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M: Good morning, everyone. Today with us is freelance writer Jessica Nordell. Nice to meet you, Jessica.
    W: Nice to meet you, Thompson.
    M: So, I heard about your story of blurring the gender of your name. Was it true that the change of your name changed the fate of your works?
    W: Well. When I was first starting out, I sent editors a lot of pieces, but I had a hard time getting them accepted. Then I began pitching under a gender-neutral name, "J. D. Nordell"—and immediately had more success. So it is this experience that set me on a path of researching and writing about unconscious bias for more than a decade and eventually publishing the book The End of Bias-. A Beginning.
    M: It seems that gender bias does exist, at least in publishing.
    W: I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that bias affects all of us every day because any time a person is interacting with another person, there’s the opportunity for stereotypes and associations to infect the interaction. These reactions can often happen so quickly and automatically that we don’t actually know we’re necessarily doing them. These are reactions that conflict with our values.
    M: So someone might think, I’m not racist, I’m not sexist. But then if they do have an unconscious bias, they may behave in a way that goes against what they believe.
    W: Exactly. So unconscious bias is a term that a lot of people are familiar with, but we might also call it unintended bias or unexamined bias. We see it in education where black students are penalized more for the same infractions. We see it in the workplace where women and women of color in particular are often passed over for desirable assignments.
    M: And we do see it in policing where black men are more likely to be on the receiving end of force, even when completely compliant with an officer’s orders and even when no arrests are made.
    W: That’s my point. I mean, we see it all over the place. While there’s plenty of research out there on specific instances of bias, I couldn’t find any studies on the cumulative impacts of bias over time. Because we know that bias doesn’t just happen once or twice. It happens continually over a day, over months, over an entire career. So what I did in order to try to answer this question was teaming up with a computer scientist and developing a computer simulation of a workplace.
    M: What’s your workplace like?
    W: It was called "Norm Corp" and it started out with equal numbers of men and women. Opportunity for advancement was based on a promotability score. Then I inserted into the company bias that research shows exists in the real world, like, devaluation of a woman’s performance.
    M: How does it work?
    W: If a female employee succeeded on a project, she received three percent less of a score boost than a man. So if a woman worked with a man on a successful project, she received three percent less of a reward.
    The consequence of this: more men were promoted than women.
    1. What helped the woman succeed in her career?
    2. What is the woman’s opinion about bias?
    3. Which of the following is not an example of unconscious bias mentioned in the interview?
    4. Why did the woman develop a computer simulation of a workplace?
    5. According to the woman, how does the simulation work?