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Your Boss Made a Biased Remark—Now What?
by Aneeta Rattan
When I ask my MBA students if they would respond to a biased remark at work, there’s a unanimous response: Everybody says yes, they would. But when I ask them how they’d react to the same comment from their boss, I usually hear, “I would still want to speak up. But I wouldn’t know how to actually do it.”
They are not alone. Research shows that people have a hard time standing up to biased comments from someone more powerful than them.1 When you are the only person in the room who comes from a certain background, it’s even harder. Sometimes your colleagues and peers may even fail to acknowledge that the comment was biased at all.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, first of ...
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