Topic: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

New program gives undergrads space to develop resilience

| by Kim Girard

 

class of students with their professor
Tarun Galagali, CEO of startup Mandala, (far right) with his class of undergraduate students in the new Foundations of Resilient Leadership Program.

Julianna De Paula, BS 24, approaches life a little differently since she finished the new undergraduate Foundations of Resilient Leadership program at Berkeley Haas.

First, she pauses to think before having difficult conversations. She also takes time out to breathe—truly pay attention to the inhale and exhale—throughout  the school day. She believes that both changes will help her as she gets ready to move to New York City to launch a career at L’Oreal this fall.

“There’s a lot going on with the war in Gaza and the protests and a lot of my friends are impacted by what’s going on in Palestine,” said De Paula, one of 30 students, largely Haas undergraduates, enrolled in the class. Being a more active listener helps guide her navigate the stress, she said. 

These skills will also make her a more resilient leader, which is the heart of the new six-week certificate program founded by Tarun Galagali, CEO of startup Mandala. The program, also used to train employees at corporations like Microsoft, covers topics that range from having difficult conversations to navigating imposter syndrome to listening mindfully to understanding the meaning of values-based leadership.

Woman standing next to a man on a college campus
Emma Daftary, assistant dean of the Haas Undergraduate Programs, with Tarun Galagali, CEO of startup Mandala.

Galagali worked with Emma Daftary, assistant dean of the undergraduate programs, Lauren Simon, associate director of Student Life & Leadership Development for the undergraduate program, and Katrina Koski, director of inclusion and belonging at Haas, to launch the class at Haas this past spring. (Mandala is an ancient Sanskrit word that means circle—referring to community and connection.) 

Developing “skills to navigate”

The program provides students an open space to discuss their struggles and challenges. In doing so, it normalizes feelings and experiences that can otherwise leave students feeling isolated and alone, Daftary said. 

“It is our role as a business school to help shape and inform inclusive, resilient, effective leaders,” Daftary said. “We launched the program to provide our students with the skills to navigate situations that are personally and professionally triggering.” One catalyst for the program, among others, she said, was the turmoil on campus following the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, and the resulting war in Palestine. “We were meeting with students and they were reporting that they were having a really difficult time processing their grief while balancing the demands of their classes,” Daftary said. “They were feeling alone and disconnected.”

“It is our role as a business school to help shape and inform inclusive, resilient, effective leaders,” —Emma Daftary.

man teaching at a podium
Tarun Galagali, CEO of startup Mandala, asks students to share “glacier stories,” and open up to each other about their struggles.

In class, Galagali starts by sharing his own story, beginning with his childhood as the son of Indian immigrants growing up in Cupertino, Ca.  After earning a Harvard MBA, he worked as a product marketing and strategy lead at Google, a management consultant at EY Parthenon, as a director of strategy at online therapy platform Talkspace, and as as a senior political advisor to Congressman Ro Khanna. Under the surface of the names on his resume, he said, there are “glacier stories” of feeling isolated, inadequate, or not belonging at times.

“I share (my story) to show that there’s a story behind each of the resume logos and resilience embedded in them,” he said.  There are positives to these stories, too, he said, as he used what learned about leadership and teamwork at Google and from his experience lobbying for mental health of kids in California to build out the Mandala program. 

Balancing stress and anxiety

Coco Zhang, BA 26, who lives with and supports her single mother by working part-time jobs as a full-time student, said she often feels over-committed and burned out at Berkeley. What helped, she said, was learning that she was not alone. “Before I joined (Mandala) I thought I was one of the few who struggled a lot,” she said. “It helped to hear other students’ experiences and to know what they are doing to balance stress and anxiety. It motivates me to see what they have done to handle imposter syndrome and to learn some invaluable mental well-being concepts that have helped me to ground my true self to go beyond my boundaries and rise above the horizons.” 

Jacob Williams, BS 24, who was part of the founding group that worked with Mandala to launch the program, said the principles explored have provided him with tools he has already deployed in daily life. 

man wearing a suit jacket in front of a building
Jacob Williams

“I think this semester has been revolutionary for me” he said. Through the program, he said he has learned to “jump across domains,” and make new connections, such as connecting the dots between his cancer research and his DEI efforts, which has made his work a lot more meaningful. “On the first day of Mandala, Tarun explored the concept of an underlying glacier,” he said. “Among the many interpretations shared, the concept of a subconscious root to the way we think, behave, feel, and act really resonated with me. Realizing the deeper motivations behind my intuition and the ways I’ve chosen to govern has allowed me to communicate in a way which ultimately generates greater value, meaning, and impact for the people I work with and the public I’m honored to serve.”

A successful outcome

Galagali said the program is particularly relevant at a time when people are “quiet quitting” at work due to burnout. People lack critical things at work, he said, including psychological safety and a sense of belonging and connection.

Galagali said he would like to expand the Berkeley program, based on the success they’ve had so far: 88% of students who finished the program reported an increase in resilience; 94% of students reported reductions in burnout; and 100% felt the program improved their confidence in entering the workplace. 

“A lot of this is a personal deep desire to create community,” he said, noting that students who have completed this program have reported that they are better able to show up for hard conversations, that they’ve learned something new to make them better at their job, and that they have more self awareness and awareness of others.

De Paula said she hopes the program will continue. “It was surprising to see so many Haas students opening up to each other,” she said. “Tarun is also very inspirational as a mentor, so I have only good things to say about the program.”

The Bigger Picture

Spring 2024|By Katie Gilbert| Image: iStock

Online images promote gender bias

Ten images of the same man dressed in clothing representing different careers. Clockwise from top left the careers are: traveler, gardener, chef, business executive, doctor, spy, painter, plumber, construction worker, and lounger. Next to each images are objects indicative of that role.These days, we’re bombarded with images on picture-packed news sites and social media platforms. And much of that visual content, according to new research, is reinforcing powerful gender stereotypes.

Through a series of experiments and with the help of large-language models, Assistant Professors Douglas Guilbeault and Solène Delecourt found that Google Images exhibit significantly stronger gender bias for both female- and male-typed categories than text from Google News. What’s more, while the text is slightly more focused on men than women, this bias is over four times stronger in images.

Delecourt says that most of the previous research about bias online has focused on text. “But we now have Google Images, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram—all kinds of content based on modalities besides text,” she says. “Our research suggests that the extent of bias online is much more widespread than previously shown.”

To zero in on gender bias in online images, Guilbeault, Delecourt, and colleagues designed a novel series of techniques to compare bias in images versus text and to investigate its psychological impact in both mediums.

First, the researchers pulled 3,495 social categories—which included occupations like “doctor” and “carpenter” as well as social roles like “friend” and “neighbor”—from Wordnet, a large database of related words and concepts. To calculate the gender balance within each category of images, the researchers retrieved the top hundred Google images corresponding to each category and recruited people to classify each human face by perceived gender.

Large-language models measured gender bias in online text by noting the frequency of each social category’s occurrence alongside references to gender in Google News text. The researchers’ analysis revealed that gender associations were more extreme among the images than within text. There were also far more images focused on men than women.

In another study, 450 participants searched Google for apt descriptions of occupations relating to science, technology, and the arts. One group used Google News to upload textual descriptions; another group used Google Images to upload pictures of occupations. Compared to those in the text and control conditions, the participants who worked with the images displayed much stronger gender bias associating women with arts and men with science (a bias linked to systemic inequalities in academia and industry)—even three days later.

“This isn’t only about the frequency of gender bias online,” says Guilbeault, the paper’s lead author. “There’s something very sticky, very potent about images’ representation of people that text just doesn’t have.”

The Decade Project

Spring 2024|By Amy Marcott

Catalyzing American entrepreneurship to look like America

Students sitting at tables in an entrepreneurship class. Above them is a message on the wall reading Question the Status Quo.Even though professional faculty member Maura O’Neill, BCEMBA 04, started her first company 40 years ago, the hurdles she faced as a female entrepreneur are largely the same ones currently faced by her students who are women and/or students of color. “These Berkeley students are super smart, have great ideas with grit oozing out of their DNA,” says O’Neill. What are we missing as a community and as a nation, she wondered, by leaving this talent on the sidelines, particularly when both the problems and the opportunities are huge?

O’Neill analyzed big data sets and found that if American business ownership reflected the race, ethnicity, and gender of the nation’s population, the country could have 2.4 million more businesses, 20 million more jobs, and a $4 trillion increase in annual GDP. At the state level, those whose business ownership more closely reflects their population have 2.5 times higher GDP than states lagging further behind. “Everyone wins when this happens,” O’Neill says.

At current rates, it will take over 700 years for American entrepreneurship to look like America. But O’Neill launched The Decade Project to accelerate the path to parity in 10 years. “If we can put a man on the moon in a decade and bring him back safely without first knowing the technology,” she says, “we can do this.”

TDP’s research shows that four areas are key to success: role models, financial capital, knowledge, and connections. In addition to mobilizing a national ecosystem of partners in each of the areas, TDP is identifying ways to leverage the flood of federal and private investment dollars (estimated to be $8 trillion) associated with the transition to a sustainable economy to seize this opportunity and catalyze local leaders across the nation.

What’s in it for Your State?

The Decade Project data indicates that if American business ownership reflected the local population, the country could have over 2 million more employer firms. How many would your state gain?

Illustration showing Decade Project data by state.

How Long to Reach Equality?

At current rates, if nothing changes, it will take over 700 years for American business ownership to look like America.*

Circle chart demonstrating the length of time required for different ethnicities to reach equality in business ownership. The outer ring is for indigenous Americans followed in order by Black Americans, all women an the Latinx community, and Asian Americans. For the latter, they are at parity but only in a few states for Asian women business owners.

*Trends based on 2019 Census Data.

**As a whole, Asian Americans are at parity, but it is not true for every Asian subgroup.

Asst. Prof. Kiera Hudson receives prestigious National Science Foundation award

| by Kim Girard
portrait of a woman wearing a white collared shirt and tie
Assistant Professor Kiera Hudson studies schadenfreude and the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies.

Assistant Professor Sa-kiera “Kiera” Hudson has received a 2024 National Science Foundation CAREER award, the NSF’s most prestigious awards program in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education.

Hudson said she is thrilled to receive the award and will use the $850,000 grant to fund new research on schadenfreude, which is pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune.

Empathy is often hailed as the emotion to target in intergroup conflicts, as it predicts consequential behaviors that can help reduce inequality, said Hudson, who earned a PhD in the (social) psychology department at Harvard University in 2020. “In many social conflicts, people struggle to feel empathy for those not part of their social groups,” she said. But in the study of empathy, behavioral scientists have perhaps overlooked schadenfreude’s relevance to conflict among groups of people, which is why it’s crucial to learn more, she said.

“If we better understand what drives intergroup schadenfreude—and the consequences—we can better understand how to design interventions to decrease the harm it causes, particularly to marginalized groups,” she said.

How schadenfreude harms 

In her new research project, Hudson, a member of the Management of Organizations Group (MORS) at Haas, will investigate how schadenfreude contributes to harm, attempting to understand the cognitive mechanisms that allow it to flourish. The project will put a strong emphasis on research and education, including training minoritized scientists, collaborating with organizations focused on equity and social justice, and disseminating research to interdisciplinary communities.

Hudson said her goal is to bring a broader understanding of people’s more “nasty, harmful behaviors,” at a particular time in history. 

“Across the world, there has been an increase in rigid beliefs of who belongs to ‘us’ versus ‘them’ fueled by perceived threat and competition, leading to intensified intergroup animosity,” she said. “These are the exact conditions under which schadenfreude thrives, suggesting that we are not only in an empathy deficit as a nation, as proposed by Obama in 2006, but perhaps also in a schadenfreude surplus.”

More broadly, Hudson’s research at Haas is focused on two main areas: the psychological and biological roots of power hierarchies, and how these hierarchies intersect to influence experiences and perceptions.

Online images may be turning back the clock on gender bias, research finds

|By Katie Gilbert

A paper published today in the journal Nature finds that online images show stronger gender biases than online texts. Researchers also found that bias is more psychologically potent in visual form than in writing.

An illustration of a hand holding a phone with a beam of light shining one a woman's face. A larger verison of her face is ampified in the background.
Image copyright Solène Delecourt

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, and research has shown that the human brain does indeed better retain information from images than from text.

These days, we are taking in more visual content than ever as we peruse picture-packed news sites and social media platforms. And much of that visual content, according to new Berkeley Haas research, is reinforcing powerful gender stereotypes.

Through a series of experiments, observations, and the help of large language models, professors Douglas Guilbeault and Solène Delecourt found that female and male gender associations are more extreme among images retrieved on Google than within text from Google News. What’s more, while the text is slightly more focused on men than women, this bias is over four times stronger in images.

“Most of the previous research about bias on the internet has been focused on text, but we now have Google Images, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram—all kinds of content based on modalities besides text,” says Delecourt. “Our research suggests that the extent of bias online is much more widespread than previously shown.”

Not only is online gender bias more prevalent in images than in text, the study revealed, but such bias is more psychologically potent in visual form. Strikingly, in one experiment, study participants who looked at gender-biased images—as opposed to those reading gender-biased text—demonstrated significantly stronger biases even three days later.

As online worlds grow more and more visual, it’s important to understand the outsized potency of images, says Guilbeault, the lead author on the paper.

“We realized that this has implications for stereotypes—and no one had demonstrated that connection before,” Guilbeault says. “Images are a particularly sticky way for stereotypes to be communicated.”

The extent of bias–and its effects

To zero in on gender bias in online images, Guilbeault and Delecourt teamed up with co-authors Tasker Hull from Psiphon, Inc., a software company that develops censorship-navigation tools; doctoral researcher Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan of Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (now at IPPR in London); Mark Chu from Columbia University; and Ethan Nadler from the University of Southern California. They designed a novel series of techniques to compare bias in images versus text, and to investigate its psychological impact in both mediums.

First, the researchers pulled 3,495 social categories—which included occupations like “doctor” and “carpenter” as well as social roles like “friend” and “neighbor”—from Wordnet, a large database of related words and concepts.

To calculate the gender balance within each category of images, the researchers retrieved the top hundred Google images corresponding to each category and recruited people to classify each human face by gender.

Measuring gender bias in online texts was a trickier proposition—though one perfectly suited for fast-evolving large-language models, which noted the frequency of each social category’s occurrence alongside references to gender in Google News text.

The researchers’ analysis revealed that gender associations were more extreme among the images than within the text. There were also far more images focused on men than women.

Sticky images

The experimental phase of the study sought to illuminate the impacts that biases in online images have on internet users. The researchers asked 450 participants to use Google to search for apt descriptions of occupations relating to science, technology, and the arts. One group used Google News to find and upload textual descriptions; another group used Google Images to find and upload pictures of occupations. (A control group was assigned the same task with neutral categories like “apple” and “guitar.”)

After selecting their text- or image-based descriptions, the participants rated which gender they most associated with each occupation. Then they completed a test that asked them to quickly sort various words into gender categories. The test was administered again after three days.

The participants who worked with the images displayed much stronger gender associations compared to those in the text and control conditions—even three days later.

“This isn’t only about the frequency of gender bias online,” says Guilbeault. “Part of the story here is that there’s something very sticky, very potent about images’ representation of people that text just doesn’t have.”

Interestingly, when the researchers conducted their own online survey of public opinion—and when they looked at data on occupational gender distributions reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—they found that gender disparities were much less pronounced than in those reflected in Google images.

Opening doors to new research

Delecourt and Guilbeault say they hope their findings lead to a more serious grappling with the challenges posed by embedded bias in online images. After all, it’s relatively easy to tweak text to be as neutral as possible, whereas images of people inherently convey racial, gender, and other demographic information.

Guilbeault notes that other research has shown that gender biases in online text have decreased, but those findings may not reveal the whole story. “In images we actually still see very prevalent widespread gender bias,” he says. “That may be because we haven’t really focused on images in terms of this movement towards gender equality. But it could also be because it’s just harder to do that in images.”

Guilbeault and Delecourt are already at work on another project in this vein to examine gender-age bias online using many of the same techniques. “Part of the reason this paper is so exciting is that it opens the door to many, many other types of research—into age or race, or into other modalities, like video,” Delecourt says.

Watch a video explaining the research:

Read the paper:

“Online Images Amplify Gender Bias“
Nature, February 14, 2024

Authors:

  • Douglas Guilbeault: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley (corresponding author)
  • Solène Delecourt: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
  • Tasker Hull: Psiphon Inc.
  • Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
  • Mark Chu: Columbia University
  • Ethan Nadler: University of Southern California
This project was funded with grants from:

Contacts:

Douglas Guilbeault, corresponding author, [email protected]

Laura Counts, Berkeley Haas media relations: [email protected]