The White Guy Bias Part 2

If you haven’t viewed the Outside the Lines piece I am commenting on, you can see it here.

Following up on what I wrote yesterday in point 2, I want to quote Gladwell at length concerning the impact of our prejudices (conscious or unconscious).  In the section this paragraph appears, Gladwell is speaking about something called an IAT or Implicit Association Test.  It is a test that measures our deeply held prejudices.  He cites various examples (as different tests focus on different areas themselves).  Race.  Gender.  And even height.

Regarding height, he points out that in polling half of Fortune 500 companies, he found that 58 percent of them employed CEOs who are about 6 feet or taller.  That might not sound like a big deal until you are told that in the U.S. population, only 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or taller and the average height of men is 5 foot 9 inches.  As he makes plain (and the Bible even supports this notion in the story of King Saul), we often instinctively give taller men a preference when looking for a great leader.  The president Warren Harding is the perfect example of this (hence, the title of Gladwell’s chapter, The Warren Harding Error).  Though we would never say we are prejudiced for taller men in leadership, the evidence is quite clear.

And this is where Gladwell’s summarizing comments apply to our discussion.  He writes,

Is this a deliberate prejudice?  Of course not.  No one ever says dismissively of a potential CEO candidate that he’s too short.  This is quite clearly the kind of unconscious bias that the IAT picks up on.  Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature.  We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.  And this isn’t confined to the executive suite.  Not long ago, researchers who analyzed the data from four large research studies that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood calculated that when corrected for such variable as age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary.  That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year.  As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the height-salary study, points out:  ’If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousand of dollars of earnings advantage.’  Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations?  It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selections decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.  We see a tall person and we swoon.

I believe the application to our discussion should be plain.  In particular, I would ask, if biases we don’t fully know about or even deny impact our decisions like this, how powerful are the biases that we willingly acknowledge (as in the case of the white guy bias in basketball)?  This definitely needed to be considered in the Outside the Lines piece.

I might even say more on this topic tomorrow, but for now, I think it is necessary for me to say that I am not writing this series as a bitter white guy.  I think Kyle McAlarney came across that way in the video.  Though I do think there is more to the issue than OTL addressed, I am thankful for where I am and know that I have had countless opportunities due to other biases held in our and other cultures.  So black or white, enjoy thinking through this with me.  No playing the race card.  No suing for discrimination going to happen here!  Just checking things out.  Thinking things through.  For more than anything else, such a discussion should no doubt have application to much more important things than American white guys playing in the NBA!