Aubrey Blanche: Interrupting Bias in Your Career

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  Ted CarstensenPlatform Director
  Heavybit

Late last year Atlassian’s Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Aubrey Blanche, gave a talk at our San Francisco Clubhouse in partnership with the Younger Women’s Task Force. Her awesome talk focused on the kinds of bias women may experience in the workplace, as well as actionable strategies you can employ to interrupt those biases. Sign up here to come to the next YWTF event.

A bias is an inefficiency in our decision-making process.

Biases can be found all over the workplace – from code reviews, to job listings, interviewing, and negotiating your salary – so it’s a sure thing that “they will impact you in your career” says Aubrey.

To set the scene, she lays out some fascinating information about our brains. It turns out that we “are exposed to 11 million discrete pieces of information every minute” which makes it “completely impossible that we could process all of that data with our conscious mind.”

In reality, Aubrey says that our conscious mind “can only process about 40 pieces of information in a minute,” which means that 99.999996% of the information we come into contact with is “processed, categorized, and used by our unconscious mind to drive our decisions and behaviors.”

The takeaway is that we’re not always sure what’s driving the conclusions that we come to, so it’s important to ‘interrupt’ these processes to reconfigure the heuristics our brains have developed to be more inclusive. Don’t miss the full talk below.

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