To date, The Wing has offered coworking and community services to paying members who can visit one of its eight physical locations in six cities across the US. But now, CEO Audrey Gelman says, it’s opening a digital hiring marketplace for those members, to help them hire each other.

“We have an app, so members message each other,” Gelman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. “We recruit from it. A quarter of our employees are our former members, who we’ve found largely through our app, meaning engineers and product designers, etc. And now, we’re releasing a product where our members can post jobs and hire each other.”

Separating this new hiring service from much larger platforms, such as LinkedIn, is the fact that The Wing was designed to serve women and gender nonbinary people. Gelman said that with LinkedIn and some of its competitors, “some guys think it’s a dating platform and send messages to that effect,” but there are other facets of hiring bias she’s hoping to combat, too.

“Women are less likely to apply for jobs if they don’t have exactly the number of years of experience, so we coach people about the right way to post jobs to discourage that and to encourage people who may have untraditional backgrounds, etc., to apply,” she said. “And just, obviously, making sure that we’re building in safety and moderation from the very beginning, rather than having to add it after a scandal.”

If all goes well, The Wing may expand into other digital services in the future, she noted.

“Women are so multifaceted,” Gelman said. “They take off and on hats so quickly. And then, they’re opening up about postpartum stuff or talking about some of the most personal things going on in their life. So, I think we have permission to productize and create value for women around a lot of different times in their life. This is just the first one we’re focusing on.”

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Audrey. Listen to the full interview by subscribing to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.

Kara Swisher: Hi, I’m Kara Swisher, editor-at-large of Recode. You may know me as someone who loves to call middle-aged white men “bossy,” but in my spare time I talk tech, and you’re listening to Recode Decode from the Vox Media Podcast Network. 

Today in the red chair is Audrey Gelman, the co-founder and CEO of The Wing, which is a coworking space designed for women with eight locations around the country. The day this podcast comes out, The Wing is also launching a digital hiring marketplace for its members. Audrey, welcome to Recode Decode.

Audrey Gelman: Thank you very much. Longtime listener, first-time guest.

Very funny, Audrey. So I want to talk a little about a lot of things, but I just want to note that Audrey is going to have a baby really soon, and she luckily lumbered herself down here to do this podcast. So I really appreciate your being here. This is her first child so it’s going to be a very exciting time for you. It’s a really good time to talk about women in the workplace and how women work. Why don’t you give people some background about you and how you started The Wing.

Sure.

Because it’s really a lovely place: It’s like WeWork, but not annoying. I don’t know how else to put it, but you don’t have to say that.

Your words, not mine.

All right. So explain to everyone how you got to do this.

Sure. I grew up in New York City, and my dream was to work in politics, so I started out in my 20s working on campaigns and in government, and I was living a very nomadic lifestyle. I was on the Acela… 

Who’d you work for?

I worked for Hillary. Then I worked in New York City politics. I did some races against Eliot Spitzer and other folks like that, and then worked at a consulting firm, SKDKnickerbocker. I was constantly on the Acela, working in every place except a desk, like a lot of young people. I was schlepping a lot, to be honest. The original idea for The Wing really came from that need of a place that you could go in the city where you could get some work done.

But there had been places. WeWork had been in existence. What do you mean by schlepping? You just didn’t have somewhere to go or you worked in coffee shops or …

Yeah, random coffee shops and just dealing with the indignity of a guy hitting on you, or it being loud or dirty or gross and just not having …

Whether you have wifi or not.

Right, and consistent wifi, just inconsistent everything. Also, I think that there’s men … My husband, God bless him, he gets to roll out of bed and go to work. It’s different for women. There were other things I needed, too. I didn’t want to pack my entire bathroom into my shoulder bag and get a hernia or whatever. So I had this idea of a pit stop almost. Then I met my partner, Lauren Kassan, and she had built physical businesses, really understood construction and operations, and I had no idea how to do any of that, and we really learned about the history of women’s clubs, and there had actually been about 5,000 of them.

They’re around. I just saw someone the other day in Indiana. We weren’t sure it was happening, what that was for, but there’d been a lot of women’s clubs with luncheons and things like that.

There’s brass plaques that you’ll see on a building that’s like The Women’s Club of Indianapolis.

DC.

But it’s sort of, at least for me, like my grandmother’s generation, they were dying out, and she really believed it could be a place for community, and so we had this idea of resurrecting the concept of the historical women’s club with some of the convenience of a pit stop, like women’s utopia with bathrooms and showers.

Talk a little about women’s clubs, because we’ll talk about … You have men allowed to join, correct?

Mm-hmm.

We’ll get to that in a second, but the history of women’s clubs, what were you trying to get at for that part of it?

For all the women’s studies classes I had taken in college, I knew very little about them, but then we worked with a historian named Alexis Coe. She’d written her thesis on it, and there were thousands of these clubs. They played a huge role in suffrage and the overall advancement of women in this country. They were a really powerful force of organizing and spaces.

Voting.

Yeah, voting. Spaces for women to scheme and plot, honestly. They had just gone out of fashion, but the idea of women gathering together was very, very powerful. So we pored over the menus, the membership cards, all the ephemera from these clubs, and we were very inspired to create something that was obviously more modern and progressive and diverse, but that had some of the spirit of those clubs.

All right. You had not done anything like this, right? You had not done any kind of …

No. I mean, I’d never even, basically, worked in the private sector. I’d really only worked in government and on campaigns. I was pretty unqualified, I would say.

So how did you go raise money to do this? How much have you raised?

To date, we’ve raised $117 million.

Wow. That’s good for a first-time entrepreneur.

Yeah, in two years. I mean, the other thing was, I’m a public school kid. I didn’t have friends and family that were like investors, you know?

Mm-hmm.

I had friends of friends of friends and just was relentless and bugged people and got meetings, and then they acquiesced and introduced me to other people. We finally got a couple people who knew what they were doing and that we really liked to invest as angels.

So talk to me about the fundraising, because you would be compared to WeWork in terms of … Did you think of it, that it had already been in existence? How did you think about yourself as a different thing? By the way, they’re under a lot of pressure right now with the IPO, and they’re ridonkulous as one, but go ahead, which is different. It doesn’t mean anything about the business, but they definitely have a valuation that’s way out of line, I think, a lot of people feel. Talk about how you thought of it and especially in relation to them.

The fundamentals of our business are really different. We don’t take spaces and cut them up and have desks or anything like that. It’s an annual subscription business. It was really, the vision was also to build a brand. For us, we have an e-commerce business associated with The Wing that does really well and there’s girls in Oklahoma that want to wear Wing T-shirts and have Wing key chains, and it represents something powerful, that it’s not just, again, a desk.

In terms of fundraising, I think we did, I would say, zag when everyone else was zigging. I felt very strongly that to build real community and to ever get to a place where you’re going to take it to a massive scale digitally, you have to start locally and in real life. Even Facebook, to create the behavior and the escape velocity, they needed the physical college campuses. Originally, that’s where that behavior took hold. So we were like, “No, we’re going to do a physical space.” It is not the direction investors were keen on, but it’s really paid off for us because I think, again, it’s built that credibility.

Meaning that it was a club versus just a coworking space.

We didn’t know how …

If people work there.

It was an experiment, honestly. We didn’t know how people were going to use it. What we found was that people were there all day long working. They lived their whole lives there. They were showering there. They were working there. They were attending events. They were making friends. They were starting businesses, and then they were also eating. We were like, “Okay, we got to figure out how to do a cafe.” So a lot of it just came from studying the way that people actually use the space.

But do you see it? Do you see yourself as comparable? Because people always like to make comparables to a WeWork, because you’re expanding across the country right now.

We are. We have. We’re expanding our physical footprint. We’re opening our first international location next month in London. We do have physical spaces, but again, the actual fundamentals of the business is really different because it’s not taking a real estate, cutting it up and re-releasing it. It’s about building a community, and over half of our members don’t use The Wing as their office. They use it as a place, as a community, as a network, as a place to meet people. They get clients from the network and they attend events, etc. So it’s a much broader, addressable market. It’s very different, even though people do take their laptops there, some of our members, and work for the day.

But you don’t consider it, though. You’re not that kind of idea.

No, that’s not the growth plan that we have. Again, the fundamentals of the two businesses look very, very different.

All right. I want to talk about the business in particular, but explain to people what the experience is when they come in. It’s a really unique environment. Explain walking someone through a Wing. There’s several in New York. Is that two in New York?

We have three.

Three in New York.

By the winter, we’ll have six.

In New York, in the city?

Yeah, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. I think that women spend their entire lives worrying and caring about other people. There is something that is profoundly liberating about walking into a space and feeling like someone has been worrying and caring about you, and the way that people describe it is really like your shoulders relax and release and you just feel this calm, and we call it the warm fuzzy feeling, but it is an amazing feeling that is hard to describe or quantify. The world is a men’s club, you know?

Right.

When you think about just everything from office temperatures to the height of shelves to the ergonomics of chairs, everything is built with a 6-foot-1 guy in a suit in mind. That’s the standard. When you walk into The Wing, we have really tried to create a new world for women.

Talk about what you try to do there. I mean, walk through, say, a typical Wing.

Sure. There’s spaces to cowork, so you’ll find people with their laptop and a cup of coffee working for the day. There’s meeting rooms. There’s a cafe. We do events at night. We have childcare. We introduced The Little Wing, so you can leave your kid.

Explain that, because that’s unusual.

I mean, it was interesting because my co-founder, when we raised a round for capital, she was eight months pregnant, and it’s supremely difficult, and we were really, again, thinking about innovation in the business, what new things we could create that would make women’s lives easier, and everyone told us, “It is impossible to do childcare. That’s why every big company in the world doesn’t have it. It’s just too hard. There’s too much oversight and regulation,” and we were like, “Anything is possible.” 

It’s just that you don’t have people at the top that really are affected or care enough to break through the bricks. So we figured it out, and it’s a childcare space where you can leave your child for up to three hours. It’s $25 for three hours, and you can go and attend an event, have a meeting, take a shower, or whatever it is you need to do. There’s classes. They meet other kids. You meet other moms and parents. It’s been really incredible to watch.

If they come into work for three hours, have a meeting, they can leave their child there?

Yeah, or go to a talk or an event or things like that. Our staff use it. Our members use it. I am going to use it. It is possible, is really what we learned.

Do you think about extending it? Because three hours isn’t … that long.

Yeah. I mean, it’s not daycare. For us, it was about iterative steps forward to make life easier for women, not necessarily the entire leap, but we’re continuing to figure out how we can extend the business and what we hear from members is, “It’s a lifesaver.”

Right. So you have that, you have showers, you have an ability, so you’re trying to sort of be an … It is an office. It’s an office/gym. You don’t have a gym in there.

We don’t, yet. I mean, people work there for the day or they’re using it, again, between things. They’ll run over the bridge and then take a shower there and then go to meetings for the day. People will land from planes and go directly to The Wing rather than going to their hotel. It’s very convenient for travel and just, again, the nomadic. Women live six lives in one day.

Sure. Absolutely. You’ll have six in New York, but where are you expanding to? You’re trying to, with taking this $117 million, you’re expanding.

Yes, in a lot of different ways, not just physically, but we are in Boston, we’re in Chicago, we’re in LA, we’re in San Francisco, we’re in Washington, DC, and soon to be London, as well.

Your plans are to go all over the country? To smaller cities, to …

We’ve definitely been in dense, urban environments, but we have some interesting things coming up in the future that relate to smaller markets. But I mean, London or in New York or LA, you can have so many, and we’re …

So many locations.

I love the idea of just, it’s so convenient. It’s wherever you are and it’s in your neighborhood.

Which is a little like the Soho House. I mean, there’s these ideas around them. It’s a really interesting trend, these houses, because there’s Soho House, there’s WeWork, there’s a ton of coworking spaces. It spells the end of the office for a lot, for not everybody, but many people.

American life used to be defined by clubs that you’re a part of. For women, it was the Junior League and these kind of rites of passage.

Sure.

And it was where you made your friends and had your connections, and all of that died out. I think that it’s both a reaction to the hyper-digitalization and isolation and loneliness to want to find your people and your tribe and community, and just that, fundamentally, people need that to be happy and survive.

When we get back, we’re going to talk about the digitization because you’re starting a digital network. When you have this amount of money you raised, and, obviously, WeWork is the poster child for this. The valuations are crazy. How do you describe yourself, because you’re starting a tech element of it but you’re not a tech company.

Again, I think that, at some point soon, everything will be a tech company in some ways.

We can’t do that.

Fair, but I think that we’re — it’s a community, and, again, we had a strong conviction that the way to build a community, even one that’s going to be global one day, is to start in a smaller, atomized way where you really learn how to build community between people and create meaningful connections.

Physical community?

Yes. In our case, yes, but there are so many different examples of it. There’s Run Club, it’s amazing. But I think for us, yes, we felt that to create ultimately what we believe is going to be a global community, a global brand, you start small, actually, rather than just turn it on and expect the world to come.

We’re here with Audrey Gelman. She’s the CEO of The Wing, which, I don’t want to call it … It’s not just a coworking space. It’s a community space for women. Let’s be clear, because I’ve already gotten a million tweets from people: Mostly women join there. Is that right? Is that correct?

Yeah, but we do not ask for your gender identity or expression and we have a really diverse community that includes trans women, folks who are gender non-binary. Our members are taking meetings with men all the time, but yes, it began as and really exists as a space and a community that was designed for women.

You do not stop men from joining, though. Correct?

No.

I can answer the premise. People ask me that about The Wing all the time. I’m like, “I think, yes, of course.”

No, we don’t taze them or anything.

No, just a little. Just a tiny taze. Just a little bit when you touch the button or something. No, but they’re allowed in this space? 

Yes.

But you do think it’s important to have women, not “only,” women …

Autonomous women’s spaces was the vision. Again, I think that the world is, in so many ways, designed for men. There’s more guys named Stanley on that Forbes Innovation …

Oh yeah. We’ll get to that in a minute. We hear about how many Michaels there are. 

Yeah. Johns, James, it’s outrageous. 

This is a Forbes list of innovative people and they somehow managed to only have one woman.

And they couldn’t even find her picture.

I know. We weren’t on it. There are lots of people.

I mean, I didn’t expect to be, but yeah, I just think this is the status quo, and sort of what our vision was was to create autonomous women’s spaces. When you do that, and even in women’s colleges, you create the environment where women can take greater risks, have more confidence. No one’s talking over them, no one’s interrupting them. People joke, like you sneeze at The Wing and like 16 people say, “God bless you.” It’s just, it’s different. It really, really is.

It is. It’s such a pleasure to go there, I have to say. 

Yeah. So, it’s just different. And the truth is, what you realize when you are in an environment that, again, is not women-only but is the majority of the people there are women, the atmosphere is totally different. And what we’ve seen is that women are like, “I’m going to quit my job. I found my kitchen cabinet of people who are going to help me launch my startup.” My publicist, my book editor, just everyone around me, the person who’s designing my website, my first ambassador, and you can really find your people. And once you do that, you can take greater risks professionally.

Yeah, it’s interesting, because I had dubiousness about any clubs of any kind, but it was really interesting entering there. It was so pleasant. It was such a pleasant environment, which I thought was interesting. And the other part was, it got me thinking, when I first came out as a gay person, when I went to Provincetown for the first time, and it was like, “Whoa, this is what life would be like if …” It was a lovely moment, and I don’t think people recognize how much they fit into a world versus a world fitting them kind of thing.

And that’s why, what we’ve done is said, “Okay, we’re going to move the furniture, change the paradigm.” We design 80 percent of our own furniture in our spaces. 

How is it different?

It’s different because the ergonomics of the average chair are designed for a 6’1” man, and all these standards were set in place, largely in the ’60s. And what we’ve done is, we’ve done a ton of research and learned how to really design things where your feet can touch the floor.

Right. My feet never touch the floor, Audrey. 

They will at The Wing. Well, I’m 5-1, so I understand. 

Yeah.

But I think that part of it is, someone’s like, “Oh, my feminism is when the temperature’s set to 72 degrees,” or something.

Right, right, right. I guess. Yeah, that’s true. All right. So, talk about, one of the things is talking about whether you’re a … I don’t think you’re a technology company, but I’m not the one deciding. 

We’re very young.

You’re very young. So, talk about what you’re doing now, this new thing that you’re doing.

Sure. So, one of the first things we heard from members was, again, we just watched them, this sort of economic opportunity, get created out of thin air, and what they wanted the ability to do was what they were doing in-person with their cards and scribbling their names down on a piece of paper and their email address, which was hire each other and really be able to build their businesses. 

1,800 businesses are started by women literally every day in this country, which is amazing, and what we’ve done with this product is, we have an app, so members message each other. We recruit from it. A quarter of our employees are our former members, who we’ve found largely through our app, meaning engineers and product designers, etc. And now, we’re releasing a product where our members can post jobs and hire each other.

So, LinkedIn.

It’s essentially like a LinkedIn product. But the problem is that LinkedIn and some of the other dominant hiring platforms have a ton of bias around women, and some guys think it’s a dating platform and send messages to that effect. So, for us, we’re really building a community-driven hiring marketplace where our members get to do the thing that they’re doing already. 

So, explain how it works. People who join The Wing can use it to put their resume, or what?

You can post a job. Right now, we had a bunch of members start doing it, and populate jobs. There’s jobs at Disney, Facebook, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You post the job, you’re able to inquire and contact the person about it, send them your resume and connect. And then, similarly, you can say, “I’m a freelance writer and I’m looking for beauty opportunities,” to write about beauty or something, and sort of amplify, signal boost what you’re looking for professionally, and then people can find you that way.

Mm-hmm. So, it’s just a simple jobs platform, really? 

It is a simple job. But the community is what’s so special, which is that, again, you have in two seconds, it’s not even launched, that level of quality of jobs and that level of quality of candidates and the ability for them to find each other. 

So, how do … They find each other on the app? Or at the events? 

Yeah, there’s a feed and we have an algorithm that matches you with people who have lots of things in common with you, new friends. 

Do you have a digital element on The Wing right now? 

Yeah. We have an app. Yeah. 

You have an app. And then people just book things, like book rooms, and …

Yeah. You can RSVP to events, you can say, “Oh, I want to go see Gloria Steinem speak,” whatever, and then you have a profile. You can message with people, you can group message. I’m in a group message with all the women in my neighborhood who are Wing members, and then, now, you can post jobs and apply for jobs and hire each other. 

Mm-hmm. So, is this something you think is important for your business? Are you expecting money off of this? What’s the plan?

Again, it’s really about solving problems for women. I think we have created, in some ways, a community and a social network that exists physically throughout our spaces. Now, we’re leveraging that into a digital platform and allowing our members to connect and get value and economic opportunity without even walking into the space. 

When you think about creating these virtual communities, it’s an interesting thing, because one of the problems is, sometimes people have millions of social networks, essentially, or millions of ways to connect. Talk a little bit about how you think this is different. Right now, it’s just jobs, but do you see it as a bigger conceptual idea?

Definitely. That’s what we’re building. We’re just doing it step by step and really learning how to do each thing in an excellent way and solve problems for women, and again, do it differently, do it without bias. Our tech team is run by a woman who’s incredible, Nickey Skarstad. She came from Airbnb and Etsy. And again, we’re trying to approach all the problems around bias.

Such as? Could you explain that?

Just, women are less likely to apply for jobs if they don’t have exactly the number of years of experience, so we coach people about the right way to post jobs to discourage that, and to encourage people who may have untraditional backgrounds, etc., to apply. And just, obviously, making sure that we’re building in safety and moderation from the very beginning, rather than having to add it after a scandal. 

Right. Yeah, I don’t think you’re going to get a lot of problems like that, though, correct?

But we’re going to grow.

Right. 

I think you have to set rules from the beginning. 

Right. Well, yes, yes. You know that’s my thing. That’s my big thing that I talk about almost continually, until my face falls off. 

But it’s not going to be a social network, where people can just discuss being a new mother or about things like that? 

That’s the idea. 

Right.

Again, this is where we’re starting, and we’re really going to study, how can we be able to matchmake in terms of jobs and economic opportunity and gigs, too? Most of these dominant jobs platforms are not meant for project-based work, either, and so that’s what a lot of our members do. But no, our members, again, they’re coming and they’re working. Again, women are so multifaceted. They take off and on hats so quickly. And then, they’re opening up about postpartum stuff or talking about some of the most personal things going on in their life. So, I think we have permission to productize and create value for women around a lot of different times in their life. This is just the first one we’re focusing on.

Sure. Talk about that a little bit, because one of the things you touched on is that the things are not designed from the get-go. Just like clubs aren’t designed, furniture’s not designed from the get-go. What do you think happens on social networks now that’s a problem? Besides … Okay, we need six hours for this. 

I think that it’s interesting. I remember being on Facebook and being so excited to get my Oberlin email address and make my profile. I just think that, also, these platforms are so big. They’re so big, they’re just riddled with bots and Russians and trolls and Nazis, and everyone kind of throws up their arms. 

You don’t have those on yours? Not yet.

Knocking on wood. 

Yeah.

No, we don’t. But I think that you’re going to encounter issues, you just have to make those rules from the beginning and know that they’re going to happen. You know what I mean? 

Right. Right. 

And I think that the problem is, the people have this assumption that either assume good intent … I think you’ve just seen bad intent, honestly, from the beginning of design around that.

Right. Me, too. Right. 

But yeah. It’s like, these platforms feel so impersonal. LinkedIn is very, very useful, but also one of the weirdest things someone can do is wish you a happy birthday on LinkedIn. You’re just like, shudder, you know? So, I think that they’re just so big and impersonal, and you don’t bring your full self to them, you bring sort of your work version. And a lot of — the thing that we’ve believed about The Wing is that women are multifaceted. They’re professional, ambitious, they also have tons of other stuff going on. You have to make room for all of that.

Are you worried that … A lot of the women’s communities online haven’t thrived. iVillage was one of the first ones, if you remember, and that was aimed at a wide range of women’s experiences, I know. But lots of them haven’t thrived. Did you think about that, like what it takes to allow them to thrive?

Again, I think that you start with atomization and super-high engagement, and you grow from there rather than just say, “We’re going to be a massive global community and we’re opening the floodgates.” So, that’s been our strategy, to be incremental, build real bases in different cities and regions rather than just say, sort of, “Come one, come all,” right away.

Right. So, this is for all Wing members? Or everybody? 

Today, it’s for all Wing members. 

Right. So, it’s just people who are there, so it’s by nature … How many members do you have now? 

We have 10,000 today.

10,000. So, it’s just for that much, you’re building them their own social network, essentially?

Correct. 

And then, do you hope to make it larger? Is that … Because again, these women’s sites have not thrived. 

Yeah. And I think, again, there’s a lot of things that haven’t, that just because something hasn’t worked in one form …

I agree, I agree.

But yes, the idea is to make it much more broader, and make the ability to become a Wing member much more diversified than just you’re a member with a one-size-fits-all option of these spaces. But this is just the first step towards it.

Right. So, you could have Wing members who aren’t actual, physical Wing members?

Yeah. I spoke to a woman in Lagos, Nigeria, the other day, who is opening her own space inspired by The Wing. And then I spoke to these women in Lincoln, Nebraska, who are starting a space. 

Their own space? 

Their own space. Yeah. But then, the people that buy our … We have a magazine, we have merch, all this stuff. It’s been so fascinating to study where they’re coming from. They’re all over the world, but they’re also in small towns and cities across the US.

And they don’t have access to the actual, physical spaces.

No.

Yeah. So, you think you could do that? Because I’d be really fascinated if someone would actually build a women’s network, that it actually works and makes money and is really helpful. It’s a really interesting … And you’re right, just because it hasn’t worked doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. It just hasn’t worked.

Yep.

But a lot of those specific niche-oriented … And I don’t think women are niche, but you know what I mean? Like the gay sites. 

Then we’re still considered niche, I guess.

No, but it’s the gay sites, the oriented sites haven’t done as well as the more broad sites. The broad sites have taken over everything, which, it is an interesting thing, because there were a zillion of them before. There was PlanetOut, there was gay.com for gay people, there were a whole bunch of feminist sites, there was women’s sites, there’s sites for people of color. They haven’t exploded in the way that the broader sites have.

Yeah, I think it’s all about execution. But I do think there’s a reaction against these megaplatforms right now.

Yes, absolutely, 100 percent.

And sort of a hunger for finding a smaller, more protected way of doing the same thing you do on those other sites.

Right. Are you charging for this, for people to …

No, it comes with membership.

Comes with membership. So it’s just an added thing? And you’re making money through … what? Just adding on.

Memberships, food and beverage, retail. It’s pretty diversified, actually, but membership’s the core.

But you’re not taking vig from the job placement? 

No, no. We’re just watching how people use it and hoping they’re making money from it. 

We’re here with Audrey Gelman, the CEO of The Wing. We’ve been talking about The Wing, which is this … You describe it. I don’t want to call it a coworking space, because it isn’t. It’s a women’s community, physical, and now you’re bringing it online? 

Correct.

But just for jobs.

Just for jobs and connections, but this is just the first big feature. 

Okay, so talk a little bit about being in this space, because I think you do get … I did use the word niche, and I didn’t mean it the way I think a lot of people do, but how do you think … Do people, when you’re getting funding or things like that, think, “Oh, you’re the women’s site”? How is it being a woman entrepreneur where you’re selling a woman-oriented product?

It was much worse at the beginning, I would say. So, I do think that there’s been kind of an acceleration of …

Tell me a story.

There’s so much. There’s just a lot of, just, you open your mouth and you can’t get one word out, and there’s some guy who talks for 40 minutes and opines, and thought leaders. It’s just nauseating. I, honestly, have not had the worst of it. I’ve had so many friends and colleagues who’ve been through either people assuming it was a date or being sexually harassed. And I think, just in general, skepticism. I think men get to walk in and have a big vision without any proof, and women have to have it down to every line of their P&L like a bulletproof plan, so I think there’s just a lot of bias. 

You want to be able to lie capaciously.

Correct. That’s real equality. 

People make up stuff. It is so funny, some of it. 

I want to be able to lose billions of dollars.

Yes, me too.

When a woman can do that flagrantly, then we’ve really made it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jen Hyman, she’s the CEO of Rent the Runway. But she said, like, “I’m not allowed to do that.”

Right.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Like, “I have to be profitable as a business.”

Right, right.

And I think that’s one version of, again, the bias that exists and the standards that women are held to. But it’s really changed. Our last round that we raised, it was entirely women. We were in the position, for the first time, of turning down a really prestigious venture firm because they didn’t have a woman partner.

Talk about why you did that, why you wanted to do that. Because there are more and more women partners at venture capital firms, for example, but it’s really still terrible.

Yes.

Like, they pretend, but it’s still … You know. And it’s acted like it’s a big deal, like they want a pat on the back for it. But I don’t give pats on the back. I give smacks on the back.

If that’s what does it, like, you know …

No, no. It’s a really interesting thing. But it does create a downward stream thing, where you don’t get funding for people of color and women, and then they say, “They’re not successful,” and then, “We’re not funding them because they’re not successful.”

And then one fails and then it’s supposed to represent all women.

Right, right. Or people of color, whatever. It’s really … So, the conclusion would be that only young white men are smart.

Yeah. It’s like guys in vests and AirPods that are funding each other and that’s the network that exists. And I think that there are women who are fighting pretty hard and creating really amazing, innovative things, like AllRaise, that are changing the dynamic, and #Angels. But yeah, I think that for us, it was really important to bring in not … You know, really amazing women who are venture investors and who are partners at firms. But then also, we have the US women’s soccer team join as investors. Valerie Jarrett, Kerry Washington, Robbie Kaplan, a number of really amazing women from Time’s Up. So, it was …

Mm-hmm. Why did you think that was important?

Because I think you need your kitchen cabinet, you know? You need your presidential cabinet, and it can’t just be VCs. You really need a variety. I think that’s what we’re creating at The Wing, which is that members join and they find those women who surround them and support them. We wanted to replicate that in our investor base. 

So what was the pitch to a Kerry Washington or Valerie Jarrett?

I think for a lot of them, they walked into the space and experienced the feeling and were like, “Whoa. There is nothing like this.” And, “This is the future and we want to be along for the ride.” You know?

Mm-hmm. In terms of when you raised the money, you said all women investors.

Yeah.

Explain that.

So, the partners that led the deal — Jess Lee and Kara Nortman — were … Again, it was women who are championing the deals.

Sure. Does that have to be like that? Because it’s really, it’s interesting. Because often, I get complaints from women that they have to be the ones that are the women at these firms or at these companies.

I don’t think it does. We have a guy on our board, Tony Florence, who’s a partner at NEA, and he does not do a lot of … He doesn’t want a lot of pats or smacks on the back, but he’s actually been … The majority of the companies in his portfolio were founded by women, going back to Care.com. And so, there are guys who I think get it, who understand, whether it’s consumer products or anything else. I don’t think it has to be women, necessarily, but I do think it’s important to … If you don’t see yourself represented …

So how do you change that dynamic? When you’re looking at it as someone who has raised money, how do you change the dynamic of that happening? Because there’s pressure on you to be really successful. If you screw up, people will be like, “Look, we tried it, and …”

Yeah. I think sometimes that’s the reality. It’s like, you know, failure looks like, “Oh, those cute girls. They tried.” You know?

Yeah.

”Gee, golly.” And again, if you …

”Nice wallpaper.”

Yeah, exactly.

You do have nice wallpaper.

Thank you!

Yeah. Is it wallpaper, or is it …

We have custom wallpaper …

Custom, yeah.

We think of everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I think that you represent the gender, you know? It’s not that way with men. Men fuck up and bankrupt companies every single day, you know? So there’s a lot of pressure, and I think that that’s why the people take what they’re doing really, really seriously. But I think things like The Wing, it’s like you … Again, environments where women feel like they can take on more risk and take the leap, go for it. You know, not all of them are going to work. 

Right.

But you have to first take that leap. That’s the scariest part.

Right. So let’s get to the idea of diversity, because it was an unusually diverse group of people in there. Is that the case, or is it all white ladies meeting? 

I would say that … It’s interesting, the legacy of these women’s clubs. They were so powerful. But the mistake was, again, there’s this assumption that, “Oh, we just celebrated the passage of suffrage.” It’s like, “No, we didn’t. We just celebrated the passage of suffrage for white women.”

Mm-hmm.

You know? Women of color did not get the right to vote until the Civil Rights Act.

Mm-hmm.

And so for us, it’s about making sure that we’re doing something that doesn’t just replicate the past. It takes some of the really great, disruptive spirit of the past, but in a progressive way that is diverse. Our eighth hire was starting our diversity and inclusion team. Again, I think that you always … It’s very intentional that work never, ever stops, but it’s also about hiring. Our CFO is a queer woman of color. You know?

Mm-hmm.

So it’s from our C-suite all across the company, and it’s at the forefront of our minds, literally every day.

When you’re thinking about this … I mean, it’s interesting, because I think a lot … Some of my listeners will be like, “Oh, who cares as long as it’s good?” Why is there that focus? I would love you to articulate why you think it’s important that these intentional choices be made, just like you’re making intentional choices with the social network. One of my big things I bang on is nobody thought about these problems before they happened, or nobody is intentional about doing what they’re doing.

You have to set in place values that you believe in. Not as a reaction but the way that you start. It’s so much harder to do it if you’re doing it in response to something later. And so for us, it’s also about our policies. So, you know, creating things like child care, but also we provide health care to our part-time workforce. We provide stock options and a living wage to our part-time workforce. I think it’s about creating policies that are in line with your values and sort of walking your talk. You’ve never going to be perfect. I make 100 mistakes a day. But I think just setting those things up at the beginning, rather than doing it in a reactionary way.

It was that stream on Twitter about the WeWork employee who was early and didn’t get shares. That was a shock. That, to me, was a shock. But I guess it isn’t. It happens all the time.

Yeah, I do think it happens all the time. But again, the only thing that we can do is learn from it.

I’m going to finish up talking about a couple more things, but do you get dragged down by all the negative stuff around WeWork right now? Is that a problem with fundraising? Or you just raised money?

No. 

Do you think about it? Because they’re getting … I mean, you’re adjacent to them.

Sure, but I think so different. The fundamentals of the actual business model are very different. We are really building, again, a brand. And so, I think that it’s …

It’s more than just a space.

Yeah. Honestly, I know that people associate it, but they couldn’t be more different.

Yeah. Did you worry about that? Like that there’s a challenge, like, “This is happening”?

No. Again, I think that if you really look into our business, you know that it couldn’t be more different. So it’s not a big thing in my mind.

Finishing up, I’d love to get a sense of where you think you’re going. So, just more of these spaces? Or where do you think your big opportunities lie? 

Yeah, I think it’s just growing our membership, you know? And what that means is membership in a lot of different ways. That’s what we’re excited most about and going to be rolling out over the next 18 months. I think that there’s such an exciting opportunity, again, to gather women together, like the magic and the impact and the influence that comes with that. It’s very scary. Woodrow Wilson, I remember, talked about these women’s clubs, and it was like it was the greatest threat to society, these women gathering together. And that’s what gets me going. So, it’s just about …

Right. He didn’t like women’s groups? He didn’t like women’s clubs?

No, because women were supposed to be confined to the home. It was actually disruptive.

Yeah. Yeah. Keeping people separate is usually the way you keep control of people.

Correct.

Which is interesting. So, you want to have more … Where’s the business going, from your perspective? Is it actual physical spaces, or …

I do think that the physical spaces play a really important role. We’re going to continue to expand our physical footprint, but you’re going to see the business expanding what the definition of membership looks like, in a lot of different ways, in part digital, but other things, too. We just had camp, which was 500 women.

Yeah, I’ve heard about this camp. How was the camp? I wasn’t invited to your camp, Audrey.

Oh. You’re definitely invited. You’re always invited. 

Explain what this camp was. I’ve heard …

Scott’s even invited. I love Scott.

Oh my God. You don’t want Scott at this camp.

That’s probably true.

You know what? Let’s bring Scott to the camp.

I think Scott would be like, “This is awesome.”

How about we do a live Pivot there, and then we hunt him down in the woods. Did you see that new movie of the rich people hunting someone? It’s a new …

Didn’t they take it back, like it’s too …

Oh, they did. They did. You’re right. Oh, you’re right. They took it back. Nonetheless, we can do that for Scott.

I’m a big Scott fan. The big dog.

We’ll give him a couple hundred yards to go first.

Yes, he’ll get a … 

We won’t use guns.

He’ll be able to start.

We will just use … You know.

Yeah. Running start.

Maybe a bow and arrow or two. Just slightly wounded.

No tasing.

No tasing. So, tell me about the camp. Explain this camp thing to people. 

Yeah, so we do a camp in Upstate in the Adirondacks. It’s 500 members. And it’s really amazing to see these women, who are so professionally capable, these corporate lawyers, just totally letting loose. It’s a nostalgia feeling. It’s so much fun. We have prom. And honestly, I call it reparative prom, because people have a lot of bad memories of prom.

Really? I had great proms.

I mean, you’re the shit. I don’t know.

I know.

But not everybody …

No, I did. I had a nice boyfriend. But anyway. So you have proms. What else? What do you do at this camp?

Oh, you know. People do karaoke. 

Right. And what’s the idea behind this? I thought it was quite innovative and fascinating that you did this. For your top members, presumably, right?

It’s first come, first serve among members. 

Oh, okay.

But it sells out really, really quickly. People are obsessed with it. We’re going to do more things like it. And I think it’s …

Yeah. It’s like the Summit but not annoying. Sorry. I shouldn’t insult them.

Well, it’s not like … It’s not a conference, per se, but it’s like a way to meet people and just have fun. You know?

Right.

And there’s tie-dye and crafting and pickling, and … Yeah. It’s just awesome. 

That was I think the most interesting idea, the way you do events going forward and how you organize them. Because they’re quite lucrative, actually. You get a lot of sponsors, I understand, too.

We do. 

Who sponsored tie-dyeing? Someone really …

J. Crew!

Yeah, right. Okay, right. So, but it was interesting. So then you pull sponsors into these kind of things. 

We do. Again, in a limited way and in a thoughtful way, but it helps us to be able to do crazy big things. You know, we had our deejay in a huge clamshell. You know, this year was Under the Sea themed, we had a “Wet Gala.”

I wish I was invited to your camp.

Please come next year. We’re going to do a lot more, that’s coming.

Were you a camp counselor? I was a camp counselor.

Well, I’m so pregnant, so …

Yeah.

But I did karaoke, and everyone thought I was going to go into preterm labor.

Well, you’d have a lot of help there.

Well, yeah. I would be … You know, there’s tons of doulas and physicians who are members, so …

It’s sort of like the one they have in San Francisco for all those men. What’s that thing called?

Bohemian Grove?

Bohemian Grove, yeah. My brother’s the doctor for that.

That’s cool.

I know, sort of. But it’s so annoying to me that they get to all go up there and sit around in towels and talk to each other.

Be masters of the universe.

Well, no. Apparently, they do a lot of stupid things. 

Fun things.

They do skits. Fun things, too. Yeah. But I always thought, why don’t women have that kind of thing regularly?

We can, you know?

We can.

It’s just how big we dream.

All right, Audrey Gelman. I’m coming to your prom next year.

Awesome.

All right? Anyway, thank you so much for coming, and very good luck with your first child.

Thank you.

It must be very exciting. It is very exciting. You’ll enjoy. It’s the best thing you’ll ever do. I can’t believe I say that, but it’s true. It’s an amazing experience, and you’re going to be a wonderful parent. But you’re also birthing this company, I guess.

Yeah.

Kind of a horrible metaphor, but it’s true.

Ow.

Ow. Well anyway, all right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. 

No matter how well-intentioned their creators were, tech products can encourage and amplify existing racial biases. And Stanford University psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt says companies can take meaningful steps to reduce that effect — although it may come at the cost of the twitchy virality that has helped them grow so quickly.

“Bias can kind of migrate to different spaces,” Eberhardt said on the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. “All the problems that we have out in the world and in society make their way online. … You’re kind of encouraged to respond to that without thinking and to respond quickly and all of that. That’s another condition under which bias is most likely to be triggered, is when you’re forced to make decisions fast.”

In her most recent book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, Eberhardt recounts how the local social network Nextdoor successfully reduced racial profiling among its users by 75 percent: It introduced some friction.

“They realized, after talking to me and other people and consulting the literature, that if they wanted to fight racial profiling on the platform that they were going to have to slow people down,” she said. “It used to be the case that if you saw someone suspicious you could just hit the crime and safety tab and then you could shout out to all your neighbors, ‘Suspicious person!’ Oftentimes, the person who was suspicious was a black man, and in the cases where it was racial profiling, this person was doing nothing.”

Requiring those users to complete a three-item checklist — which included an educational definition of racial profiling — shifted the “cultural norm,” Eberhardt explained, away from “see something, say something” and toward “if you see something suspicious, say something specific.”

“Companies have a huge role to play here,” she said. “I think they have a responsibility in all of this because of the power they wield. I mean, they cannot just affect one life but many, many lives, millions of lives. That checklist changed the mindset of all of these people now who are on Nextdoor. I think recognizing that power and marshaling that power is a good thing.”

You can listen to Recode Decode wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn.

Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with Jennifer.

Kara Swisher: Today in the red chair is Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor at Stanford University’s Department of Psychology. She studies the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime, and has written a book called Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Jennifer, welcome to Recode Decode.

Jennifer Eberhart: Thanks for having me.

Do you want me to call you professor?

No, it’s okay.

I can if you like. I try to give everyone the titles they deserve. So this is a wider-ranging book that you’re talking about, but I wanted to focus in on tech, but I want to first talk a little about your background and how you got to this topic and why you decided to write this book. So why don’t we start with a little bit about you. How did you get into writing about this topic?

I feel we’re living through difficult times now as a country. The Pew Research Center released a report just recently, which they found that six in 10 Americans feel like race relations are generally bad in this country. And a majority of Americans feel like things are getting worse. And so we’re really struggling with these issues right now. And I wrote the book to speak to that struggle.

So tell me how you got there. How did you get to study this topic? You’re a professor at Stanford and how did you get to that spot?

I’ve been interested in issues of bias, issues of race and inequality since I was a little kid, actually. I grew up in Cleveland, in an all-black neighborhood. And when I was 12 years old, my parents announced we were moving to an all-white suburb called Beachwood. That was near the other place. It was actually just a bike ride away, but a world of difference in terms of resources and so forth.

Sometimes it’s just a highway, or a road.

Yeah, it’s definitely true. I think since that time, it just raised a lot of questions for me and I never stopped asking those questions, basically.

But you’re studying from a psychology point of view, there’s all kinds of ways to study this. Social science, things like that. You wanted to get at the heart of what causes bias and tell some of the stories around it. How did you get to Stanford? You studied and then …

Well, I came to Stanford from Yale. I had been there for a few years and my husband and I came together. He was starting out as a professor in the Law School. And so we’re both there and we raised our children there and all of that. So we moved from the East Coast to the West Coast basically because of the wonderful opportunities that Stanford provided for the two of us.

You’re also coming here at a time when tech has sort of amplified … I’ve always talked about weaponizing and amplifying a lot of bad feelings, all kinds of different things in society, and sort of fracturing a lot. Racial issues have been at the top of that list. But let’s talk a little bit. How do you define when you’re saying “biased?” 

And when you say Biased, Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, I’ve seen it not hidden. They talk about in Silicon Valley, “unconscious” bias. I think it’s entirely conscious, in a lot of ways. Talk a little bit of how you define it. How do you think about the topic overall?

This sort of “unconscious bias” or some people call it “implicit bias” can be defined as the beliefs and feelings we have about social groups that can influence our decision making and our actions, even when we’re not aware of it. That’s the key, is that it can be something that you’re acting on, something that’s really affecting you and guiding your behavior without you actually being aware. That there’s a bias there that is influencing what you think and what you do so.

So that’s what we’re talking about. You were saying that you feel like it’s entirely conscious. I think …

I think the awareness of sitting around a table with people that are so homogeneous and not noticing it seems, it’s hard to believe sometimes. And at least in tech … but we’ll get to tech in a minute. But when you’re talking about, what you are trying to study here is uncovering where it comes from. So why don’t you talk a little bit about how you look at it from your studying point of view.

Right. So from a psychological point of view, I’m interested in looking at sort of multiple sources for it. And so one source just has to do with how our brains function, how we’re wired. And bias is kind of an outgrowth of that.

So our brains are built to categorize and we categorize all kinds of things, including people. And so we develop these social categories that we slap people in. And once we have those categories developed, we develop beliefs and feelings about those people in those categories. And so that’s called bias, right? That bias can then affect what we do and affect our decision-making.

So part of it just has to do with wiring, and we’re wired in that way because we are constantly confronting all kinds of things in overload, a stimuli out in the world. We have to figure out a way to do pattern matching. We have to figure out a way to categorize things so that we can manage it better and the world becomes more predictable and so forth. And so there is a utility to it, if you will. But that categorization …

So if it was like “car,” “tree,” that kind of thing.

Right, exactly.

Or “danger” or “fire” or something like that. That makes a lot more sense than “people.”

Right.

But of course …

But it’s “people,” it’s not like we have a different way of dealing with people. It’s the same brain, right? And so we’re looking for shortcuts everywhere we can. And so categorization is a shortcut, stereotyping is a shortcut. It’s something that’s seen as sort of basic and it’s universal. Most researchers believe that regardless of the country, regardless of the culture, that people categorize, right? And they stereotype other groups, and the groups might change. The actual social groups that are present in that space might change.

And then also the stereotypes that you have about them may change. But the act of stereotyping is something that’s considered fairly basic.

Fairly basic, among everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. But again, the content of those stereotypes can shift quite a bit. And a lot of that has to do with the disparities that are out there in our society. And so we were exposed to those disparities. We develop associations between certain groups and certain types of jobs and that kind of thing. Or having certain traits. And so that is something that is more culturally specific and that can do a lot of harm.

Right. Talk a little bit about some of the major themes you think are important to think about when you’re thinking about it. Because I think it does apply. The reason I think it’s important in tech, you have things like facial recognition coming. You have social media, which has bias, things like services that have bias, Airbnb, Nextdoor, things like that. Can you put the idea of bias in a bigger context? You’re initially saying, this is something people just do for comfort’s sake or to make sense of the world they live in.

Yeah, it’s something they do to function in the world.

Function, right, yeah.

So for example, you can develop, say, an association between African Americans and crimes. This is something that I look at a lot and have done a number of studies on, and that association can lead you to see weapons more clearly, for example. If you just expose someone to an African American face, a blurry image of a gun becomes more clear to you. And you can develop more clarity from that. 

It can also blind you to certain things. These biases can actually influence something as basic as what you see. But they can also influence how you treat people. They can also influence whether teachers are going to discipline a child in school. It can influence whether you get hired, whether you get promoted. It can influence jurors in making death penalty decisions. All kinds of things in life. It can do so in ways that sometimes are beneath your awareness and sometimes can lead to great harm.

So talk about the ones that are these hidden beneath your awareness. How does that happen from a psychological point of view?

You have these associations that can get activated. So the association between African Americans and crime, for example, might be an association that people know about that they’re aware of. They’re not always aware of how that association is influencing how they’re making decisions about various things.

So it’s baked in and they don’t know it’s baked in there.

Exactly right. They’re applying it and they don’t know that they’re applying it, that kind of thing. They can think that they’re acting in a way that’s completely fair and they can also not be motivated at all to act in a way that’s unfair, right? Their intentions might be good, but then you can still be influenced.

So how do you realize that? Realize these hidden prejudices and then get rid of them? Because presumably what happens is then someone points to them and says, just like right now, lately, “I’m not racist.”

Right.

And then racist actions happen.

Right.

How do you uncouple those?

Yeah, it’s hard because it’s one of those things when it becomes hidden, it’s hidden, not only to the person who might hold the bias and be acting on it, but it also can be hidden to the target of bias. And so it makes it especially difficult to untangle. And that’s one of the reasons that we as social scientists, we like to study this in a controlled way in a laboratory sometimes. So we can rule out all these other factors that it could be. You could have made some decision that you’ve made based on all kinds of non-racial reasons, right? And it may seem reasonable, but then we can notice in these studies a pattern develop where, okay, for African Americans in the same situation, you’re evaluating them in a more negative way or whatever it is.

And so we can look at how these biases can take shape accounting for all these other differences in the situation that people can point to to say, “Well, my behavior is really motivated by X or Y, or whatever it is. That has nothing to do with race.”

Right. And so when you have a situation like that, when you have these hidden biases that shape what we think … first what we see. There was an expression that was used for me, “believe what you see, you don’t see what you believe.” Something like that. You believe what you actually see versus just what you think you see.

It struck me at the time when I heard it was from a report, it was an editor who was giving me that advice in terms of reporting. Because a lot of people go into reporting with — deciding what the story is before … not seeing what actually is happening.

Right.

How do you push against that? Because that seems like you’re talking about sort of an innate human trait to do these things.

Well, that’s the thing about bias. I feel like when you say that it’s something that we do as humans, it’s sort of part of how we function.

I don’t think that, I think it’s on purpose.

Okay. Well, it’s both, right? It makes it hard to fight it too. But I think the issue is, when bias is conscious, you know what you know and you sort of think what you think, right? And you feel what you feel and so it’s on the table. And so you might argue with a person about whether it’s right or wrong, but then they say, “Well, this is my belief about this certain group.” Or, “This is how I feel about this certain group.”

The issue that gets stickier is, if those associations that you’ve picked up out in the world, say, about African Americans and crime, again, since we’re talking about that, that they start to influence you in ways where you can’t actually detect it. And so you think that, “Oh, well, how I’m thinking or how I’m feeling, it’s just kind of the way things are.”

That’s right.

Right? Right. So it’s not the thing that you were talking about earlier, where believing is seeing. They believe that they’re seeing what’s there, what’s present.

The truth, what’s present. So fast-forward to today. Right now one of the things you’re talking about was the idea that things have gotten worse, or people feel they’re worse. And it does. I think most people do. Why do you think that is now? I want to get into the next section talking about tech because I think it has to do with proliferation of social media and everything else. Why do you imagine? Because this has been around for a long time, these issues. What has happened? What has changed?

I think the worry is that … things are more polarized than they used to be, and I think people are worried about also our norms shifting. And so we used to have these egalitarian norms, and we were really proud of that as Americans and so forth.

Well, alleged egalitarianism.

Right. I mean, so this was the ideal. I’m not saying we always reach that ideal, certainly, but it certainly was a norm that people valued. And now I think people worry that that’s eroding. It’s actually something that doesn’t define us as Americans even anymore. And so, I think that’s part of the issue because once the norms start to go, then our behavior can follow that. And our behavior can follow that, even when we pride ourselves on it being egalitarian, because we’re social creatures and the social environment that we’re in matters.

And so, even if we see ourselves as egalitarian and we’re in a situation, we’re in an environment that is less so, we become less so over time. And so I think that’s the concern is this fight over who we are as Americans and what we should be trying to uphold, even if we don’t always make it there. This idea that this is something to strive for, that when once that starts to erode then people get worried.

And, why now do you feel it start to erode? Where are we at currently in this?

Yeah. So this is the other thing about biases that it’s not something … so we’re all vulnerable to bias, right? But it’s not something that we’re acting on all the time. So there are situations that can trigger it and there are situations that can kind of keep it at bay. And there are lots of things that are happening in the world now where we’re triggered by that bias more than we used to be.

Talk about that.

So, for example, again, the changing or the eroding of the egalitarian norms, that’s a worry. That’s an issue. So that’s a situational trigger of bias. I think also, people are feeling under threat. People are fearful, people are stressed. So even our emotional states can make it more likely that we will act on bias. When people are worried about their status in the world and so forth and whether they’re going to be able to maintain their way of life and the way of life that they want for their children and so forth. That tends to lead to more bias. And so there are lots of conditions of the world that are pushing us in this direction.

How do you un-push it? Because we’ve got a president who is saying things that now people are calling racist, for example. “Bias” is a loaded word. “Racist” is the most loaded word. And not even loaded. It’s what it is. When you’re in that environment, when that happens and then people are arguing over it, how do you remove yourself from it? How do you get out of that?

The thing that’s interesting to me about that is that it also shows that what’s explicit versus implicit bias, that that’s also shifting too. The line is blurring. The line is shifting.

It’s all explicit.

Well, things that we used to think about as explicit and we would all agree, okay, that’s blatant, that’s explicit, now we’re arguing about whether it is. And so that’s what I mean by “the line is blurring.” For some people they don’t think the things that we thought about as explicit bias, for them it’s more implicit. Right?

And so it’s hidden from them even though it’s not hidden from other people. When that starts to happen, I think that can set the stage, or make more permissible, all kinds of things that weren’t permissible before.

And that means everyone can be biased.

Yeah.

And be proud of it.

They don’t have to worry. There’s no tension around it. You can still be …

There’s no shame to it.

You don’t have the shame. You can still be a good person and upstanding and all of this and still act out in this way because now you don’t define this as bias anymore.

Right. Because it just is the way I think. That’s what I think.

Right.

Right. So, when you’re studying that, is this a phenomenon that’s new or something that’s historical, goes through cycles where people do this?

It’s one of those things where it’s not new in a sense that it’s the same social conditions that have gotten us where we are now. If you’re asking whether threat has always been a trigger for bias, I think threat has been a trigger for bias. And the nature of that threat and what’s producing the threat might change across time, but threat makes us a lot more vulnerable to bias than if we’re not threatened. That’s the case for a lot of these triggers too.

Triggers right now.

Yeah.

A lot of people feel that social media, like myself, has weaponized and amplified a lot of what’s going on. There’s so many different areas right now in tech that are hitting these problems in different ways. One is artificial intelligence, which I think a lot of people feel is going to solidify the already … putting in bad data into this to create more feelings of misrepresenting who is committing crimes and who’s responsible for them. So, putting data into a place where it’s impossible to figure out how they come to conclusions. So, AI is one.

One is facial recognition, which I think there’s all kinds of controversies around that. In the silliest ways, in terms of how pictures are taken, how they design things, to the more serious ones is that identifying people incorrectly. Just recently, with Amazon and their Rekognition software identified members of the Congressional Black Caucus as felons, or things like that.

Then there’s the social media itself, which is used by — especially by Donald Trump and some others, as a weapon now, in that regard.

So, let’s talk first about, among these, what do you think when you’re studying bias and the links between race and how people put the link between race and crime, which one do you fear most to be abused? Or do you just fear all of them?

Yeah. I feel like there’s a lot to feel worried about now, actually. It’s interesting, too, because this is also another example of how a bias can kind of migrate to different spaces. We didn’t have an online space before. All the problems that we have out in the world and in society make their way online.

Except it’s worse because it’s anonymous. It’s loud. It’s broadcast.

It is. You’re kind of encouraged to respond to that without thinking and to respond quickly and all of that. That’s another condition under which bias is most likely to be triggered is when you’re forced to make decisions fast. You can’t sit back and think about different …

Twitchy.

Yeah. Exactly. Tech encourages that. In tech, speed is king. People are trying to develop tech products that can be used in really straightforward ways, simple ways. You can use it quickly, intuitively. You don’t have to think. Those are the very conditions under which bias is more likely to come alive. That’s a problem.

Let’s talk about each of them. Artificial intelligence, obviously they’re going to input data that is going to create a whole new set of data where crimes might happen, what kind of people are likely to commit crimes, but the whole worry around this is first the designers of these systems are largely white men, essentially. Secondly, the data they’re putting in there is old data that’s generated badly. How do you weed that out, or is it impossible to do so?

I think one of the issues, it’s not just that there’s just a lack of diversity in terms of ethnic diversity and who’s developing the algorithms, but there’s also a lack of diversity in terms of the background that people have, the disciplines that they come from, their areas of expertise. So, if you have only people who are from a tech world, who are developing algorithms that are speaking to issues of criminal justice or education or housing — all these different areas — or issues in the workplace and so forth and you only have one way to think about that and you don’t even have training, actually, to understand the historical realities of the inequality, you don’t actually conduct research on these issues to try to understand what the sources of that inequality might be and so forth. So, you can take data that has bad data, basically, and you can bake …

I call it dirty data.

Yeah. Okay, dirty data. And bake that in and further the problem, rather than alleviate the problem that you’re seeking to address. So, yeah, then it’s an issue.

Then it confirms biases.

It does and it can make that worse, right? Because now …

Because a computer said it.

Right. This is a machine. It’s not a human, so therefore we’re doing everything right, everything’s clean. So that helps people to think, “Okay, well now we really don’t have to think about this issue anymore.” So yeah, those are all real worries.

What about facial recognition? The idea of it being memorialized in a digital way.

First of all, I used to study — I guess I still do — face recognition among humans. With that work, we look at something called the other race effect. This is this idea that people are much better at recognizing faces of their race than they are of recognizing faces of other races. That has been examined in the context of criminal justice for eyewitness testimony …

Mistaken identity.

Yeah. Exactly. You look at people who are on death row, even, who get exonerated. A lot of that, the center of the case is an eyewitness who thought they saw this person and so forth. You also have an issue with machines doing this. That machines aren’t as good at recognizing groups, faces of members of certain groups and other groups. If that’s the case, then there’re all kinds of problems that can arise from that. For example, if you have this face recognition technology that law enforcement officers are using …

And using it badly or not using it correctly.

Right. You can stop people and think, this person matches the description and it’s not that person. That has to do with how we develop the technology and what faces that you train on and so forth.

Right. In a review in the Times, it said, “Eberhardt gives striking examples from her research of how racial categories and stereotypes affect perception. In one study, she and her colleagues found that people’s brains were active when they were looking at the face from someone of their own racial group. This, Eberhardt says, helps explain why people sometimes do poorly at recognizing individuals from other groups and find that matters from criminal justice where mistaken identity is common. In another study, Eberhardt examined the stereotype linking black men and crime. Police were often asked to look at a computer screen. Half were exposed, subliminally, to crime-related words like ‘apprehend’ and ‘capture.’ Those blink for a fraction of a second. The other half, when exposed to gibberish, the officers then saw two faces side by side, one black, one white. The officers who were primed to think about crime looked more at the black face.”

That’s right.

Explain that, why you did it that way.

Well, because we wanted to really explore how deep these associations go. You can have this association between blackness and crime that is so strong, that’s so powerful, that is directing …

You have to pick them.

Yeah. It’s directing your eyes as to what to look at out in the world. Also, once you look at an object, like I said before, even a blurry image of a gun can become more clear if you’ve just been exposed to an African American face. So, that’s power.

It has to be a gun, right?

Yeah.

It has to be a gun, you’re saying, in other words.

Well, you just …

You just see him.

You see the gun faster, so it lowers your threshold for understanding what’s a gun and what’s not a gun. So it shows us that these associations can influence what we see in these real, literal ways.

Right. Then, you also notice: “The same stereotypes she discovered affect perceptions of physical movement. Analyzing the data from a New York City police department, Eberhardt learned that black men were far more likely than white men to have been stopped for engaging in what’s called ‘furtive movement,’ suspicious behavior like fidgeting with something at your waistline. Yet among those stopped, whites more often had a weapon.

Yeah. Actually, we found that only 1 percent of the people stopped for furtive movement actually had a weapon. So it’s a really low hit rate there. A lot of that has to do with just the fact that furtive movement is a subjective standard that they’re using to stop people. It was hard for the department to actually define what furtive movement was and led …

“We just know it when we see it.”

Yeah. That led officers to come up with their own definitions, and those definitions can also differ depending on what area of the city you’re in and who you’re looking at and so forth. Now, they have eliminated that as an option on the form that they complete when they make a stop, so you can no longer stop someone for furtive movement alone. 

Those kinds of stops were huge. For example, during the height of stop and frisk in 2010, there were about 600,000 stops. These were all pedestrian stops on the streets of New York City. Over 300,000 of those stops were for furtive movement. It was by far the No. 1 reason people were being stopped on the streets of New York, even though it’s hard to actually define what furtive movement means.

Right. Absolutely. So, when you add sensors and cameras into the situation, it gets even worse, presumably. Cameras are supposed to eventually be able to say what’s furtive, right? For example, when you get on a plane now, they take your picture. They’re looking at your face and figuring out whether you’re going to hijack the plane or just be difficult in coach, or whatever they’re trying to look for. Is that a better thing if the computers are doing it, or not?

Well, it all depends on how it’s being used. The whole thing also, with the body-worn cameras, for example, since you mentioned cameras for police. That can be used in a way where, okay, we’ll have this camera. You can stop people and look at their face and see if that face matches some face of a wanted criminal in a database. So, it could be used in that way. Or, it could be used in a way where you’re trying to improve police community interactions. You’re trying to understand what happens during those interactions when things go awry. What is the cause of that? How can you use language?

We, for example, with researchers at Stanford, we’ve begun to look at the language the police officers use doing routine traffic stops. We use body-worn camera footage to allow us a window into those stops. We found that officers are professional overall. This is in Oakland, actually, California. But there’s a race difference, where they treat white drivers with more respect through their language than black drivers.

The words they use. I saw someone did an art project on this, where they just played the sounds and how they spoke to African Americans stopped. The words were more diminutive, disrespectful. The words to white motorists were “sir,” “ma’am.” It was really interesting.

Yeah. For black motorists, it was “bro” and “dude,” and those kinds of things didn’t happen with white motorists.

Right. So, these technologies should presumably be able to show people the bias in order to fix it if they see, “Oh, look what I just did,” but the opposite seems to have happened. No one can agree on what they’re seeing, which is pretty clear. You’d think technology would help. It’s like, “Look what just happened.”

Well, seeing is subjective. That’s what we were talking about before, the whole believing is seeing. It’s not like it’s just … our own histories, our own beliefs influence what we see and how we see. That’s the whole point of those studies we were just talking about where you can prompt police officers to think of “apprehend” and “capture” and “arrest.” That directs their eyes towards black faces or the blurry image of the gun, the fact that an African American face can lead you to see that gun sooner. Those are examples of how this tight association we have between blackness and crime can influence what we see.

Even if there’s absolutely proof.

Exactly.

Amazing. I remember the videos that came out of all the … the various videos that were happening of killings of motorists by police. I had at least three people say, “Well, it’s not clear what happened there.” I’m like, “Oh, it’s clear.” It was fascinating. It was sort of the beginning of this entire Trump era. It was really interesting because I was sort of like, “It’s actually right there.”

Right. Well, not just what you see, but again, what you look at, what you’re focused on when you’re looking at one of these viral videos of an officer-involved shooting, for example. What you’re looking at and what you’re looking for and if there’s something ambiguous, how you interpret that and so forth. All that varies.

So, more data doesn’t help people become less biased.

Well, I think data can help, but I don’t think data resolves everything. I think sometimes you need more than that. I think that the same is true for … There’s a push in California, for example, it’s actually a state-wide mandate now that police officers record information about who they’re stopping. The race of the person, the gender, and so on and so forth. The idea is that …

“Look what you’re doing.”

Yeah. That you can have this data now and you can see whether there are racial disparities in stops and racial disparities in searches and arrests and so forth. But people can look at the same data differently. So, collecting that data alone isn’t going to resolve the problem, because some people will look at that data and say, “Well, this shows that there’s bias and that we need police reform.” Then, other people can look at that same data and say, “Well, it doesn’t show bias at all. Police officers are …”

“They’re just doing their jobs.”

“They’re doing their job and they’re stopping the people who are committing crime.” If there were racial disparities in who commits crime, then you would expect that. Again, you have the same data but a huge disagreement about how to see that data. So, you need more than data. I don’t think data’s worthless. It’s an anchor, but it’s not going to completely resolve things for every question.

We’re here with Jennifer Eberhardt. She’s a professor at Stanford University who’s written a book called Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. 

Jennifer, when you’re talking about this, if data doesn’t work, necessarily, or cameras or sensors or tech, how do you solve the problem? It seems like it’s only getting worse because on social media, as you said, it’s twitchy, it creates that, it separates people.

Mm-hmm.

People thought it was going to bring people together, so people would see each other more clearly.

Right. That was the intention for a lot of these tech products. I think that was the intention.

Yeah. Commonality.

Yeah.

Right. Humanity.

Right, but the intention sometimes is irrelevant. When you have a problem that’s created, you have to focus on what that problem is and how it’s being produced, regardless of the intention. That’s the case for bias too. You can have a bias and you can do something that reflects that bias or you can make some decision that’s infected by bias. The issue isn’t whether you intended it or not, so you have to focus on the impact and have the impact be a motivator for trying to figure out how to correct it.

So how do you do that? Because people, for example, in Silicon Valley with hiring, they’re like, “It just is that way. It’s just there’s more of these people than these people,” and ultimately it leads you to their conclusion, which is that only young white men can invent things, which is untrue. But they’re saying, “Look, this is only the people …” But then you’re like, “Well, you hire them and therefore they’re able to and therefore …” They can’t see the whole systemic problem.

Yeah. I think it’s hard for people to see, especially for Americans to see things at a systemic level, because we’re so socialized to think about ourselves as independent spirits, and we don’t really see the situation that people are in as much as we just kind of see the behavior as a true reflection of the self in the person’s desires and intentions.

“You aren’t rich because you didn’t try hard enough.”

Yeah, exactly.

“You didn’t get into college because you aren’t smart enough.” Whatever that idea is, “you didn’t work hard enough” really is at the heart of it.

Right. So, when people see the disparities, oftentimes they interpret those disparities in a way that has to do with how they feel about that group or the associations that are well practiced about that group.

So is it healthy? Because you do see it on social media now, people don’t hold back anymore. They’re saying these things out loud, especially the president and others. And they’re using these tools which naturally allow people to express themselves and the id. The id takes over, I guess, and everything else. How do you solve for that then? Is there a hope to get rid of bias entirely? Or is it just not …

Well, I think you can solve for it in a lot of ways. I mean, like we talked earlier about slowing people down, that people are more likely to express bias when they’re not thinking and they’re just kind of going on these automatic sort of well-rehearsed, well-practiced associations that they have, and so they kind of spring to life and influence how people are making decisions and so forth. So, I’ll give you a good example of this, which is Nextdoor. Right?

Right. This is a company, explain the company for people.

Yeah. So this is an online platform, right? That was created with the intention of bringing people together, of making communities happier and safer, where people could gather and share information.

About their neighborhoods.

About their neighborhoods, and so it’s all kind of neighborhood based. Really great idea, sort of good intentions there. But …

Over the back fence kind of thing. There’s one called Back Fence that was like that too.

Oh, okay. I didn’t know about that one.

It failed.

So anyways, with Nextdoor, I mean, Nextdoor is, I think, in 95 percent of our neighborhoods in the US right now, and so it spread quite a bit. But they have problems sometimes with racial profiling, right?

They did. They’ve been trying to solve those.

Right. And then how do you solve that? 

What it was is there are people allowed to put up videos with their cameras and things like that in a lot of places, and it’s always black people committing crimes. That’s what it degenerated into in a lot of neighborhoods. And then the question was whether people were reporting incorrectly, or whether they’re recording too much of those or whether that was the real thing. And so it was a big debate around that.

Yeah. The debate I heard about was several years ago, the co-founder of Nextdoor, Sarah Leary, reached out to me to ask, “Well, how do we curb racial profiling on the platform?” Because that was an issue and completely … This was the opposite of why they created the platform.

Right, same thing with Airbnb.

Yes, the same thing.

Which is people didn’t want to rent to people of color or whether we should put pictures on it of people … it went on, it was like this, it was a similar issue.

Right. Similar issue.

Right.

So, with Nextdoor they realized, after talking to me and other people and consulting the literature, that if they wanted to fight racial profiling on the platform that they were going to have to slow people down. Right? But again, we were just talking earlier about how a lot of tech products are built to …

Speed people up.

Yeah, so you don’t have to think.

How do you slow people down in that regard?

So what they decided to do was, it used to be the case that if you saw someone suspicious you could just hit the crime and safety tab and then you could shout out to all your neighbors, “Suspicious person!” Oftentimes, the person who was suspicious was a black man, and in the cases where it was racial profiling, this person was doing nothing. Like it was …

Right. Furtive movements that weren’t very furtive. Which is called “walking” to most people.

Or just the presence in the mostly white community was enough to make that person suspicious. It had nothing to do with any kind of criminal wrongdoing. So that was a problem, right? So, they decided to slow people down by putting up a checklist. It’s a three-item checklist. You have to go through the checklist before you can just shout out to all their neighbors about this suspicious black man.

The first thing on the list is, what is it about the person’s behavior that is making him suspicious? So it can’t be …

Walking.

It can’t be “black man.” I mean, a lot of times it was just the social category. So your social category can’t make you suspicious. They learned that. And then the second thing was to describe the person in enough detail that you’re actually describing that person’s individual features rather than simply his social category, which often, again, was black male. And then the third and last thing was they gave them a definition of what racial profiling was. And so, a lot of people actually didn’t know what racial profiling was, nor did they understand that they were engaging in it. So just educating people about what it was and what they were doing.

And then so letting them know that this is prohibited on the platform. So that’s getting back to the whole cultural norm thing that we talked about earlier. You’re setting the cultural norms where you’re saying that this is not permissible. They were trying to modify … You’ve seen those signs, “If you see something, say something.” They were trying to modify that so it’s, “If you see something suspicious, say something specific.” That’s what they were going for.

So using this method and trying to slow people down with the checklist, they were able to curb profiling on the website by over 75 percent.

Which makes for a better experience, correct, for people.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Because what would happen in those situations is that you would get a lot of incivility, where people end up in shouting matches or something like that. And you’re trying to create a product where you’re bringing neighbors together and not polarizing things.

It’s an interesting thing on Ring, too. Same thing is going on on Ring. It’s just like a video cavalcade of racism. I just, I can’t, it’s amazing when you watch it.

Yeah. I think people feel like tech is going to solve a lot of our problems and make things easier. In some ways it can, but in some ways it raises all these other issues. The bias migrates to these other spaces, and especially if we haven’t really dealt with the issue — and we don’t want to talk about race, we don’t want to talk about bias — it can emerge in these other spaces.

So first just slow down. What else?

We talked about furtive movements, so not using subjective standards to evaluate the behavior of other people. This idea of what’s furtive and all that was subjective and it actually led to huge, huge racial disparities in who got stopped by the police. They decided to take that off the form so that you can’t stop someone based on furtive movement alone.

“Just looks sneaky.”

Yeah, and that’s a good thing, right? So you want to evaluate others and evaluate yourself, too, on a basis of objective standards rather than subjective standards.

Such as, changing it to what? Rather than furtive, what other reasons?

So, if they have a gun and they’re pointing it at someone.

That would be a sign.

So there are other criteria officers can use to determine whether somebody is worthy of stopping.

Okay. So that, and what else?

I mean, I think, so we got speed, we got subjective standards, we got … Also, I think accountability is a big issue. Bias is more likely to happen when you don’t have accountability and you don’t have metrics to actually measure some of the things that you care about. So for example, I think we started out talking about just how there’s not much diversity in tech, at these tech companies at all. We know that partly because a lot of the tech companies have started to keep track of what they’re doing. That accountability, using those metrics so that they’re transparent about what’s happening, is a good thing, because it allows us to see how bad their problem is. It allows them to create goals for themselves for where they want to be.

They’re just telling us that.

Well, without the data you have nothing, right? You don’t really know. It’s hard to hold yourself accountable to something that you can’t see or you don’t want to see.

Well, you can see it, you just don’t want to say …

And you don’t want to focus on it. But having those metrics allows not just them to focus on it, but us as a society to focus on it and think about sort of how can we …

Okay, so accountability?

Yeah. So that’s, I think, huge. I mean, there are a lot of these. I think increasing positive contact across groups, too, is a big one. That’s something from social psychology we’ve known for many decades now, that not just bringing people into contact with each other, but establishing the right kind of contact, actually can reduce bias.

What’s the difference between the wrong [kind of contact] …?

Well, if you bring people together and they’re two different groups, say, and they’re of unequal status, that’s not the best contact. So, sometimes if it’s unequal status or if you know it’s competitive or if people in leadership positions in that context don’t condone the contact and all of that, that’s negative, that’s bad contact. In those situations you can actually make bias worse.

“I knew those people were like that.”

Yeah. Yeah. Now you have proof that they’re actually, exactly what you thought they were and so forth. So, that can backfire. It has to be equal status contact where it’s people working together cooperatively for common goals and it has to be contact that’s sanctioned by leadership. There’s a long sort of laundry list of conditions that make contact either bad or good.

Right. And then finally, when you think about all these things, it seems as if we’re past a point of no return, but that’s probably not the case because we’re right in the middle of it. Right? It feels like that. And it does feel like, especially tech creates that situation of people being … There’s no analog contact as much. There’s digital contact and so it’s very hard to … Again, it was supposed to bring you together, it brings you apart, because there’s no physical contact, there’s no physical contact, there’s no looking at each other.

Right. The anonymity issue is huge, and we’ve known about that for a while as researchers as well.

Anytime it’s anonymous, it’s ugly. Yeah. It brings out your worst self, actually. Why is that?

Well, people are responding to social norms. They are responding to how they’re seen. They’re responding to the image of themselves and whether they’re going to be liked or shunned and all of this. You don’t have those concerns if you’re anonymous. People don’t know who you are, and so you’re more likely to …

Not respond to shame or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is interesting, although there’s a whole culture of that you shouldn’t shame people online. I’m like, well, “maybe you should.”

But will the shame even work if it’s anonymous?

That’s right. If it’s anonymous, yeah, it’s really interesting. So lastly, when you think about this idea of bias … What are you studying next?

So I’m trying to look at ways that we can use science to help us to understand bias and to help us to mitigate it.

More drugs. No, I’m kidding. Everybody’s on LSD, that’s the answer from Silicon Valley, in case you’re interested.

Is it?

Sure. It gets rid of the ego, and then we’re all id. We’re all id, I guess. But what do you think? Do you have any clue right now of how you use science to do that? 

Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve talked about some of the clues, right? We talked about figuring out ways to slow people down so that they don’t do these things, and we can do that as individuals ourselves or we can slow people down in the social environments that we control. So Nextdoor, right?

It worked, yeah.

It’s in 95 percent of our communities, and now they have figured out a way to slow people down so that there’s less profiling. So that’s huge, right? And I feel like companies have a huge role to play here. I think they have a responsibility in all of this because of the power they wield. I mean, they cannot just affect one life but many, many lives, millions of lives. That checklist changed the mindset of all of these people now who are on Nextdoor. I think recognizing that power and marshaling that power is a good thing.

They don’t like to feel like they have impact when they have enormous impact, which I think is difficult. One of the things I’m obsessed with is, you know when you’re fill in a Google box? If you do “black people are …” “women are …” Try it some time.

Oh, okay.

You won’t like it.

Oh, wow.

There you go. It’s fascinating, the results. And of course they all say, “Well that’s what people are searching for.” And you’re like, “Yeah, but you can stop them from …”

Right.

You know what I mean? You can suggest other things or don’t suggest …

You’re kind of aiding and abetting that, right?

Or don’t say anything at all. Don’t let anything be filled in. Saying that’s the way people are is sort of like, “Well, people do terrible things to each other.” It doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate it.

And you’re giving people a tool to express that.

Exactly.

And so do you have some responsibility in that? I mean, that’s …

I know this is gonna sound like a really crazy question, but is there any good use of bias? Is it ever good? Categorization I get, being able to … This is a car, this is a lion, that’s a cat. That’s okay. These are all good things. Don’t get eaten.

Yeah, and there’s bias that comes with that, with the cats and the lions and all that, because once you categorize them, you have some idea about whether they’re dangerous.

Dangerous or you should pet them.

Yeah, exactly. And so, in that sense you can say stereotyping has a function, right? Once you put people in a category and then you develop beliefs about the people who are in that, or the animals who were in that category.

It’s easier with animals.

Yeah, so that helps you, right? It makes things more predictable for you. People talk about stereotyping as an energy-saving device where you don’t have to think of everything that you’re confronted with fresh. You can think about what kinds of things go with the animals, say, that are in that category. And so it saves us time and saves our brain resources, it makes things more predictable. So there’s a function to it.

And we have all kinds of biases. We were spending a lot of time here talking about racial bias, right? But there’s hindsight bias and there’s confirmation bias. There are all kinds of biases that we are …

Wait, what’s hindsight bias?

It’s just basically when you’re thinking about, after something has happened or occurred …

“I knew that would happen.”

Yeah, you knew that and you think, “Oh, it should have been clear from the beginning,” and so forth. And then confirmation bias is you have a theory about how …

And you look for things.

Yeah, and you look for certain things and not others. And even when you’re confronted with something that’s inconsistent with what you thought, you ignore that, you minimize it. So there are all these biases that we have, including this racial bias that we want to be aware of.

Right. Thank you so much, Professor Eberhart. It’s really good to talk to you. I think the robots should just take over at this point. They’ll be biased in a whole different kind of way, but at least it’ll seem fair.