The extent to which women and minority lawyers and their views are excluded from key strategic decisions is the extent to which law firms are vulnerable to failure. The likelihood that any person’s different views will be seriously considered and embraced is directly proportional to the explicit power that comes from the person’s organizational role  and the implicit power that comes from trust and respect for the person. Without both, the most likely candidates to have opposing ideas, are never heard and their ideas, which could prevent disaster and create success are ignored. Let’s look at the case of Brooksley Born.  Click here for the HBR story.

Born was a “first female” in several regards.  She was the first to graduate at the top of her Stanford law school class and the first president of the Law Review at Stanford. She was brought in by the Clinton administration, in the 90s, to run the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission because of her adjudged competence as an expert in commodities and futures. She attempted to regulate the over-the-counter derivatives market, “whose crash helped trigger the recent financial collapse.”

Instead of embracing her ideas, which flowed directly from her level of competence, there was “fierce resistance” from Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers, who “prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation.”  Does anyone, who is reading this, see the power of a gender-pattern trumping the power of competence? Here was a woman, who was given the explicit power of a role and yet that power was insignificant compared to the implicit power of unconscious bias.

As human beings, we are unconsciously biased to seek out data points that confirm what we are experiencing in the moment and ignore those, which are discomfirming. Click here for more about this phenomenon.

When Born suggested regulations, the financial markets were doing just fine. As human beings we are unconsciously biased to marginalize those who have a different social identity from ours.

What if Born had been given the implicit power to succeed?  What if the men with the power to embrace her ideas had done so?