Unconscious Bias = Bad Startup Branding
The Recurse Center
What did you just think of? Unless you already know what the Recurse Center is, you probably didn’t think of much beyond maybe guessing it was something vaguely to do with computer science.
Hacker School
Now what did you just think of? Dev boot camps, web development, recruiting for companies?
The Recurse Center is a 3-month self-directed programming retreat in New York. They just recently rebranded from Hacker School to The Recurse Center.
A couple weeks ago, Nick from the Recurse Center, visited Berkeley AWE (Association of Women in EECS/CS). He explained that the reason for the recent rebranding was to avoid having to constantly reject people’s initial assumptions about Hacker School (“No, we don’t have teachers.”, “No, we don’t cost money.”, etc). From Nick’s blog post:
But today, bootcamps are everywhere, and I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve explained to people that we are not a bootcamp. Despite our best efforts, the problems with our name have grown worse over time. The media and others have taken to using “hacker school” generically to refer to bootcamps, and despite our many protestations, we’ve failed to stop this. Having our name co-opted and used generically for something so different has been the source of seemingly endless confusion.
With the name Hacker School, they had to fight an uphill battle of denying that they were a dev bootcamp before they could even begin to explain what they actually were. Instead of continuing the fight, they decided to change their name to The Recurse Center, a name that people had no initial assumptions about.
While hearing Nick talk about the issues they had with their branding, I kept thinking that this was exactly what people go through on a daily basis. If you’ve never been the subject of harmful unconscious bias before, this is what it feels like — bad startup branding.
Imagine if every time you talked to a VC you had to first explain for five minutes that your cloud storage startup wasn’t a real-time analytics startup. It would be horrific! But this is exactly the kind of struggle that groups who are negatively stereotyped against face.
Instead of starting neutral or positive like everyone else, you start negative. In every conversation, you have to first prove that you’re not like the stereotype that people assign you to before you can even begin to talk about who you actually are. (“No, I didn’t just start learning how to program.”, “No, I actually do know what Bitcoin is.”, “No, I actually really like math.”)
No matter how skilled you actually are, it’s a difficult and frustrating task to always have to convince people to change their rating of you from a -5 to a +5, especially when your friends automatically start at a +5 (again, regardless of how skilled they actually are).
The real harm done in unconscious bias doesn’t come from overt discrimination or even from hurt feelings. It comes from the huge gap of hidden extra effort that members of marginalized groups have to put in to get to the same starting point as their peers.
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By the way, I think the Recurse Center is doing awesome things and creating a great environment to learn in. You can apply to join their next batch here. (And no, I was not coerced to write this post in any way by them :P).
