Speaker 1: What would the world look like if everybody were aware of the stereotypes that they have and the biases that they have? When we talk about unconscious bias, we're basically saying our worldview can actually exert an influence beyond our conscious awareness and it creates ambiguity.

Speaker 2: You go to an engineer who's built something extremely innovative and you say, who do you think your user is? This is where I have the most fun. My name is TB Raman and I led our work on Android accessibility for three years. Write down everything that you think you know about your user with respect to abilities, inabilities, special abilities, disabilities. Almost every assumption that you write down on that whiteboard about, this is the user I think I'm building for, is questionable. Because our various unconscious biases define the boundaries you're unwilling to expand.

Speaker 3: These biases, they're the shortcuts that our brain has created so that we can deal with the information that we process every single day.

Speaker 4: Right when we see anyone, whether we think about it or not, we are implicitly, automatically making judgments about how warm and competent that person or thing is.

Speaker 5: All humans need to make decisions and so we fill in the blanks because our brains are wired to do that and we fill in with things we don't know with past experience. Oh, you pattern map to someone I think I should hire so I'm going to hire you versus this person because they didn't map because I can't fill in the blank because they don't look like me or they're not from my same background and so I can't see how they're going to make the jump.

Speaker 1: Every single person is great at things that you may not expect them to be but it's really hard for us to see that when we're so powerfully guided by the things we expect to be true in the world.

Speaker 3: I grew up surrounded with this conversation about what you can't do and what you won't be able to do. My name is Enrico and I'm an autistic software engineer. The first time I go through the performance review process, I was asked for five strengths. It was the first time that I had ever been prompted to think in that way about myself and it was really a life-changing moment for me.

Speaker 4: When we are working in our day-to-day jobs, we are still making judgments about the people around us, about the resumes we see, about the employees that we're trying to decide, you know, whether to put them on teams or not.

Speaker 6: People are very wedded to the idea that they can perceive something objectively and statistically they're wrong but it's hard. You become attached to this idea that you can assess something by looking at it.

Speaker 7: These subtle assumptions we make about people can have lasting effects on who we're promoting, who we're hiring, who we're putting in leadership positions. We have the responsibility to understand the assumptions that we make and understand the errors that we make.

Speaker 8: But it's not just for the collective good. If you take the time to understand more about this, there are things that you can implement for yourself that will help you develop as a leader and to do your job even better.

Speaker 6: It made me realize how often I have a very strong belief that is simply incorrect. When I look at one of these evaluation situations, the first question is how can I eliminate the sources of potential bias and leave just the data so we can actually make better decisions.

Speaker 5: If you're not conscious of the biases that you have, you're just not contributing at the level that you could and you're not innovating at the level you could and so your products won't be as good. Your results won't be as good.

Speaker 2: When you think outside the box with respect to the assumptions you made about how somebody would use this wonderful thing you built and when you sort of broaden that perspective as to who you change the world for, you build something even bigger.