Understanding our biases can be tricky. To help us understand, we spoke to Sinead English; Founder of Hilt, to give us some inside knowledge on the topic. This is what she had to say:
Like it or not, when it comes to our decision making, we are all biased. And worst of all, we are often not even aware that we are allowing these biases to affect our choices and decisions, because it is outside of our rational and conscious awareness. Stay with me.
Unconscious bias is defined as a positive or negative unconscious belief about a particular category of people. We can make quick (and often inaccurate) assessments of people and situations. It is influenced by our background, our cultural environment and our personal experiences. Unconscious bias can lead to inequality and discrimination and can contribute to people feeling that they are navigating a hugely unfair playing field when trying to start or progress in their career.
Anyone who has a say regarding decisions on hiring, promoting, mentoring or recommending anyone for a job, a place on a course - or any opportunity that helps their professional or personal development should accept the fact that unconscious bias may be pulling some strings in their subconscious while they make those decisions. Have you ever had a “gut feeling” why someone will be better for a role than someone else? Have you always been right? Probably not.
With International Women’s Day 2022 calling on all of us to #breakthebias let’s look at some practical steps we can take to minimise the effect our unconscious bias has on our everyday decision making. To find out more about International Women's Day, click here.
1. Accept that we all have unconscious biases. Be aware of your own biases and challenge your “gut” feeling
2. Make it okay in your workplace to call it out unconscious bias when you see or hear it. While mandatory unconscious bias training is not a panacea for “fixing” the unconscious bias problem, it will help to allow people to discuss it without feeling self conscious or that they are questioning their colleague’s good character. At the very least ask them to read the Harvard Business Review article Tackle Bias in Your Company Without Making People Defensive which discusses how having an unconscious bias for or against a particular group of people does not make you a “bad” person.
3. When evaluating a group, aim to have a clear, objective, and transparent process. Evaluate every person against the same criteria. Decide what your evaluation metrics are before the first person walks in - not when they have all left and you are trying to justify why you have selected person X (who, by the way, reminds you so much of yourself when you were starting your career – hello Confirmation Bias and Affinity Bias). Ensure that the people involved in the selection process are as diverse as possible. Have a selection policy where diversity of gender, as well as diversity of age and ethnicity are represented within the candidate evaluation team.
The business case for diversity has been championed by McKinsey for many years. Diverse workplaces, when measured in terms of gender and ethnic and cultural diversity have consistently shown that they significantly outperform their non-diverse peers. Checking and calling out unconscious bias is not only the fair and decent thing to do, it also makes business sense.
Hilt provides Unconscious Bias Training to organisations seeking to ensure their processes are fair, robust, objective and transparent. Hilt also provides training for candidates to ensure they are putting their best foot forward in their applications. Contact Hilt by clicking here to discuss how we can help you.
You can also read more about Unconscious Bias clicking here.
Sinead English, Founder, Hilt – www.wearehilt.com