It was a seemingly innocuous comment. When white colleagues saw Michelle Hernandez, who is African American, with two of her coworkers—one African American, one Middle Eastern—many would say jokingly, “That looks like trouble!”

Michelle and her friends laughed it off at first. But as the comments became more pointed, the women—three of only ten minorities on a 100-person staff at a Richmond, VA, nonprofit—began to feel the remarks were racially motivated. “My boss told me, ‘When the three of you are behind closed doors in your office, people are watching that,’ ” says Michelle, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. “Eventually, we were so harassed about our relationship with one another that if we wanted to meet for lunch, rather than carpool, we would stagger what time we left the building and drive in separate cars.”

Most people know better than to make blatantly prejudicial comments at work. But small actions—seemingly harmless jokes, greeting one colleague more enthusiastically than another, disregarding someone’s comments in a meeting—are more difficult to define as problematic because the offenders are typically unaware that they’re being offensive and the recipients are generally unsure how to react. Indeed, these slights often lead those on the receiving end to wonder if they’re just being oversensitive. But eventually, such prejudicial affronts can take their toll on an employee’s self-esteem and, in turn, on work performance. “It erodes your morale and after a while puts you on the defensive,” says Michelle. That’s why Mary Rowe, PhD, an ombudsperson and adjunct professor of negotiation and conflict management at MIT, calls this subtle discrimination the “principal scaffolding for segregation” in the workplace.

Dr. Rowe, who coined the term “microinequities” in 1973 for such slights, describes them as “apparently small events that are often hard to prove” but that “occur wherever people are perceived to be ‘different.’ ” They’re a result of inherent biases regarding anything from gender and race to age and class—something we all have, adds Dr. Rowe—and are often based on experiences we have growing up that we then use to categorize people. They can be expressed by gestures, language choices, treatment, or even tone of voice, but the cumulative effect of microinequities can harm an employee’s performance.

“Bias is part of the way our minds work,” explains Brian Nosek, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the director of Project Implicit, an online test designed to detect hidden racial biases. “Our minds have to make judgments when there’s not enough time to use all available information, so we make impressions of people very quickly, often without recognizing what features are influencing our decisions.”

This stereotyping process isn’t necessarily bad; it’s when we attach judgments to it that problems arise. Since some of our strongest stereotypes are based on race and gender, women of color—in fact, women in general—often suffer the most from microinequities, especially as managers make assumptions about their ability to do the work.

Simi Nwogugu was pregnant when she was hired at a major New York City–based media company after completing an MBA at Harvard University. Her boss, also a woman, had decided to delay having children. “If I ever said I was tired or didn’t feel well, my boss would ask if I didn’t think I should have waited to have kids,” says Simi. Then, when Simi became pregnant again a year after having her first child, her boss told her that she’d wanted a workhorse, not someone running on the mommy track. “She asked if there was something in my culture that was making me have babies so early,” says Simi, who is from Nigeria and was 31 at the time.

When Simi complained to human resources, she was told not to make a big deal out of it. It’s a common response to microinequities: The recipient is judged as being too touchy. “This kind of bias is unplanned, and it rarely makes it to the surface of people’s awareness,” says Stephen Young, founder of Insight Education Systems and author of Micromessaging: Why Great Leadership Is Beyond Words. “Therefore, I judge the person who brings it to my attention as being oversensitive, and the claim is dismissed. If this person persists, then she is seen as someone who is too angry, too sensitive—as someone who doesn’t fit our organization.”

Celebrating Our Differences
Given that this kind of prejudice is unconscious and hard to define, how, then, do forward-thinking companies deal with microinequities? The best way is to directly counter them with microaffirmations, a term Dr. Rowe uses to define subtle messages that let employees know that they’re doing well and are expected to succeed. “Appropriately affirming the work of another person is likely both to help that person do well and to help him or her to enjoy doing well,” she says. “Such consistent, appropriate affirmation can spread from one person to another, potentially raising morale and productivity.”

But to get to this point, companies must first help employees acknowledge their micromessages, both pro and con. However, when it comes to unearthing hidden biases, experts say that most standard diversity training can be ineffective, even counterproductive. “If once or twice a year you go into a room and talk about diversity, it often feels like a blame game, like, “You white guys are the problem,’ ” says Dr. Nosek. This could lead to a backlash and might actually increase bias, he says, or people might assume that having gone through some form of diversity training, they don’t really need to think about issues surrounding bias in their day-to-day work lives.
Instead, companies instead should create programs that help employees recognize and discuss their hidden biases year-round. It must be “in the company’s DNA,” says Allen Thomas, chief diversity officer and managing partner at Deloitte, one of our 2009 Best Companies for Multicultural Women. Explains Thomas: “We have two components to help deal with these issues. The main one is education—we have a number of programs to make employees as aware as they can be of their hidden biases—and the other is a celebration of employees’ cultures.”

This second element is key, says Simi, who ultimately quit her job and now runs Hod Consulting, which helps organizations manage diversity. “The dominant group usually has good intentions when they say, ‘Let’s all get along and focus on our commonalities,’ ” she says, “but the nondominant groups are very aware of their differences and want those differences to be acknowledged and celebrated.”

To that end, Deloitte offers both online and in-person training programs, including one that asks participants to write the life stories of 30 individuals, based solely on their photographs. “We are visual in nature, and we look at people and things click without us even knowing,” says Thomas. “People built their stories around hidden biases, and quite often the story was tremendously wrong.” After realizing the power of stereotypes, Thomas says, employees typically start to question their thinking and realize that they shouldn’t make judgments using common assumptions.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, another of our Best Companies, also offers employees educational opportunities to help them recognize “that we all have filters,” says Reggie Butler, managing director of diversity. Jennifer Gale, senior manager in learning and education at PwC, who is Caucasian, participated in a program Butler ran. “Reggie asked a series of questions, and if we could answer yes, we were to step into the center of the room,” recalls Jennifer. “He started with mundane questions like ‘Do you own a car?’ but then he asked things like, ‘Have you ever told or laughed at a racist joke?’ It made you think, Gosh, I have done that.”

Jennifer says that even though it was uncomfortable facing these hidden biases head-on, she learned to be more conscious about making assumptions based on people’s backgrounds. She currently works with several Mormons and, prior to training, had assumed that they would be more sheltered and sensitive to certain things; now she knows to ask their thoughts.

And this, say experts, should be a company’s goal: to create an environment where employees can become attuned to their unintentional biases and work to overcome them. It’s more effective to take the positive approach, they say—to emphasize inclusion rather than punish exclusion. Says Butler, “Instead of placing blame or making people feel guilty, we recognize that the solution is to create awareness, talk about the assumptions we all make and provide a safe environment for self discovery.”
 
Bring Hidden Biases to Light
Too many multicultural women choose to ignore microinequities. “They brush them off and tell themselves that it’s to be expected in the workplace, but that it’s not something that will stop them from achieving their goals,” says employment lawyer Natalie Holder-Winfield, author of Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Workforce. Yet other women are so distressed by the slow, painful chipping away at their self-confidence that they cannot function and end up leaving their jobs.

Think you’re experiencing microinequities at work? Here, our experts give four steps to identify and conquer hidden bias.

Test your perceptions. Talk about your experiences with your friends and colleagues to make sure that you are, in fact, being treated unfairly. Holder-Winfield tells the story of an African-American man who felt his white boss was racist because he never greeted him properly in the morning. “The man didn’t know if his manager greeted his white colleagues differently,” says Holder-Winfield. “Just because the manager didn’t say good morning doesn’t make him racist. It could just mean he had no upbringing!”

Look for patterns. Behavior should be pervasive rather than a onetime incident. When Betty Dominguez worked as an account representative at a financial services firm, she was routinely asked by her white male bosses to fill in for the secretaries, who were also Latina. “I was offended. Why didn’t they ask my white colleagues? Why didn’t they ask a guy?” says Betty. “These people had very old ideas of roles people should play in the workplace. And when they looked at me, they saw a Latina, and therefore a secretary.”

Speak up. Early in her career, Lily Tang had a white boss who would call her his “China doll.” It was meant as a compliment, and at the time Lily said nothing. “In Asian culture, the idea of saving face and not embarrassing your boss by saying anything is deeply rooted,” she says. “But if it happened today, I would definitely go to his office and let him know the impact of his words.”

Ask questions. Ask the person making the statements to explain them. “The easiest thing to do when someone inadvertently says something offensive is to say, ‘Tell me more,’ ” says Stephen Young, founder of Insight Education Systems and author of Micromessaging: Why Great Leadership Is Beyond Words By making the person elaborate rather than lash out in anger, you force him to consider his words, and he will often recognize the bias on his own rather than becoming defensive.

Take Project Implicit’s online test to detect hidden racial biases at workingmother.com.