What does it mean to break the bias?

Breaking bias is about noticing and calling out biased behaviors and practices in an effort to create environments where everyone can thrive and flourish.

It can seem straightforward enough to just say let’s call out bias when we encounter it. When you see something, say something. But it's more nuanced than that.

Being able to recognize bias is one thing. And while I'm sure you know and have experienced many common biases and what they can look and sound like, it's helpful to be able to name them and understand some of the research behind them so that you don't fall into the traps and the negative outcomes that result when they go unchecked.

But the key is in calling it out. Breaking the bias is not about ‘if’ you should call out biased behavior, it is about how and when. It can require real courage to call out bias. It can feel uncomfortable or scary, especially if there is a risk, real or perceived, that you’ll be punished, penalized, or burdened in some way for doing it. Building a healthy culture doesn’t work when inappropriate behavior is tolerated. Remembering that can be an empowering way to move through intimidating feelings and step into action.

Knowing when and how to call out bias effectively is tough because it's highly subjective and contextual. Given this, in my experience it is important to anchor efforts to break bias in compassion. Compassion for ourselves and for others who are finding their way through it.

Because bias runs deep. Our unconscious minds make associations and assumptions that affect our behavior and decision making in real time, often without our conscious awareness of it.

I remember the first time I took Harvard’s Implicit Association Test (IAT) on Gender-Career.

The IAT is a research tool developed by psychologists at Harvard, University of Washington, and University of Virginia that measures the strength of automatic associations in your mind -- the connections your brain makes quickly and without conscious deliberation. The Gender-Career version specifically measures how strongly you associate male and female with career and family respectively. It's one of the most widely used tools in implicit bias research, and you can take it yourself here.

At that point, I’d already been doing women’s leadership work for a few years. As someone who had been facilitating this work, I felt like I knew something about it. So when the results showed that I had a “slight automatic association of male with career and female with family” I was shocked. I was embarrassed. The strong reaction was telling and helped me to see something deeper too– that I had been harboring an expectation that I wouldn’t or shouldn’t have this kind of bias at all. I was holding a stigma about it, even when I consciously knew that didn’t make sense and wasn’t productive. It was confronting.

It was humbling to take responsibility for my own bias.

First of all it helped me to see my own story differently. I could see how hard I tried in my early career to prove myself professionally. I could better understand the root of the fear I carried about not being a good mom or a good wife. I was able to acknowledge all the energy and effort I put into stepping into the parts of myself that didn’t align with stereotypes of who I unconsciously believed ‘a woman’ was supposed to be.

Importantly, it helped me to have compassion for others who are working through this too -- almost all of whom have spent far less time than I have thinking about and working on this. Unlearning, learning and relearning require courageous introspection. And patience. And resilience. And nurturing. And persistence.

So what does breaking bias actually look like in practice?

The inner work matters -- but it has to connect to action. And in my experience, calling out bias is where most people get stuck. Not because they don't see it, but because they don't know how to name it without causing more harm than good.

A few things I've learned from working with leaders on this:

Context matters enormously. Whether you call something out in the moment or follow up privately, whether you name it directly or open with curiosity -- none of that is one-size-fits-all. It depends on the relationship, the power dynamics, the culture, and how visible the behavior was to others.

For more overt situations, a simple phrase can do a lot of work. "We don't do that here" -- said calmly, without elaboration -- sets a clear boundary without shaming anyone. It's a signal, not a punishment.

For subtler situations, a three-part approach tends to work better:

1. Name what you observed behaviorally ("when you said X"),

2. Share the impact ("here's how it landed"),

Then ask a closed question ("did you notice that?") followed by an open one ("what do you think?").

The goal isn't to accuse -- it's to create a moment of genuine reflection.

When someone gets dismissed

You're in a meeting. A newcomer to the organization, perhaps younger, tries a couple of times to get a word in. Finally they get some airtime and share an observation: something they've noticed that surprises them about the organization. A longer-tenured colleague cuts them off almost immediately. "You're new. You can't make that kind of judgment."

What do most people do?

Nothing.

What can you do?

First, recognize that calling it out doesn't have to mean a dramatic public confrontation -- and in fact, that approach often backfires. If the behavior is a genuine blind spot for the person who said it, humiliating them publicly is more likely to put them on the defensive than to create any real change. So the response here is layered.

In the moment, if you're in a position to do so, you can redirect simply and without drama: "Actually, I'd really like to hear what they were saying." That's it. You don't need to name the bias out loud or make it a teachable moment for the whole room. You just reopen the door that got shut.

After the meeting, go to the person who got cut off. Not to debrief the politics of what happened, but simply to say: I noticed that. That wasn't okay. I want to hear your idea. Being seen matters as much as being defended -- and for someone who is newer or more of an outsider in the culture, that private acknowledgment can mean more than you know.

Then, separately, go to the person who did the cutting off. This is where the three-part tool earns its place: name what you observed ("when you said you're new. You can't make that kind of judgment."), share the impact ("that cut the space for fresh insights."), ask a closed question ("did you notice that?") and then open it up ("what do you think?"). You're not prosecuting them. You're inviting reflection. Most people, when genuinely asked, will surprise you.

When you're the one who has been called out

I worked with a leader once who had been repeatedly interrupting a younger, newer, non-native English-speaking woman on his team during a large regional meeting. She eventually called him out directly and with a lot of emotion that silenced the whole room.

He set up a one-to-one with her for a later date and time. His instinct going into it was to explain his intention -- the meeting had a long agenda, people kept going off track -- and to gently suggest she'd been out of line with her emotional response. We unpacked that together. Intention matters, but it doesn't cancel impact. And her emotional response wasn't an overreaction to one meeting -- it was likely the accumulation of many moments of not being heard. I sent him into that conversation with two phrases in his back pocket: "tell me more" and "what else." He came out of it genuinely surprised by how much deeper it went than he expected -- and how much he hadn't seen. And perhaps most importantly, she felt heard.

If you've got a specific situation you've faced that you'd like a fresh perspective on, or if this is bringing up something for you, I'd love to hear from you.

This is a topic I've spoken and facilitated on a lot -- if you're looking for someone to bring this conversation into your organization, take a look at my speaking work or book a call and let's talk.

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