Tackling Implicit Bias One Pixel at a Time

A full-body videogame experience. A walk through Venice. A 360-view of your favorite sporting event. A quick tour of your potential college campus. When we talk about uses for virtual reality, maybe these are a few of the examples that come to mind.

The real applications of VR, though, are extensive—and many of them are about more than simple escapism. It can be used to calm PTSD in soldiers, to manage phobias with exposure therapy, to treat amputees faced with phantom limb pain, to train medical students on surgery. And, as my guest Morgan Mercer explains on Simplexity, to tackle implicit bias in the workplace. 

Founder and CEO of Vantage Point, a company that uses VR training to help companies combat sexual harassment and bias, Morgan drives home an important point: bias stands in the way of truly diverse, inclusive workspaces. Companies like hers are using technology to educate people in an effort to improve the inclusivity of offices across the world.

Before we hop into how VR fights bias, though, let’s talk about the real, costly influences of discrimination in the workplace.

THE COST OF DISCRIMINATION IN THE WORKPLACE

A lack of diversity in workspaces has very real consequences for very real people; the emotional damage caused by outright discrimination cannot be understated, and everyday prejudice causes qualified people to lose potential opportunities that impact them today and in the future. 

Perhaps these ramifications seem difficult to grasp if they aren’t happening to you. With the recent debates over minimum wage, there is a lot of conversation about money in the workplace. So let’s look at the diversity issue in simple, hard numbers—because the losses for businesses are clear.

A 2012 study estimated that workplace discrimination cost companies $64 billion dollars annually. By 2020, that estimate was up to a whopping $1.05 trillion. That same 2020 study found that “increasing the retention rate of women by 5% would save a company employing 50,000 employees up to $8 million per year.” Where do these losses come from? Morgan outlines a few places on the podcast, but a large part is the cost of turnover. When an employee leaves a position, companies have to pay to find a new employee and to train that employee. And talented people do leave jobs because of discrimination; the 2012 study found that upwards of 2 million Americans leave their jobs each year because of workplace discrimination. That figure has only increased in the last decade.

The companies themselves aren’t the only ones suffering. Consumers suffer, too, because discrimination halts new ideas. Workers who experience discrimination are 2.6 times more likely to withhold ideas and solutions. It makes sense. Too many of us have been in a meeting and felt that our voices weren’t wanted at the table because they didn’t sound like everyone else’s. Diverse teams could be producing innovative, world-changing products and processes that reduce costs, improve lives, or just create neat new technology. Discrimination robs us of some of those ideas.

THE BENEFITS OF DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION IN THE WORKPLACE 

The flip side of those numbers? It’s what companies could gain from investing in better diversity and inclusion practices (and as Morgan points out, we need true inclusion that starts in the board room). While the cost of discrimination feels pretty doom and gloom, the financial benefits of inclusive company cultures are downright inspiring:

• Your revenue spikes. Companies with more diverse leadership teams report 19% higher revenue.
• You outperform competitors. Gender-diverse and racially diverse companies outperform their industry averages by 15% and 35%, respectively.
• You innovate. Companies that focus on inclusion are 1.7 times more likely to be innovation leaders.
• You improve execution. The business decisions made by diverse teams outperform individual decision-makers by up to 87%.

Those are just the numbers that benefit companies. In addition to that, diversity and inclusion greatly improve the lives of the people in our communities. So with the losses and the benefits so clearly leaning in the favor of diversity...why do we still struggle with discrimination? And how can VR help?

COMBATING 175 BIASES 

A large portion of the diversity battle is the sheer amount of prejudice we can hold without realizing it. Unconscious bias impacts the way we see the world, and professionals have determined that we are affected by a staggering 175 types of implicit biases. In the professional world, this type of prejudice begins at the resume-review process, when even an uncommon name can cause a hiring manager to pass on a candidate.

As Morgan explains so eloquently on the podcast, the other hurdle is our inability to translate personal experiences. We cannot explain a feeling to someone—so we struggle to create a shared perception around a problem. If you haven’t experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, you may not be able to understand how that experience can warp your professional identity or how it can prevent you from contributing to a meeting. Likewise, you don’t know how you’ll react to something until it happens. You don’t know if you’ll speak up after witnessing a microaggression or after hearing an inappropriate joke until it happens. That’s where virtual reality steps in.

TACKLING IT IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD 

Virtual reality companies like Morgan’s take advantage of “state-dependent learning” (this means that we can better recall information if the moment mimics something we have experienced in the past). They immerse employees in a virtual reality simulation that mirrors a problematic event they could encounter in the office.

Rather than simply explaining sexual harassment or inequality, VR places the person in the situation. Faced with photorealistic characters, the users are confronted with things like an invasion of personal space, eye contact, tonality, and other contextual clues that make up the problems we face in the workplace. While a conversation might seem fine on paper, experiencing the dynamic of a room can completely change our perception of an event.

This immersive technology, as Morgan explains, drives empathy. This type of training helps employees understand how they could have responded better. It begins to train people on how to combat their implicit biases. And the empathy it creates helps companies begin to cultivate more emphatic, inclusive workplaces.

But if we all suffer from implicit biases, then how do we prevent the biases of the tech developers from seeping into the virtual world? Watch my full conversation with Morgan on Simplexity to find out.