Invisible Barriers: Understanding and Overcoming Discrimination in the Workplace
Stéphane Carcillo and Marie-Anne Valfort
The MIT Press (May 2025)
What is perhaps the most important “unknown unknown”?
That is an excellent question. My candidate would be thinking you know for certain that you have no cognitive biases about race, religion, gender, etc. but in fact you do…and they are a major influence on your judgment.
In his classic work Leading Change, James O’Toole asserts that the greatest resistance to change is cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” These are invisible barriers unless and until revealed by behavior…by what is said and done but also, yes, by what is not said and not done.
Stéphane Carcillo and Marie-Anne Valfort wrote their book in order to help as many people as possible to understand discrimination in the workplace so that their readers — including you — will then do everything possible to help eliminate it. As Carcillo and Valfort fully understand, resistance to those efforts will also be cultural in nature. Cognitive biases are passed along from one generation to the next, whatever the ethnic identity of the given family may be.
Carefully consider Carcillo and Valfort’s observations, shared in the Introduction to Invisible Barriers:
“This book proposes a broad array of public policies to combat discrimination in employment, going far beyond the strictly punitive approach…measures should also be accompanied by efforts to combat prejudice and stereotypes at school and beyond the school years, through communication campaigns, though their impact depends very much on the approach adopted. Finally, inequalities in access to employment often are rooted in factors that exist long before a person enters the labor market: school achievement, for example, may be influenced by overt or covert discrimination. An effective strategy must also an educational component that addresses contexts in which [inappropriate if not illegal] behaviors develop.”
Carcillo and Valfort explain HOW TO
o Define labor market discrimination
o Oppose it
o Identify it with research (e.g. surveys)
o Measure discrimination with experiments
o Advocate gender equality
o Determine the impact of race, ethnicity, and religion
o Examine the “burdens of age”
o Identify the advantages conferred by appearances (e.g. physical attractiveness)
o Address sensitive (“private”) issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity
o Combat workplace discrimination within the limits of anti-discrimination legislation
o Go beyond that legislation
o Ensure equal opportunities upstream of the labor market
Carcillo and Valfort offer a wide, deep, and thorough examination of the causes, effects, and impact of workplace discrimination. Its monetary damage is probably incalculable but substantial statistical information has been accumulated that helps to explain why, for example, in the United States, less than 30% of employees are actively and positively engaged in their work; the others are either “mailing it in” each day or actively undermining the success of their employer.
“Nevertheless — and this is the encouraging message of the present book — discrimination is not inevitable. It can be remedied, just as the cognitive biases that generate it can be attenuated.”
I hope they are right. In that event, the material provided in this book will have served its intended purpose.