project have been called "aggressive" or "abrasive." There was a great study done a few years ago of performance evaluations by a linguist who's moved into tech. And they found, by running what's called a corpus analysis, found that the word "abrasive" was only used on women's performance evaluations—a hundred percent of the time and 0% of the time for male-presenting people. Right? So it's this kind of distortion where very bad behavior in tech and elsewhere, I cannot emphasize this enough, such bad behavior. I got driven out of tech by bad behavior, and I only recognized it in retrospect, once I started analyzing it. I thought it was my own individual experience. And one of the things I like to do is let people know this is replicated. This isn't just you, this isn't in your head. You're not behaving badly. You're behaving fine. So I would say that it's that combination of softening bad behavior and not holding people accountable and then inflating very reasonable behavior and saying that people deserve the backlash that they get or the expulsion, et cetera.
SWB 18:59 Yeah. And you see it constantly. I mean, even just those words. I'm sure that even just hearing words like "abrasive," there are people listening who just have that immediate cringe that they go through because it's been applied to them over and over again. And I'm curious, you know, you talked about your own experience, kind of feeling pushed out of tech the first time. And I'm really curious about how those of us who work in the tech industry in roles, particularly that are historically considered more "soft skills," which we can talk about that too, I'm really curious about the people in those roles and the ways that bias plays out in terms of whether they're taken seriously and what people perceive as being the value of their work.
SW 19:42 Let me start with my own personal history, which I understand much better in retrospect.
SWB 19:46 Yeah.
SW 19:46 I started in tech when I had just turned 21. I was like 21 and a month. And I had a baby face, and I'm very short. I don't think your listeners can tell. I think I know a lot of short women who develop sort of lower pitched voices as part of the, "please take me seriously. I'm not a child." But I graduated from school with debt. I knew I wanted to live, which was either Boston or San Francisco and Boston was easier. And it was a mild recession. And the first job I found through the newspaper was admin for a sales and marketing department for a FinTech company. And then that role did not go well for me. I got a lot of extra responsibility and no title change and no more money. So I was just like, "This doesn't seem good." So I left and then I worked for a larger corporation, which was not a good move. That's one of the things I learned, by the way. So I just yesterday invoked a Chinese proverb, which is "dig your well before you're thirsty" as part of the reason to do diversity, equity, and inclusion work in your company. But also If you're starting to feel like your job is a dead end, let me just tell you right now, like, lay that pathway out because I ran in horror from my first job. But I was so focused on running away from, I didn't think about what I was running into. And it wasn't good.
SWB 20:55 Yes.
SW 20:56 And so I took a lot of time to figure it out. So there I was a tech writer and I felt, after a while, very marginalized in a few ways. But one thing is that I felt kind of like Vanna White. Like, I felt like big men would write the important code. And I was standing to the side, like, "Look what the boys coded." Then when I was moving into what now we would call like CHI or UX, sort of interactional stuff, because when you're documenting every screen, logical fallacies or problematic indirections become clear. I would go back to the engineers and I would say, "Hey, I have some issues with these screens. I have some suggestions. I don't think these are logical or you're going to have problems with this, or it doesn't make sense." And they would essentially pat me on the head and be like, "Oh, that's so cute," you know, like, "Just leave the coding to the big boys." Right? I got very tired of not being heard, let alone having my career with no development, no mentorship, nobody looking and saying, "You seem really smart and you're good at analyzing stuff. How can we use you? How can we leverage you? How can we up-skill you?" Like, nada. So I literally credentialed myself so men would have to listen to me, and that's how I ended up in grad school. I took the time I got a career coach and I thought about it. I'm like, how can men listen to me? Well, if I'm their professor, they got no choice. A lot of them will get pretty mad. They're like, "Who's this tiny Brown lady giving me a hard class.?" And I would get some very angry backlash on my student evaluations, which is very similar to the backlash that I see women getting in tech when they stand up for themselves or are assertive in some way.
22:23 So let's talk about, for example, UX, and a lot of people with my degree, with the linguistics degree can go into UX because it's a very natural match in a lot of ways. What I see a lot of is what I call "technical bias" in a company. And I've had even a VP of engineering, I got a report that he would say, "Engineers decide what bugs to fix first. Engineers decide what the product should be." So I was doing something that I call a "culture audit." So companies will bring me in to interview a subset of people and figure out what their bias hotspots are. And then do a survey, write up a report and say, "Here are my top five recommendations. Here's the stuff." What I found was that people who were in the people roles, so customer service reps or people who were a UX were really not being listened to because the technical bias was that engineering was the core. And then to compound that, there was gender bias and often, I think, racial bias because the people in those roles, cause "they don't really matter." "Well, it's okay to hire women for those roles. Like, they're not the important core roles." Or, "It's okay to hire a person of color for that role." So for that company, I said to them, "You have to start listening to these people who are talking to your clients or doing this research and telling you you're not developing the right functionality. You're not solving the bugs that are causing people a lot of grief." That company folded. I've seen that again and again with clients, what I've also seen, and this is true for even technical positions is that internally focused groups are lower prestige and get lower funding and lower care than externally focused groups like sales. And I really think it's just a failure of imagination when it comes to calculating ROI.
24:10 So I have a very, very big client. I was giving them this idea and it doesn't just have to be the identity that you're born with to make you on the receiving end of bias. It can be your position at work. And I was explaining that like, "I think your whole department is," and I was explaining, they were like, "Gasp!" you know? And so they were feeling it was so unfair. And so: internal, female, person of color, and then "about people" which is supposedly less technical, which I'm here to call BS on. It's like this perfect storm of really dismissing people and what they have to say.
SWB 24:40 I think this comes up a lot for some of the people I work with the most, the people I know the best, like user researchers, designers, UX writers, content design people who, what I found, are often the ones who are thinking about inclusive language in their product design discussions, who are advocating for more diverse user research, and who are really wanting to debias their, you know, internal style guides for like, what the UI text is going to say and make sure it's gender inclusive and all of these things. And I'm curious, you know, how do folks who are in those kinds of roles, who are already the subject of so much bias, how can they be effective in also calling out bias in the product?
SW 25:25 I have six domains of anti-bias work that I lay out, right? Calling out bias in any of them is dangerous for anyone who isn't a white male is what studies have shown. So people will ask me questions in training, it comes up all the time in training: "Well, if I'm the recipient of an unconscious emotion," this is something that I've written about, or "If I'm the recipient of this, well, what do I do?" And I say your number one job is to protect yourself, to protect your mental health, to protect your emotional health, and to protect your career health. Right? So we know from studies that calling out bias is dangerous for anyone who is lower in power. And again, it can be social power, it can be institutional power within an organization, it can be political power. Right? I'll tell you that ever since last May and June, there are a lot of people who are interested in doing ally work. By the way, here's a bonus: people like to say, "I want to be an ally," make it a verb. Don't make it a noun. It's a little touchy, but I read somebody saying that to call yourself an ally is like telling people “I'm a good lover.” It's like, you don't get to decide. Right? What you can do is you can say, "I'm interested in doing ally work." It's a verb. And then if other people want to call you an ally, good, like enjoy that. So here, what we have is a lot of people who are looking around and saying, "How can I make a difference? I don't know what to do." The best person is the highest ranking person to do ally work on your behalf.
26:53 So you find the highest ranking person that you think is amenable. It's going to be the whitest person, the most male person. It's probably going to be somebody who is congruent with the gender they were assigned at birth. Right? So those seem to be the most important. What we're seeing is white men who are gay can make it to the tippy top. They've had problems, but sexual orientation doesn't seem to be causing prestige hits for white men. Right? So you find your tippy top person and you explain the problem and you say, "Can you advocate to solve this problem?" This is where I know a lot of white men feel very attacked, very put upon. And so I like to say this to white men in my trainings. I'm like, "You have more power than anyone you know to make a change with literally no damage to your reputation or career and probably even a benefit. So honestly it sounds like maybe a cop out, like, maybe it sounds like I'm saying don't fight the fight, but what I'm saying is be strategic and also allow someone the benefit of feeling like they've done good. There's a really good feeling when you actually have done something good on somebody's behalf. Having said that also there's still a lot of work. You gotta do. You gotta do a lot of pipe laying, a lot of framing, a lot of educating, probably. But if you find somebody with good intentions who is high ranking organizationally and socially, go for it.
SWB 28:15 I love this conversation about essentially engaging people in working on their allyship and asking them to kind of put some of their credibility on the line to advocate for something that they would say that they value. And, you know, I'm curious, you mentioned a minute ago working through a lot of the defense responses and feeling of being blamed and shamed in that process. You know, when somebody hears, right, that, like, you need them to step up. What is your approach to reaching folks and getting them to a place where they're actually not stuck in that defense response and instead, ready to show up for other parties?
SW 28:50 Remember, I was a teaching assistant for sociolinguistics and nobody taught me how to teach. So I would do research on pedagogy, which is the science of teaching. And so I was always reading a room. And I would be so surprised and confused. Like, there I am learning my scholarship, learning my field. And I would be like, "Here's this peer reviewed article on bias and gender. Here's this peer reviewed article on race." And I would read, and I would have people discussing, and I would read resistant body language, like arms crossed. And I would be so confused. So I started working for years on how do I get people to get interested in the reality and not get caught up in whatever is triggering this resistance? One of the biggest things is delabeling and just presenting data and also presenting things as a problem we're co-solving as opposed to blaming. Another thing I like to do, I start every training by talking about what our goals are, which is, I call it the optimized workplace.
SWB 29:54 Yeah.
SW 29:55 What's an optimized workplace culture? People feel seen, heard, and valued. They feel like they belong. There aren't contribution blockers, and they're able to admit to mistakes, call out other people's mistakes, and engage in course corrections. Right? It's very basic. And I have to tell you, it's true, not just for workplaces. It's literally any group you belong to: a family, friendship circle, a team, a band. All of these foundational principles of human organizations hold. So first, I like to start and say, "This is where we're going. Everybody wants this," and I'm like, "And everybody benefits." Because there are a lot of ways that people feel like, "For diversity equity inclusion to succeed, it means I'm going to lose something." It's like, when I say, "I think you need to diversify your leadership team," and executives get very unhappy and I'm like, grow your company. Add more leaders. I'm like, "I'm not saying you got to lose your job."
SWB 30:47 Sometimes maybe they should, but that's a different story. Yes.
SW 30:50 Oh I know, I know. But this is me briefing executives, right? It's not the same. So I'm always talking about, sort of like, additive, and positive, and co-solving. Right? And then I'm like, the optimized workplace culture and being intentional about your workplace culture has been shown again and again to lead to market-leading results. It's just win, win, win, win, win. And the other thing that works really well is, I like to present right up front: we share the blame. I say a hundred percent of humans are biased. Especially in foundational training, I lay out the scientific and cultural way our brains are programmed for bias. We can only process so much information at a time. We've got a tribal limit of about 150 people that we can see as "us." Great for the majority of human history, not great for modern times, right? And then our cultural programming feeds us distorted data for the entirety of our lives. And so we're making our judgments based on bad data. So I try to remove the blame. It's not your fault that you were born with a human brain. It's not your fault that your entire lifetime you've been fed garbage distorted data. And it's not your fault you were born into the body you were born into, you're born into the body of a white guy in middle-class? Congratulations. Good for you. Is it your fault? No. I say, but it is your responsibility, once you learn things, to make sure that you are looking for problems and then using your power to address them.
SWB 32:21 Yes. I love this because in tech, I think there is such a bias toward problem solving, sort of like a "fix it" culture. And when you can present things in ways that people feel like they can be part of fixing things, you can get a lot of buy in for that.
SW 32:33 I literally have a slide that it just says, "Bias is suboptimal." I present it almost every training. Here's our goal: let's optimize processes. I've done so much work with engineers over the years. Right? You know, tech pushed me out and then it brought me back, and then it brought me back again. One of the things I liked most about academia was the teaching and the ongoing relationships I could build with people. I have former undergrads bringing me into their companies. They're 30 now. They find me and they're like, "Hey Professor Wertheim, I'll still remember the stuff that you taught me." And I checked and I'm like, that's 2009. Right? They're like, " I need you to teach that to people in my company." And so they're bringing me in, but that is because I had a 12 or 15 week relationship with them, which really lets you do some paradigm shifting and some mental model shifting in people's brains. And now I only get people for like maybe half a day at a time if I'm lucky. It's often just one or two hours at a time. And so I see that as my biggest challenge. What I'm working on this year is building packages. Where we keep on coming back and have people working to implement their new knowledge and then come back in sort of like action labs. This is one of my biggest developments for 2021, because I think it's even more satisfying to bridge what we call the "Knowing-Doing Gap."
SWB 33:50 Yeah. Well, if folks are interested in bridging that gap and kind of getting through from thinking to the doing part, where can they find out more about your consulting work and maybe bring you into their companies?
SW 33:59 My website http://www.worthwhileconsulting.com/ is a great way. People email me on LinkedIn. People email me by the website. And I also would like to recommend very sincerely that people sign up for my newsletter because it's mostly me writing about current events through an analytical lens and giving people frameworks and language to talk about things and relating it to the workplace. I send out like one or two a month.
SWB 34:26 Suzanne, thank you so much for being on today. I'm so excited to have been able to talk to you about all of this.
34:40 Suzanne, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something that I know a lot of our listeners experience, which is language policing. So many people, particularly women have been told things like, "Well, you need more leadership presence to get that promotion." And often get really vague, I would say biased, feedback. And I'm curious if we can talk a little bit about some of the ways that we inject gendered and racist bias into our assessments of people's language.
SW 35:10 This is a great question that has bothered me so much that I reverse engineered a whole training to address it. When I put it together, there was an article that came out about "Ladies: Stop Saying 'Just.'"
SWB 35:22 Yes.
SW 35:23 And it had like 4 million views, and my head exploded. And I'm like, "This pile of bullshit has 4 million views?" Real science isn't easy, and real science isn't dramatic. So I will not give you the nine pragmatic functions of "just," and how seeing "just" actually in one of those functions seems to be aligned with the idea of not bullying and psychological safety that came up in Google's Project Aristotle.
SWB 35:50 Yes.
SW 35:50 And how to have team dynamics. And I go through it, I'm like, "Here are what the top functional teams do at Google. Here's what using 'just' in this way does." So I would argue that using "just" appropriately is actually making your team more appropriate and more functional. Okay. So number one, women have their behavior policed more than people who do not present as female. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to say "male and female," acknowledging that what I mean is "male-presenting" and "female-presenting" because in my research, it's the perception and not the gender identity, but the perception of gender identity. And this also comes from transgender data where I read these wonderful reports from people who have transitioned while they're working. And they'll talk about, I mean, it's always the same. If you transitioned to presenting as female, my God do people treat you differently in a much worse way, and you're like, "Whew." And when you transitioned to presenting as male, the people's sociolinguistic behavior with you, it becomes much more respectful. There's much more uptake. So the number one thing is that there is incredible monitoring of women's bodies and women's behavior for very complex reasons that I don't have time to get into. But oh, let me give you an example though. Resting bitch face. No male equivalent, no male equivalent because people don't care if men look serious. But people, there's so much feedback where women, especially women of color, are told things like, "You should smile." And so white women are told things more like, "You're much prettier when your smile," or "You look so much friendlier when you smile." And Black women are told things like, "You look so angry when you don't smile, you look so aggressive when you don't smile."
37:30 So that's monitoring point one. Point two is the linguistic monitoring. Women have been told, I mean, probably as old as time, but in my lifetime, there are different things that women are told that they shouldn't do because it's holding them back. In the eighties before I was really working, people were looking at something called tag questions that made you sound so weak and so feminine. So no tag question is "It's a nice day out." Tag question is "It's a nice day out, isn't it?" So women were told, "Stop doing tag questions. That's what's holding you back from work. Wear men's blazers with big shoulders to be more manly. And that's going to get you to the top of the corporate ladder." P.S. it didn't. Tag questions didn't matter. And it didn't. So two things, the first thing is that it's almost always complete bullshit linguistic analysis because it's not a real analysis, and point two, very often men, male-presenting people are doing the exact same thing and nobody cares. So right now, what do people care about is something called uptalk. So it's rising a tone at the end of the sentence. Like this. Women are told all the time: "It makes you sound insecure. It makes you sound this." I have a colleague who moved from sociolinguistics into tech. He works on chatbots now for med tech, and his dissertation was in part on uptalk. He had people listen to recordings and hear what they heard, and men are using uptalk all the time. And he heard male doctors use it to sound more approachable, more caring. Nobody said, "Oh, that male doctor, it doesn't sound like he has expertise." They just ranked him as sounding very caring and approachable. But a female doctor is going to be told, "Oh, you don't sound like you know what you're talking about." Right? So it's also this very limited policing.
39:07 Then on top of that, here's the kicker. It doesn't matter what you say because gender bias skews performance evaluations downward, period. And what we have now is two great things, which is a lot of data from people who have transitioned their gender presentation while working. So that, that gender transition now is happening more and more before the work world. I have so much empathy and sympathy for people who have transitioned while working, because how difficult their life has been to live without an appropriate gender presentation, to not have gender confirming presentation. But as a scientist, The data from them is so good that I'm like, "Thank you for your sacrifice." Data is amazing and it's all completely consistent. So we have transgender data, so there's a person who was a biologist at Stanford who unfortunately died a few years ago. He had transitioned while a professor and would tell stories from his time female-presenting at MIT or whatever. The famous story that he would tell his students and I had read about was after transitioning, he presented at a conference and he walked by and he overheard somebody saying, "Oh, so-and-so's seminar was so great today. But then again, his work is so much better than his sister's."
40:20 And then I asked people to co-solve the problem. I'm like, "What's the problem here?" And all the women are like, "Yeah, he is his sister." Right? And what I found when I presented this was that men, people who had been assigned male at birth were so resistant at the very concept of gender bias that they would say, "Oh, but there's another variable of time." I thought I'd removed all the variables to prove that gender bias was real in performance evaluation. And they're like, "Well, but time had passed during his transition. So maybe he was better at presenting now." So then I started looking for things where the only thing was different, so a completely online presentation. And I found some academic studies, and I found lay person studies. And again, and again, and again, the data still shows that to be perceived of as female, even if you're a male person, you switch your name, suddenly you are seen as, you are presumed incompetent, you get pushback. You get told that you're forcing ideas on people, and then even measurable objective things are judged as doing them worse. So there was an academic study where TAs pretended to be the other one for an entirely online, entirely written class. And the female persona who half the time was female and half the time was male but always presenting as a female persona, was judged as delivering assignments later than her male counterpart. But it had been, it was a, it was a study. So it had been released at exactly measurably to the second at the same time. Right? So my point is who gives an F about what you're saying if just being perceived as female means that your performance evaluation is skewed downward and a male performance evaluation is skewed upward? So my advice is, A, bring me into the company. So everybody gets it, but let it go.
SWB 42:15 One of the things that I find with folks is that they can spend all of this time and energy attempting to thread that needle of, like, assertive but not aggressive, right? And it's incredibly time-consuming, it creates all of this angst. And the result is actually that they come out the other end feeling unconfident, full of self doubt, right? Because they've just spent so much time trying to figure out how to win a game that they literally cannot win. And I think it can really sort of add to some of the self-blame. And so I love this advice that's kind of like, this is not yours to fix. It doesn't mean you don't have to, like, live in that world, but even just to not internalize that as something you're doing, or that's something that if you just figured out this magical equation, you could get it right, I think it's really helpful.
SW 43:00 I think doing self-care about our opinion of ourselves is one of the most difficult kinds of self-care that we can do, sort of sitting in and digging things out, and picking up, and pulling them out, and taking a look, and being like, "Does this serve me?" You know, "Is this something that comes from me or it was this shoved in me from the outside in a way that's not good for me?" And the thing I'm going to add to that is that all of that trying to thread the needle? It's so expensive in terms of cognitive load and emotional load, and that's especially amplified for women of color. So I do these interviews where I'd go in, and so many people tell me, "I can't be myself at work. I am fully monitoring all the time to make sure that I'm low affect. That my voice is low." This is somebody who, with their friends, is going to be very exuberant, joke a lot, maybe be a little snide, be loud. They feel like they are a shadow of themselves when they come to work. And so I think about a lot who has a low cost to show up as themselves at work and who has a high cost? And associated with the high cost is burnout. So how can you lower the costs for yourself? And some of that has to be maybe you thread the needle, but you're like, it's a game. And it's not like "I'm bad."
SWB 44:16 Oh, this is such a beautiful note to end on—just letting go of some of that shame and self-blame. Suzanne, thank you again so much for being on today. I hope everybody goes and checks out http://www.worthwhileconsulting.com/, follows you on LinkedIn, gets the newsletter. It's a true pleasure to talk with you.
SW 44:34 It's really been a pleasure to talk with you as well. Thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you so much for having some of the best questions.
SWB 44:43 Okay. Um, wow. So full disclosure, Suzanne, and I kept talking for like an hour after this, and now I'm scheming ways that I can keep working with her. Right? So, okay, anyway, let's get to our last little segment here that is called You've Got This. That's where we take what we learned from our guest and look at how we might apply it in our lives. So for that, I want to go back to that last thing that Suzanne said about how hard it is to give some self-care to our opinion of ourselves. Woof. And I know how true this is. So in the group coaching program that I run for tech and design leaders, we talk a lot about things like imposter syndrome and self-doubt, but unlike so many other conversations about those things that I see, I refuse to look at those things as personal failings. There is nothing wrong with you if you suffer from those feelings. They're actually rational and reasonable responses to a world that is biased, to a world that has routinely policed people's voices who don't fit into a really, really narrow category. So I think what we actually need to do is unlearn the garbage messages, and that takes getting out of our heads a little bit, being able to see those messages about things like leadership presence or being too abrasive or whatever it is that you've been getting as someone else's bias and not your personal failing, not something that if you just try it a little harder, you could get it right.
46:09 So, if you're wondering how to do that, I have some good news. I've thought about this a lot. So there's a few questions I would recommend you ask yourself. First up: what do you know is true about yourself? What strengths do you have? What traits are you proud of? Asking yourself those questions can be so valuable and kind of getting some positive grounding to help you make sense of these external messages you're receiving and see, do they align or do they not align with what you know is true about yourself? The other thing though, is that it's so helpful to ask, "Well, where do my strengths sometimes get in the way? For me, for example, I know that I have a really powerful perspective, I'll say. Strong opinions, strong feelings, right? And that is wonderful. I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't want to change that about myself, but what it means is that there are things I need to watch. For example, I need to be careful about assuming and right just because my point of view happens to be strong on a subject. Or relying too much on my perception instead of asking other people for theirs. This matters so much because the more clarity you have about yourself, not from a judgmental cruel place, but just getting some clarity on yourself, the better you can filter all of that feedback you get and decide what to do with it instead of just sort of, like, internalizing all of it and beating yourself up.
47:27 For example, I know that between my strong point of view and my loud voice I need to be careful talking over people. And so if I get feedback like that, it's on me to pause, listen, figure out how to adjust. But if I get feedback that I'm, let's say, aggressive, I know that that's not actually useful and it's not really very true. It's not very specific, and I can more easily let that shit go because I know some things about myself. So that is one piece: having that sort of stake in the ground where you say "No, I know some things that are true about me. And I can use that to filter out some of these messages." The second thing I would recommend doing is really start taking a look at your inner critic. You know what I mean, right? Like, that little voice in your head that every time you're trying to do something exciting or important that whispers like, "Maybe you shouldn't. Maybe you suck," whatever it is that you are says, right? Oftentimes that inner critic voice, it's just repeating the same bias to trash we've been told. So I recommend spending some time reflecting. When does that inner critic tend to jump in for you? What does it say? How does it speak? Who does it sound like? Because you can actually learn a lot about where that critic comes from, and you can start to recognize it's not just in your head. It's not something that is true. It is typically a learned, ingested message you got somewhere else, oftentimes from a toxic boss, or a sexist teacher, or a racist society. Once you start doing that, it starts to help you get some distance. Again, it's all about being able to take care of yourself, take care of your opinion of yourself, by being able to filter out some of these messages and not just let it all in quite so much. If you want some more resources on this head over to activevoicehq.com/podcast. I will be posting up a couple of worksheets from my group program specifically on unpacking that inner critic, plus a bunch of other links and resources on this. You've got this.
49:28 That's it for this week's episode of Strong Feelings. I'm your host Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at activevoicehq.com and get all the past episodes, show notes, and full transcripts for this and every episode at strongfeelings.co. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is Deprogrammed by Philly's own Blowdryer. Check them out at https://blowdryer.bandcamp.com/. Huge thanks to Dr. Suzanne Wertheim for being our guest today, and thank you for listening. If you liked our show, please subscribe and rate us wherever you listen to podcasts. See you next time.