When Two Black Women Solving the Same Problem Sit Down to Talk
By: Dr. Bentley Lorene Gibson
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Lauren A., the founder of Traily, to talk business. On the surface, our companies look nothing alike. She built an app. I built a training and consulting practice. Five minutes into the conversation, it was obvious we are working the same problem from two different angles, and we are doing it as two Black women who have lived the very thing we are now trying to solve for other people.
“Bias rarely announces itself. No one says it's because you're a woman, Black, Jewish, gay, disabled or they just don’t like your personality. Sometimes, the person doing it doesn't even know that's why, and they hand you the blame instead. That's why proof matters more now than ever, and why what looks like a them problem is really an organizational culture and leadership problem.”
Traily is a workplace documentation app. It gives employees a private, encrypted place to log incidents as they happen: the comment in the meeting, the email that left them off the thread, the performance review that didn't match their actual work. It has a stealth mode so someone can log an incident at their desk without anyone seeing. It builds an automated timeline. It tracks the toll the situation is taking on a person's mental and physical health. And it helps people organize everything into something they can hand to HR, an attorney, or the EEOC if it comes to that. I do the work on the other end. I go into organizations and help leaders see the bias before it turns into the kind of pattern someone eventually has to document.
Lauren recently wrote about this on LinkedIn, and it's worth a read if you lead people. Her point, and mine, is the same: employees are no longer just quietly enduring toxic workplaces. They are building a record. That changes the risk calculation for every leader who has been letting bias run the show without realizing it.
Bias isn't a "soft" issue. It's making your people sick.
This is the first thing I tell every leader I work with, and it's the thing that tends to land hardest: the biases you don't think you have are showing up in your team's bodies and minds, not just their morale. I'm not talking about the obvious stuff. I'm talking about the accumulation of small, "harmless" moments that leaders rarely connect to anything: constant microaggressions waved off as jokes, being left out of the emails and meetings where real information moves, negative nonverbal communication, bullying dressed up as high standards, performance reviews that catalog every mistake and never mention what's going well, and never taking the time to actually get to know someone as a person.
Sustained bias and exclusion put people in a constant, low grade fight or flight state, and that state has a well documented cost: elevated anxiety, disrupted sleep, weakened immune function, disengagement, and eventually, people who either shut down or leave. Leaders who wonder why a talented person suddenly seems checked out often aren't looking at a performance problem. They're looking at the downstream effect of an environment they built and never examined.
A stressed, overloaded brain doesn't rise above its biases. It defaults to them. The part of a leader's mind that catches assumptions and slows down to be fair is the first thing to go offline under pressure, which is exactly when bias runs the show.
For a long time, the risk calculus for a bad leader was simple. Make someone's life difficult enough, push them out, and move on. Maybe they leave a Glassdoor review. Maybe not. That calculation no longer holds. Apps like Traily exist because people got tired of relying on memory and vibes when it came time to explain what actually happened to them. Now there's a timestamped, organized record of the pattern, built in real time, not reconstructed months later under stress. And once someone has that record and has moved on, they are not quietly disappearing. They are telling their next employer, their network, their industry. They are telling as many people as they can about what it was actually like to work for you. That is not a legal problem you can train your way out of after the fact. It is a brand problem you are creating right now, one microaggression and one skipped conversation at a time.
One place to start this week
You don't need a full audit to begin. Before your next round of 1:1s, pull up your last two weeks of emails, Slack messages, and meeting notes with each person on your team. For every direct report, find one specific, true thing you said out loud about work they did well. Not "great job," a real detail: what they did, why it mattered.
If you can do that for everyone except one or two people, that's not a coincidence. That's the pattern showing up in real time, and it's exactly where to start.
This is one lever. In practice, it's rarely the only one. The leaders I work with are usually surprised by how many other blind spots show up once we look closely: who gets pulled into which meetings, whose ideas get credited, whose mistakes get remembered longest. A single audit surfaces the full pattern instead of one symptom of it.
If this is landing, don't try to fix it alone from a blog post. Click the link below and take our quiz to see if bias is putting your company at risk. Once you find out your score schedule a call with use to discuss solutions.
Lauren and I left our conversation with the same conclusion: our work is different, but it points at the same finish line. She's building the tool people need when a workplace has already gone wrong. I'm doing the work to help leaders never get there in the first place. If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar, that discomfort is useful. It means you're paying attention. The next step is asking honestly: who on my team do I actually know? Whose mistakes do I remember better than their wins? Who gets left off the thread? Those answers are where the real audit starts, long before anyone needs a documentation app to protect themselves from you.
About the author: Dr. Bentley Gibson, PhD, is a cognitive and developmental psychologist specializing in implicit bias, and the founder of The Bias Adjuster. Her published research includes studies on the early development of racial bias in children (Journal of Cognition and Culture).
