What the hell was that?

Bias? Prejudice? Bullying?

An Anecdote from Just Work by Kim Scott

When you’re faced with behavior that’s discriminatory or offensive, it’s not always clear whether you’re facing bias, prejudice, or bullying. Part of what makes it hard to respond when someone says something offensive is the uncertainty about where the person is coming from. Is this unconscious bias talking? Or does the person mean what they said? Or is the remark a power play of some kind, intended to intimidate?

Here is an anecdote that illustrates just how complex even the briefest of interactions can be. In one sense, it was a trivial encounter, lasting less than 60 seconds. In another, it speaks volumes.

I was just about to give a Radical Candor keynote, based on my book Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, to the founders and executives of some of Silicon Valley’s hottest start-ups. A couple hundred men were at the conference. I was one of only a handful of women. Just as I was about to go onstage, one of the participants approached me, his lips pursed in frustration. “I need a safety pin!” he hissed at me. He was clutching at his shirtfront—a button had popped off. 

Evidently, he assumed I was on the event-staff team. To prevent this situation, the conference organizers had given the event staff bright yellow T-shirts. But all he could notice was his need and my gender.

I didn’t know what to say. He was being rude and seemed almost panicked about his exposed belly. More striking than his rudeness was his utter certainty that it was my job to solve his problem. I was about to give my presentation, so I was a little agitated myself. Let’s slow the moment way down and explore why it was hard to know what to say.

I wanted to believe that Mr. Safety Pin was manifesting garden-variety unconscious gender bias when he assumed I was staffing the event. Not a federal offense. Most of us have made an incorrect assumption about another person’s role based on some personal attribute, and these moments are as painful as they are common. In these situations, often the best tactic for someone in my position is to lightly correct the error and move on: the classic “Sorry, I don’t work here” moment.

But maybe his comment had sprung not from unconscious bias but rather from conscious prejudice. Maybe he believed women should have support roles and not write books about leadership.

Perhaps if I explained, “I need to prepare for my talk right now, so I can’t help you out,” he’d reply, “Oh. You must be the Radical Candor lady. I don’t believe in that soft, feminine leadership bullshit.” Unlikely, but certainly not impossible: That kind of thing has happened to me, more than once. If my attempt at a courteous response prompted him to reveal a conscious prejudice against women, it would piss me off, and that would make it harder for me to focus on my talk. I didn’t want to risk that.

Plus, there was a third possibility: bullying. What if I corrected him and he escalated, saying something like “Hey, lady, no need to get your panties all in a wad”? I wasn’t sure I would be able to resist the temptation to respond to that sort of obnoxious remark with something equally obnoxious: “I am here to teach you to be a kick-ass boss, not to fetch your safety pins!” And then I’d go onstage roiling mad at him, and at myself for losing my temper. I’d be knocked off my game.

There was another confounding factor here beyond gender: power and privilege. The man assumed he had a right to be rude to the people staffing the event. Perhaps when he realized I was a speaker, not a staffer, that I had the same economic and network privileges he did, he would apologize and snap into polite mode. But talking to anyone the way he’d talked to me was objectionable.

All this felt like too much for me to deal with in the five minutes before I walked onstage. So I said nothing, and the man stomped off, evidently wondering why I was refusing to do my job, muttering something about complaining to the event organizers about the unhelpful staff.

 Correcting his misapprehensions at that moment shouldn’t have been my job. In another sense, though, I was a potential upstander: my failure to correct him meant that he might complain about the event staff—people who were more vulnerable than I was. But perhaps most importantly, as a speaker I was there in a leadership capacity, so I had an obligation to speak up.

My silence was bad for everyone: bad for the staff; bad for me, because I hadn’t lived in accordance with my own beliefs; and even bad for Mr. Safety Pin. Because by not pointing out his bias (if that’s what was behind his request), I was making it more likely that he’d repeat his mistake.