389. The HR experts just lost an HR lawsuit (and why it matters to you)

SHRM, the largest HR association in the world, was found liable in December 2025 for racial discrimination and retaliation, and the judge declined to overturn the verdict.
Whatever the outcome, the story points to a pattern that happens on ordinary teams: the person who looks or sounds different gets watched more closely.
Tokenism makes underrepresented people more visible, which draws more attention to their behavior and their mistakes.
Greater attention produces more noticed mistakes, and more noticed mistakes produce more documentation, which can look like objective evidence of poor performance.
Prove-It-Again Bias means some people are assumed capable until proven otherwise, while others have to keep proving it.

Ask yourself whether you can name the small mistakes each person on your team made recently; if you can list many for one person and almost none for others, check why.
Recognize that a manager doesn’t need to be consciously biased for unequal scrutiny to happen; attention drifts toward whoever stands out.
Before you document a performance issue, compare it to how you’d handle the same mistake from someone else.
Notice when a mistake from one person is treated as a fluke and the same mistake from another is treated as a pattern.
Make observation consistent across the team, so the evidence you build reflects performance and not where your attention went.

Pick your last three performance notes or check-ins and ask whether the same behavior would have been recorded for someone else on the team.
Identify the one person you’re watching most closely right now and find out whether that attention is earned.