Breaking the Invisibility Tax: The Science Behind Who Gets Heard with Chloé Nwangwu

When brand scientist Chloé Nwangwu discovered that crucial Yemen voices were excluded from peace talks during its civil war, she realized something profound: brands teach others how to treat you. This revelation led her to develop groundbreaking research on what she calls the "invisibility tax" - the hidden costs that under-recognized groups must pay to gain visibility in spaces where decisions are made.

In this episode, Chloé illuminates how visibility biases shape whose voices are heard in critical conversations. Through the lens of behavioral science, she explains how these biases manifest in systematic ways, from the "racial attention deficit" to the "ambition penalty," creating barriers that keep vital perspectives out of influential spaces. 

For nonprofit storytellers, her insights reveal how unconscious biases might be influencing which stories we choose to amplify and which remain in the shadows.

Chloé challenges listeners to examine their role in what she calls the "ecosystem of influence," particularly those who serve as gatekeepers in the nonprofit sector. She argues that true recognition equity requires more than passive awareness - it demands active participation in seeking out under-recognized voices and ideas. 

This conversation isn't just about making space at the table. It's about understanding how our choices as storytellers and marketers can either perpetuate or help dismantle systemic barriers to visibility.

About Chloé Nwangwu

Chloé Nwangwu, the Brand Scientist, is the director of NobiWorks, a brand visibility consultancy rooted in behavioral science. She equips underrecognized brands with visibility strategies and systems scientifically formulated to help them neutralize visibility biases while commanding — and keeping— attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Most recently, she advised the first refugee delegation to the UN.

Connect with Chloé

NobiWorks Resource Page | Instagram | LinkedIn

About Host Maria Bryan

Maria Bryan is a trauma-informed storytelling trainer. She helps nonprofit leaders tell powerful and impactful stories that resist harm. Maria has over fifteen years in marketing communications in the public sector. She has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism, and is professionally certified in Trauma & Resilience, Trauma-Informed Space Holding, Trauma-Informed Coaching, and Somatic Embodiment & Regulation. Maria is a firm believer that storytellers make the world a healthier, safer, cleaner, and happier place.

Connect with Maria

Speaking & Training | LinkedIn | Email

Transcript

Maria Bryan: Hello, we have Chloe with us today. Chloe Nwangu is the brand scientist. She is the director of NobiWorks, a brand visibility consultancy rooted in behavioral science. She equips under-recognized brands with visibility strategies and systems scientifically formulated to help them neutralize visibility biases while commanding and keeping intention in an increasingly crowded marketplace. And most recently, she advised the first refugee delegation to the U.N. Chloe, welcome. What a joy to have you on.

Chloe Nwangwu: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted and honored.

Maria Bryan: Our paths crossed, oh gosh, many moons ago. We were both reporters together. And it just so happened to be the day we were tagged along by PBS.

Chloe Nwangwu: Yeah, which is wild also in hindsight.

Maria Bryan: Wild! And so we are both in a PBS special together, which you have a lot more screen time on there. You had a lot of really great things to say. I'm kind of in the background with my purple glasses, interviewing folks. That was a fun day. I'll put it in the show.

Chloe Nwangwu: Yeah, put it in the show. I remember looking back and watching it when you brought it up, when we connected again and just being like, we were so little, we were...

Maria Bryan: My goodness. That was like the time in my life when I'm like, "Oh, I don't want to be a journalist."

Chloe Nwangwu: Right? I was like, "Oh, it's not journalism. Got it." So glad that I figured this out.

Maria Bryan: I do have fond memories of you, Chloe, like us sitting in a little coffee shop, getting to know each other. And it does bring me back to my reporter days and you are now the brand scientist. So can you bring us on that journey? What brought you between your reporting days to becoming a brand scientist?

Chloe Nwangwu: Oh man. Yeah. It's funny because after I realized that journalism is not it for me, I was pretty fresh out of undergrad. I ended up going to Israel to study conflict resolution and mediation. I got a master's in international conflict resolution and mediation, and just went on the ground to study one of the most intractable conflicts in the world and the sort of dynamics that were at play there.

Incredibly formative time in my life, especially since maybe I want to say three or so years before then I'd been living in Cairo and had just left and the Arab Spring had erupted. I had spent some time in the Middle East and now I was really curious about the politics and the power and all of those things, the mechanics of what was going on in the region.

And I don't even know how to describe this. It might have been serendipity. I think it must have been serendipity. I had a series of experiences that led me to my role as a consultant and advisor with a group of independent diplomats. And these folks, their job was to work with Democratic non-state actors - and now I'm kind of using jargon, but I mean like think like separatist movements that have democratic aims and ideals, parties to civil wars, really big things that were happening in the international politics world.

And I was brought on as a very junior member of the team, let's be clear, to work with them as a fellow. It's hard to pick just one particular file, but whenever I'm asked this question, I always do turn to the civil war in Yemen, because it is something that I can more concretely trace things from.

With the civil war in Yemen, my team was brought on to help one of the parties to the conflict get into the peace talks. I eventually realized that even though these people were a pretty sizable chunk of the population, they somehow weren't in the peace talks. And this is as someone who studied mediation - rewind, my specialty in mediation was about using what we know about the human mind and using what we know about human social dynamics to make peace settlements more likely to happen and more likely to last. That was my expertise. That was my focus.

And so me coming into this situation in Yemen and seeing that this group who really should have been in the peace talks, if any of the things that I had studied and learned were going to happen, weren't in the peace talks - that was devastating for me. It was devastating for me. I realized that as somebody with my training in mediation, while I can have control of some of the dynamics in the room, I don't necessarily have control of who gets into the room, who gets in the door.

That began my exploration of, first of all, why aren't these folks who are clearly so important to the future of this nation at this table? Why aren't they even getting in the door? What's the cause of that? And then what do we do about that? And believe it or not, that's why I became the brand scientist.

Because I discovered that the cause could be remedied by brands. Brands, right? The thing that I had observed in my time with these independent diplomats, and especially on this file, the civil war in Yemen, was that brands taught others how to treat you. That's why in little side sessions and little bilaterals that we would have at the edges of the UN or wherever it happened to be like in the EU, in those conversations, there are reasons why you wouldn't make certain moves with Germany or France. Because their brands informed you how they would respond to that.

So what I realized is that if we can shape brands appropriately for folks like this group that we're trying to get to the table, maybe we can teach others how to treat them. Maybe we can teach others to open the door and have them come through. And that was it for me. That was it.

Maria Bryan: My heart is racing. It's pounding. Because I know about your work, but I didn't realize the massive wider implications of this. I'm so excited. Let's talk about a little bit of this language that you use. And I love this example of who was invited to these peace talks in Yemen. You say that the visibility game is rigged and through that, you've introduced this concept of invisibility tax. These folks that weren't invited into the room for these really important conversations have this invisibility tax. Unpack that.

Chloe Nwangwu: Absolutely. What I discovered in that research that I mentioned to you was that there was this systematic thing going on where certain kinds of people and certain kinds of experiences tended to be either overlooked or underappreciated, context dependent. I ended up calling that phenomenon under-recognition. There are folks who belong to under-recognized communities who themselves are under-recognized. And as a result, their ideas, their work, whatever it happens to be, are also under-recognized.

The invisibility tax, which you brought up, which is one of my favorite things that I ever named, is one side of the under-recognition coin. So within under-recognition, we have the cause and then we have the costs. On the cause side, we have what I call visibility biases, and these are just cognitive biases, so learned brain chemistry, invisible scripts in our heads that are responsible for allocating our attention in discriminatory ways.

A really great example of a visibility bias is the racial attention deficit. This is not one I discovered. This is out of some research from 2021, and the researchers were able to empirically demonstrate that white Americans are 33 percent more likely to overlook their black peers. And that's even when they've been incentivized to pay attention to those peers. And then even when they do the usual things to try and ameliorate that situation, the gap drops, but to 15%, which is still huge.

So that's the racial attention deficit. That's a perfect example of visibility bias, and this collection of cognitive biases grows by the day as they are discovered. What visibility biases do is it's almost like throwing an invisibility cloak on, but not the fun kind.

Then, we have the costs of under-recognition. That is what I have called the invisibility tax. What's the extra bit of time or money or resources, whatever those happen to be, that under-recognized folks are made to pay by society or have extorted from them, let's say if I'm going to be really bombastic about it, in order to be visible at all, or even to be as visible as their peers, if they dare.

A great example of a facet of the invisibility tax, also not something I'm responsible for, is the ambition penalty. That is something that was coined by Stephanie O'Connell Rodriguez, incredible work by her. And even just hearing it, you know what it means. The sort of darned if you do, darned if you don't - if you demonstrate these traits, including ambition, that are usually lauded and applauded in those who are either adequately or over-recognized, then you are penalized for that. You're punished for that. And this is something that O'Connell Rodriguez attributes to women and girls largely and says that this is often mislabeled as the confidence gap in women and girls. However, I extrapolate this to be something that all under-recognized folks face. So yeah, that's the invisibility tax, that's a facet of the invisibility tax. And there are dozens and dozens of these, think of them as line items that add up over time.

Maria Bryan: Explore a little bit more how you are rethinking the confidence gap, because I think about the confidence gap a lot, because I worked at a nonprofit that worked with young girls. Can you maybe clarify the difference between what we think of as the confidence gap, which to me what it means is there is this age where both boys and girls are equally confident, equally putting themselves out there. And then there's just this shift that happens where girls become quieter, go more inward, and boys go, go, go, go, go, and then it's going to have lifelong consequences for young women and women. So tell me a little bit more about your take.

Chloe Nwangwu: So yes, yes. And I have to give full credit to Stephanie O'Connell Rodriguez for this work. When she says that this is often mislabeled as the confidence gap in women and girls, she literally means that. Often we will look at that sort of divergence that you're talking about, and we will say, "Oh, okay. So like at this point in time, girls' confidence tends to drop," right? And the gap between girls and boys in terms of their confidence tends to grow, it starts at this point and continues on.

There is an active agent. Here's what I mean by that. When it comes to under-recognition, lots of folks will like the term underrepresented instead. Let's replace that with under-recognition. And one of the key reasons for that is because underrepresented is just a thing that happens. Like, "Oh no, and now they're underrepresented, shame how that happened, gosh darn." Whereas with under-recognition, it is very clear that there is an active agent doing the under-recognizing. And so the impetus then is put on that active agent that's doing the under-recognizing rather than on the one who's being under-recognized.

With the confidence gap, it's very similar. There is an active agent at play here. It's not just that girls just happen to lose confidence at this-

Maria Bryan: Not biology, it's not like inevitable.

Chloe Nwangwu: Exactly. Like it didn't just happen to be that way. Society and the conditioning there have programmed it so that it happens that way. And they've done so by penalizing specifically women and girls, but largely under-recognized folks for having ambition. Because after you hit a certain age, that's what your confidence looks like. Confidence starts to go from that cute winsome thing that you see in a child to they hit a certain age and it looks like ambition, and ambition in young boys is expected. Great. Love that. He's hungry. Get at it, boy. Ambition in girls - well, we know what we call ambitious women. So that's what she's talking about. That's what's happening there.

Whenever I name a phenomenon that I've sort of observed or done some research on, that particular switch is something that I'm always paying attention to, just the awareness that there is always some sort of active agent here. And we have to, have to, have to shine the light on that when we are talking about these things.

Maria Bryan: What I would love to know your perspective on is what is at stake with invisibility tax and not just for those that are under-recognized, but for the greater good.

Chloe Nwangwu: That's a really, really great question. I will bring us back to Yemen. And in some ways, I think the least interesting part of the story that I told is the fact that yes, we did eventually get them into the peace talks. When I left that work, they were in the peace talks. Haven't really been keeping an eye on the situation since, but they were in the peace talks by the time I was done with my work. I bring us back to Yemen because those are the consequences. Like, that's what we're talking about here.

Maria Bryan: Just huge? I-

Chloe Nwangwu: Is huge. Right? That a civil war that is to date known as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and has been termed that year after year after year for a devastating number of years, let's just say, could continue and maintain its turpitude because the right ideas from the right folks aren't getting to the right places. I always tell my clients when I am working with them that, yeah, we're going to get you into the rooms where it happens, that's sort of the goal. That's the thing that we're doing.

 Influential ideas in influential places. However, the thing that you're going to realize is that the folks who are in those rooms will disappoint you. They will disappoint you. I don't want to diminish that work at all because I know it's hard. I've been there. I can tell you from experience that they will disappoint you, and that's why we need you there. That's what's at stake.

Maria Bryan: So our listeners, they hold great power just by virtue that they, whether they are marketers, fundraisers, videographers, they are holding people's stories and crafting them and then turning them over to the greater public. 

And I see the invisibility tax being such a glaring problem for our listeners that they might not even realize the power dynamics that they have just by choosing who's in the room and we have as storytellers such responsibility and such a role of choosing which stories are going to be presented, who we're bringing into the room, whose voice that we are giving possibly a bigger platform to, and I'm hoping that folks are listening to you and really reflecting on that and what is at stake really, truly what's at stake. 

I know you work directly with folks who you are supporting to mitigate this invisibility tax. For those on the other side, for those who have this power, who have this role and responsibility, what kind of message do you have to say to folks who have an opportunity to bring more folks to the table? What do they need to know? What can they do to support this effort?

Chloe Nwangwu: Yeah. So I think the first thing that I would say is to understand your role. The solution looks like tending to your ecosystem of influence. And your ecosystem of influence has three parts, all responsible for different outcomes. When I say understand your role to folks who already have influence and who are looking to support recognition equity, that sort of has me narrow in on part two of the ecosystem of influence, which is what I call your circle of recognition. Your circle of recognition is just fancy talk for your network, but it is your network structured around a specific behavior, namely recognition. And it is designed to amplify your ideas in the right kinds of ways.

When I say that, I say that because ideas can be amplified in a sort of information sharing sort of way. What that means is understanding that within a circle of recognition, there are a set of stakeholders that are required to make it go and make it hum. I've identified a minimum of five, a sort of starter pack. And if you are someone who already has influence, then chances are you are already a gatekeeper - that's one of the stakeholders that belongs to the starter pack.

As a gatekeeper who wants to support recognition equity, it is your responsibility to keep an eye out for and to seek out under-recognized voices, under-recognized peoples and under-recognized ideas, understanding that you have connections outside of echo chambers that they may be a part of that will be incredibly crucial to them when it is time for their ideas to start building towards critical mass and catching on at a societal level. 

As a gatekeeper, as somebody who is standing between that potential under-recognized person or organization or idea and opportunities that would allow for it to spread in that way, you have to be looking. You have to be looking for under-recognized folks.

That's the first thing that I would say. The second thing that I would say is that there are other roles that you can play. Two of the other roles in this sort of starter pack are mediator - and a mediator is somebody who is directly connecting folks to opportunities - and an advocate, someone who is speaking about these under-recognized folks or voices or ideas in places that they don't happen to be in yet.

So if you are a gatekeeper, what I am telling you to do is to become a mediator or to become an advocate. Realize that you are a gatekeeper, realize that, and then become a mediator or become an advocate. 

And if you're saying to yourself now, "Ah, well like, I've been looking and I haven't really found under-recognized folks," but that speaks to a larger problem. And not for nothing, but visibility biases are a kind of cognitive resistance. So just understanding that they're all sort of coming up from the same well, it's probably going to be a bit uncomfortable. 

And, in fact, I think that you should use that sense of "oof this is hard" or "oof like I feel like I'm stretching" or "oof a little uncomfortable" as a litmus test because if you're not feeling a little uncomfortable, chances are you're not pushing quite far enough.

Maria Bryan: I love that. I think that we, as trauma-informed storytellers should always just be a little bit uncomfortable and making our leadership uncomfortable.

Chloe Nwangwu: That is correct.

Maria Bryan: Chloe, talk to us about the visibility lab and what you do for the folks that are listening. How can they connect with you, learn more with you and tell us all about the visibility lab or any other projects that you're working on right now?

Chloe Nwangwu: Absolutely. I'd be delighted. My work is all about making sure that under-recognized ideas get the attention and recognition they deserve in the rooms that have the most impact and influence on our society. 

At the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do. If you suspect that you are up against cognitive resistance that includes under-recognition, where you can see the difference between the work that you are doing, and the work that a peer of yours is doing, who seems to be so much further ahead, despite you both doing very similar things, I want you to know that you're not imagining that. And it's literally my job to help close that gap and take you beyond that.

If you are somebody who is interested in learning more about under-recognition, learning more about visibility engineering, which is what I call my methodology and how we fix it, find me on LinkedIn doing my nerdiest best to share about what I have observed, research that I've read and that I've interpreted. I'm also on Instagram. 

And if you really, really want to hear from me, like if you really, really want the nerdy stuff, I have the nerd list. It is where everything goes first. The most recent thing that I was writing about was on the models of influence and understanding which model of influence best fits the goals that you have. So, stuff like that that's not even out in the world yet. Join me in any of those places. And if you have questions, I'm sure you have questions. Feel free to reach out.

Maria Bryan: Chloe, your work is so refreshing because it's not this little bout of success. Now you want to train everyone how to do exactly what you did, which in my world is just like a dime a dozen, but this is research and evidence-based. I am so honored to have you on When Bearing Witness. Thank you for joining us and sharing your wisdom.

Chloe Nwangwu: Thank you for having me.