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Psychologist Valerie Purdie Greenaway is the first African American to be tenured in the sciences at Columbia University, in its entire 263 year history. Despite her celebrated position—and, in fact, perhaps because of it—she still struggles with perception, subtle stereotyping, and the enormous stakes of being one of few women of color in a leadership role. Here, Valerie Purdie Greenaway speaks with diversity and inclusion expert Jennifer Brown about being "the only" in a workplace, whether that is along lines of gender, race, culture, or sexual orientation, and how organizations and individuals can do more to recognize and address their biases. That also means letting go of the idea that stereotyping is a malevolent case of "bad people doing bad things." What does discrimination really look like day to day? Most of it is subconscious, subtle, and is deeply embedded into the structure of organizations, which can have an impact on performance, mentorship, and staff turnover. Do you recognize any of your own behavior in this discussion? This live conversation was part of a recent New York panel on diversity, inclusion, and collaboration at work.
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VALERIE PURDIE GREENAWAY:

Valerie Purdie Greenaway is the Director of the Laboratory of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, core faculty for the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program (RWJ Columbia-site), and research fellow at the Institute for Research on African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia. Dr. Purdie-Vaughns has authored numerous publications that have appeared in journals such as Science, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. She was been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Russell Sage Foundation, Spencer Foundation and William T. Grant Foundation. In 2013, Dr. Purdie-Vaughns was awarded the Columbia University RISE (Research Initiative in Science and Engineering) award for most innovative and cutting edge research proposal titled, “Cells to Society" approach to reducing racial achievement gaps: Neuro-physiologic pathways involved in stereotype threat and social psychological interventions. Previously, Dr. Purdie-Vaughns served on the faculty in the Psychology Department at Yale University. She completed her doctoral work in psychology at Stanford University in 2004 as a student of Dr. Claude Steele. She completed her undergraduate work at Columbia University and lettered in varsity basketball.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Jennifer Brown: There is a lot of interesting new technology that scrubs job descriptions for gendered words, because they are—literally the ways that companies are presenting opportunities is screening out—women are self-screening out, because they’re seeing words that they don’t relate to or resonate with. So technology is going to have to help us shortcut our biases because we are so, unfortunately, kind of hopeless when it comes to that. It's really hardwired into us to be biased against maybe ourselves and believing the stereotypes we hear, but then also particularly bias coming at us, of course, from folks who have not done the work around their own choices, right, putting us into boxes.

So I want to know from you about when you experienced, in your career, some stereotype threat, and how did you correct for it when you know that it may be being applied to you? How do you not get swamped by that? It’s like “the death by a thousand cuts,” you know, it does accumulate, and then it causes a lot of us, frankly, to leave organizations. We can’t even put a fine point on it, but we feel; we don’t feel valued and heard and welcomed. So how did you overcome that and claim your power and align that?

Valerie Purdie Greenaway: Yes, that’s a great question. So first, by way of background: as a professor at Columbia, I’m the first African American to ever be tenured in the sciences since Columbia started. So I think it’s an incredible achievement but it also says a lot about even where we are today.

People think I don’t struggle; I struggle every single day. I have perfectionistic “syndrome” where I work on an article for a year, and then I work on it for another year. And I know the literature that women are more likely to do that, that perfectionistic syndrome is linked to being worried about being stereot...

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