No Giggles Allowed—Implicit Bias Isn’t Funny

Over the weekend, I read The New York Times workplace column, “Work Friend.” A guy named Eric wrote to complain to the Work Friend that he “worked with a couple of people who giggle too much.”

I cocked my head a little at the word giggle but did not think much more of it.

He goes on,

A few sentences into any conversation they will say something that has the cadence of a witticism but usually, if you were to consider their actual words, isn’t at all. Then they crescendo into whatever hellish guffaw or chortle they are stuck with.

Trying to lighten the mood is not the worst thing a person could do. Still, it disturbs me that they have chosen frivolity as their work persona without the sense of humor to back it up.

At first, I read this, and I thought, “that’s dumb.” Would this guy rather everyone be stony-faced and serious all the time at work?

Lighten up, Francis (IYKYK).

But Work Friend (new) columnist Anna Holmes surprised me with her response, which I think I should have thought of myself!

She challenged him to consider that he was sex stereotyping these coworkers.

Holmes assumed the “people” that Eric refers to are female - she professed she “never heard the word ‘giggle’ used to describe a sound emanating from a man.”

So she wondered if Eric’s real issue included that he did not like the way women sounded when they laughed.

Then she told a personal story about calling out her dad about something he said to two loud-voiced women in a cafe that could be deemed to be sexist.

Now, I don’t know if the “people” in this scenario are, in fact, women, but I’d bet they are. And, I don’t know if Eric is sexist or misogynistic or just irritable.

I would bet though that implicit bias, inherent sexism, is at work here (pun intended).

What Is “Implicit Bias”?

Implicit bias is the natural human process of categorizing “like objects” together and the unintentional and unconscious judgment a person makes based on pervasive stereotypes.

Like sex stereotypes.

For example, a supervisor who perceives women as less confident than men can lead to women being passed over for promotions.

As you can imagine, sex stereotypes harm women in the workplace.

According to Women in the Workplace: Key Findings in 2023,

Women who experience microaggressions struggle to feel psychologically safe and “self-shield” by muting their voices, code-switching, or hiding important aspects of themselves. The stress caused by all this cuts deep: they are 4x more likely to almost always feel burned out and 3x more likely to think about leaving their companies.

(emphasis added).

Let’s Not Encourage Code-Switching

Code switching is when women adjust their behavior, language, and communication style to fit in with the dominant male culture in the workplace.

Who wants that kind of workplace where everyone has to sound, behave, and act a certain way?

Discrimination on the basis of gender stereotypes, i.e., how a person should look, dress, and act, is illegal.

In the specific context of sex stereotyping, in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (490 U.S. 228 (1989)), SCOTUS stated,

an employer who acts on the basis of a belief that a woman cannot be aggressive, or that she must not be, has acted on the basis of gender…An employer who objects to aggressiveness in women but whose positions require this trait places women in an intolerable and impermissible Catch-22: out of a job if they behave aggressively and out of a job if they do not. Title VII lifts women out of this bind.

Look, I know that Eric’s complaint may be nothing.

Of course!

But it raises an important issue, and that is—employers would be wise to consider what role implicit or unconscious bias is playing in promotions, demotions, salary, terminations, and other terms and conditions of employment.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Employer Takeaways

So what can employers do? After all, no one is a mind-reader. Here are some tips:

• Be aware of the existence of implicit bias. We judge people and situations around us all the time, often without realizing it. Realize that judgments may be based on pre-formed ideas steeped in unconscious bias. Consider your teams, and monitor their decisions.

• Train your employees, supervisors, and managers so that they are not discriminating against one gender on the basis of sex— this includes the unequal treatment of women based on their gender. Training should be interactive and geared toward your specific workplace. A “one size fits all” approach to training is generally ineffective.

• Audit your workforce. If the impact of favoring or crediting your male employees over your female employees causes your female employees to achieve less compensation or promotion, you may very well have a problem.

• Ensure the company has an Employee Handbook calling out sex discrimination, including sex stereotyping. Provide examples. Lots of examples.

Leaders need to foster inclusion so that employees feel they can bring their authentic selves to work rather than the type of “performance bias,” which seems to underly Eric’s complaint.

As Holmes concluded, “Anyway, I’d ask you to think about this a little. Just a little. Because, listen, I know from annoying co-workers, and I know from annoying laughs. So it’s not so much that you’re the baddie — it’s just that you might want to take issues of sex and gender and power into account: People have been complaining about women’s voices for decades. (Probably forever.) Is that what’s going on here? And am I the baddie for suggesting that this is the actual issue? That I don’t know, either. Maybe a giggle is just a giggle, nothing more.”

Maybe so. And maybe not.