My partner is a software engineer, and she has experienced an enormous amount of inappropriate behavior - everything from "was that inappropriate, am I being too sensitive?" to a person getting fired and walked out by security for their behavior toward her (extremely justifiably). None of this has ever happened to me, though.<p>Even in the more innocuous cases, it leads to a ton of self-doubt. Part of the problem is the volume of it - these aren't one-off instances, but repeated questioning of one's worth as a human being and member of the team.<p>I like unconscious bias as a model for addressing this because it lets you flip the equation around on these cases. Imagine someone who tells women at work to smile. By accusing them of being sexist, the argument becomes about whether they're being sexist - and they'll inevitably argue that they're not, they're just being nice, people are being too sensitive/PC and in the end nothing happens. And it's really not the individual instance of it that's the problem, but the volume of it - and not just from that person, but from everyone. And this really serves to diffuse responsibility.<p>Unconscious bias would say to recognize your own biases, and rather than have the argument about whether or not you're sexist/racist/whatever, to think about how you can treat people equally, and correct for your biases. And then, rather than trying to apply labels to people, we can have a real conversation about behavior - and correct ones behavior and build systems to accommodate for these biases.<p>For example, if someone repeatedly interrupts someone in a meeting, they might not even know it (hence, _unconscious_ bias). If you accuse that person of being sexist, the conversation stops there. But if people subscribe to unconscious bias, it can be a learning experience "hey, I noticed you interrupted X a few times in that meeting" it can be a chance to understand ones biases - "oh, I didn't mean to. I'll be mindful of that in the future." And you can even go a step further, and create systems to compensate - have a rule that one person can talk at a time (say by holding a ball), or a culture where you explicitly acknowledge any ideas you're building on before you suggest something.<p>Obviously there's no silver bullet to solving this, and there are bigger issues than people being interrupted in meetings, but I've found when people subscribe to this philosophy of self-reflection and mindfulness, it goes a long way in creating a positive environment where people are treated like people.