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WFD | Institutional Cowardice
| The Truth about Open Offices | Werner Herzog | Bias, Bias, Bias in The Workplace, including ‘Lookism’| It Pays To Be Smart |
Beacon NY | 2019–11–01 | A wave of stories about bias in the workplace: how attractive people benefit from ‘lookism’, how we should dissect the constituent elements building to systemic bias at the atomic level, why supposed efforts to counter gender inequality in tech just isn’t working, and how we might employ AI to sidestep human blinders.
It seems we need to move to a war footing against bias in the workplace. I think Herzog’s quote below is apt.
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In The Truth About Open Offices, Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber jab a finger in the eye of today’s prejudices about the workplace. Writing in a strongly admonitory tone — with a strong undertone of disdain for the unexamined premise that there is a single, best form of workplace — the authors advocate extensive research and experimentation around what they call the ‘anatomy of collaboration’:
Workers are surrounded by a physical architecture: individual offices, cubicles, or open seating; a single floor, multiple floors, or multiple buildings; a dedicated space for the organization, a space shared with other companies, or a home…
