What do you see in this picture?

optical illusion lady

A young woman looking away from you? Or a much older woman looking to the left?

You’re sitting in a business meeting with five men and five woman around a boardroom table. One of the women makes a suggestion which is largely ignored. Ten minutes later, her male colleague makes what is in reality pretty much the same suggestion, and it is met with great support and encouraging feedback. Until you play back the video tape, none of the men will remember that she made the same suggestion.

What about here?

optical illusion face sax

A Marilyn Monroe type silhouette, or a shadow man playing the saxophone?

You’re sitting with a group of friends around the dinner table. Friendly conversation is happening. Later, when you are presented with a bar chart of how much each person spoke, the white male block towers above the rest. But that’s not the way you remember it at all.

optical illusion

It’s like when you took a quick look at this pic and saw the baby’s feet sticking out of the bottom of the blanket. Sometimes you have to go back and take a second look, you know, just to make sure.

When it comes to conversation spaces though, for many of us – and this is me speaking specifically as a white male – we have grown so used to the way things are, that we tend to not even realise the imbalance.

One way you can go about educating yourself is to start observing when you are in those spaces, which is why i issued this challenge invitation on Facebook this morning:

Experiment for this week for my white male friends – i am going to be doing it so this is an invitation to join me…

Anytime you are in a group with diversity in it [gender or race] intentionally observe the dynamic in the group purely on the basis of who speaks.

[1] How many men speak before a woman speaks? Maybe do a quick in-your-head calculation of ten interactions in a row. How many men, how many women?

[2] How many white people speak before a black/coloured/indian person speaks?

If you spend an entire week without a single interaction that doesn’t consist only of men or white people, then that may also be something you take note of.

Bonus experiment: In those spaces [unless it’s a work one and you actually have to speak] see if you can sit the whole time without speaking. Monitor how many times you have something to say, how important you feel what you have to say is and how hard it is not to say it.

This is my second study week and so i will be in a group of I think ten people that is fairly split down both those lines.

Come back and report how that went…

Sometimes we see what we think we see and other times we see what we want to see. But it’s only when we take a bit of a closer look that we see what is actually there.

The old couple for example. Or the Mexican playing a tune for his friend on the guitar.

And sometimes we see both.

If you’ve seen this one before, for example, you probably aren’t able to unsee it, but if you haven’t seen it before, can you see the out of place object in the picture?

optical illusion

The cigar seems so obvious once you’ve seen it and yet it had to be pointed out to so many people as this illusion went viral a few months ago.

Not being able to see a picture when it has been designed to trick you, should not leave you feeling stupid. Once you see it and are in on the joke, it becomes a really fun thing and you share it with your people to try and trick them. Cos once you know you know.

But refusing to see men dominating conversations.

Refusing to see white people dominating conversations.

Once you’ve seen it? Well, that is something you can feel stupid about. If you refuse to change that is. Once you’ve become aware, then the responsibility lies with you, to step back, to keep your mouth shut, to give someone else’s opinion the benefit of the doubt and to even hold on to the ‘What if the point I want to make here is not the most valuable point to be made?’ Gasp.

Take some time observing this week and come back here and let me know what you see.

Women and black, coloured, indian people you are more than welcome to comment as well, particularly on how you experience this, whether it’s something you’ve been aware of and how it’s made you feel…