Fairness is the quality of treating people equally or in a way that is right or reasonable as we see it. Naturally, we see the world with our eyes, and we assess people by comparing them to our beliefs and principles.

By Emile Fakoury
In the business or corporate world, we judge individuals as we deal and interact with them by comparing them intuitively to ourselves and our principles.

We seem natural to treat people who are not like us, in various aspects of skin color religion, origin, and race differently as we favor our physical and behavioral traits. This comes from our basic instinct to protect the self.

In the last decade, many corporates have seen movements and initiatives that continue to fight bias and work hard to be equal among employees and to be fair with minorities. Nevertheless, if we don’t look at the root cause of our bias, we will not be able to assess it in isolation and mitigate its actions.

The perfect situation is when where individuals are treated only because of their skills and contributions in isolation of any physical or religious traits. 

It is not an easy position, due to two main reasons that we keep fighting and try to ignore constantly and leading us to failure.

These 2 aspects are first our visual impression that dominates our judgment before knowing the individual skills and ability and secondly our preference to compare others to self and our traits and principles.

These 2 aspects act like strong magnets that deviate our objective assessment and fairness toward everyone.

It is not going to be easy to eliminate our basic instincts or erase these two aspects, we must live with them and act smartly by controlling the ‘mind’ in ourselves.

I don’t think we need to fight bias and inequality; this is not the right fight.

If we can train ourselves to recognize these aspects of physical traits and self-comparison and control it smartly by telling our minds respectively that the person’s ability comes only from the skills and experiences developed through the challenges and not from the physical appearance or being similar to our experiences or traits.

As we rethink our habits and retrain our minds, we will find ourselves treating others equally, and only then we will have the right to complain about how others treat us.