Unconscious bias and diversity in the workplace a middle-aged white guy’s view.

You might find this a strange topic for me to be writing about, considering that I am not in a “traditional” minority group. However, you are wrong to assume it does not affect me, especially as a business leader. In order to be a top tier leader and drive the best outcomes, it is critical to understand the impacts of unconscious bias on our decision making and I want to share my experience and insights into this with you.

I first became aware of this topic around 2-3 years ago. It started when I was asked to champion diversity and inclusiveness for our business in the middle east. 

My initial reaction was “What is the problem”? 

I worked in a large international company, my colleagues were of all backgrounds, races & cultures. I worked with lots of women at different levels of the organisation and integrity is a key aspect of our company culture. I had not observed problems related to diversity and inclusiveness. 

How wrong I was. 

I started to look more deeply into the topic and the data shocked me, although some teams were well-balanced, parts of the organisation were significantly lacking in diversity, whether related to gender, age, background or race. 

The fact that most people do not identify these issues naturally is a form of unconscious bias. If you get the chance, take a critical look at your own organisation, ideally get the statistics. You will likely be surprised. For example, just because you work with people of a certain minority does not mean they are equally represented throughout your organisation.

So, what is unconscious bias?

“Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and these biases stem from one’s tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.”

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/unconscious-bias

A good way for you to get a better understanding of unconscious bias is to take an implicit association test.

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

I found this quick test helps to demonstrate how this mechanism works in your own head. 

Unconscious grouping happens in the brain automatically and this causes us to then make unconscious assumptions and mental shortcuts. These groupings are formed with cultural context and the many thousands of hours of your personal experience. Every time you perform a repeated action your brain reinforces it by building stronger neural pathways, the same way you would learn to play the piano or speak a foreign language. Therefore, these unconscious groupings are a natural behaviour caused by our brain function and because ‘practice makes perfect’ they can even strengthen over time (which is why older people might be more susceptible to these kinds of biases). 

The problem with these mental shortcuts is that it causes us to take decisions based upon feeling/intuition rather than data-driven conclusions. 

In the context of a company, it can lead to the following issues:

• Lack of diversity, which has been shown to be detrimental to (amongst other things) the financial outcomes of a business. Diversity of thinking in an organisation can be key to innovation and growth for the company. 
• Prejudice against certain ideas due to the person who generated them (“They are too young”, “they don’t have experience”, “they don’t even have an engineering degree”). This can stifle innovation and suppress new business ideas.

Another symptom of unconscious bias that we should be aware of, is the use of gender pronouns. I have observed this happening in various forms of written and verbal communication. You should be especially careful when writing job descriptions. Sentences such as “His responsibilities shall be” will put off those candidates which do not identify with that pronoun. A much better option would be ‘your’. When writing guidelines or internal documents, descriptions such as ‘manpower’ should be ‘personnel’. Fighting your unconscious bias in meetings is also important. Addressing a mixed group as “guys” or “gentlemen” might be an innocent mistake, which even I make from time to time, but it sets a poor precedent and acts to alienate female or non-binary members of the team.   

However, gender is not the only area where the effects of unconscious bias can be felt and men are certainly not the only ones who have unconscious biases. We all do and we all need to be aware of this problem. We need to watch out for it slipping into our communications and analyse the reasons behind the decisions we make, especially with respect to personnel. I recommend using the many online resources available to learn what the different manifestations of unconscious bias can be and how to mitigate their effects within yourself and your team. Here is a good article on unconscious bias in the workplace with particular relevance to recruitment:

https://builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/unconscious-bias-examples

In summary – unconscious bias is a normal natural phenomenon which is caused by the way our minds categorise the world around us. However, this doesn’t mean that it is something we have no control over. It is vitally important to be aware of the impacts unconscious bias has on our behaviour and decision making. I would recommend that you all keep an eye out for examples of this in your day-to-day activities. It is an interesting activity and can be quite shocking once you are aware of what to look for. In order to combat the negative aspects, awareness is the key tool. Talk about it with your teams and give feedback when you see it happening. 

Diversity of thought in an organisation improves competitiveness – don’t suppress this through unconscious bias.

Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash