Our nation and institutions—including the businesses where we work—have become far less discriminatory and more inclusive over the last few decades. However, many of us still act in ways that unintentionally discriminate.
 
How bad is it? In this week’s New York Times Nicholas Kristof describes a research study in which California college students, many of them Obama supporters, unconsciously perceived him as less American than the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

My colleague, Joan Reede MD, Harvard Medical School’s Dean for Diversity & Community Partnership, and I recently published a research piece that identifies seven unintentional forms of discriminatory behavior that are common and costly within today’s business environment.  Sixty-two percent of minorities and 53 percent of women we surveyed experience one or more of these discriminatory behaviors at least monthly; 96 percent say these incidents cause them to make negative judgments about whether their organization values equity and fairness; and 53 percent say that, when these problems occur, no one confronts or discusses them.

As we near the election of either a black man as president or a woman as vice president, I believe we will see a fairly dramatic impact on these unconscious, or at least thoughtless, forms of discrimination. Here’s why. Humans are very poor at detecting and recognizing gradual change. We don’t see problems that creep up on us until a crisis happens. After the crisis, when we look back, the pattern seems obvious. We don’t understand how we could have missed it. Some examples? The gradual rise of extremism followed by 911; the gradual rise in global warming followed by Hurricane Katrina; the gradual loosening of financial regulations followed by our current economic meltdown.

The same inability to see patterns occurs when things are getting better. The roles that blacks and women play in our society have steadily improved, but this election will be the lightning bolt that makes these changes visible. Ant he day after the election, we will look back and see black and women achievers everywhere—at the tops of their professions. And I think this realization will sink deeply into our psyche in ways that will finally defeat at least a few of our unconscious biases.