Unconscious Bias: Minimizing Impact on Discrimination, Hiring, Promotions, & Retention

Areas Covered:

• What?! Me Biased? No Way: Understanding, Recognizing and Interrupting Unconscious Bias at Work
• Unconscious Bias in the Workplace: The Science and the Law
• Unconscious Bias at Work: How Our Mind Deceives Us and What to Do About It
• Unconscious Bias at Work: Examining Ourselves, Our Colleagues, Our Workplace Through Our Perceptual Lens
• Unconscious Bias in the Workplace: How to Recognize It, How to Tackle It
• Unconscious Bias at Work: An Invisible Presence with Potent Clout
• What We Don't Know May Hurt Us: Recognizing and Addressing Unconscious Bias in the Workplace.

Who will Benefit:

All Management including team leaders, supervisors, middle managers, directors, and senior leaders, administrators

• Human resources professionals including generalists and HR managers
• Risk Managers
• Attorneys
• Physicians
• Nurses
• Law enforcement
• Professors
• Team Leaders, managers and Supervisors

Topic Background:

We all experience some degree of unconscious bias—yes, even those of us that are well-intentioned. Unconscious bias includes the subtle associations we make towards groups of people. Stereotypes, which often operate unconsciously, are often the root of our bias. The phenomenon has been used to partially explain the racial tension in the U. S. and particularly with the police shootings of Black men. The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) recognizes the important role unconscious bias plays in the life of attorneys and law enforcement. As a result, beginning in 2015, the DOJ rolled out training to more than 23,000 agents in the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies as well as 5,800 attorneys in 94 U. S. Attorney’s Offices around the country. State and local police and sheriff departments are also conducting unconscious bias training.

More and more corporations and organizations are incorporating unconscious bias training for employees recognizing the role it plays in workplace discrimination including hiring, promotion, retention, and talent management practices. Wall Street estimated that 20% of large corporations conduct unconscious bias training. It shapes the organizational climate. One of the challenges in addressing unconscious (implicit) bias is, based on the research is that people are often resistant to accepting behavior that is inconsistent with their stereotypes and belief systems, while accepting behavior that is consistent with stereotypes and their beliefs.

In spite of over 50 years of civil rights law, inequality continues based on sex, race, disability, and other protected classes, as it relates to levels of education, poverty and success; unconscious bias influences those inequalities. Courts have recognized the existence of unconscious discrimination since the earliest Title VII decisions and have specifically stated that Title VII reaches this form of discrimination.

Unconscious bias is built into our DNA—it is part of our human nature. It is automatic for humans to categorize individuals and groups to help us make sense of the world. Unconscious bias includes mental shortcuts to categorize people we are unfamiliar with into specific groups. Often those groups are labeled “good” or “bad”. The brain is hard-wired to create these groups and from an evolutionary standpoint, this hard-wiring helped us determine what was safe and what meant danger. Once assigned to the group, we attribute stereotypes that we associate with that group. Unconscious bias, implicit bias, is different from conscious bias (explicit bias) that most of us associate with overt prejudice such as racism, sexism and other forms of intolerance.