While many organizations and some of them could be yours profess to want to do something about diversity and inclusion and have spent much time, dollars doing something, we still have been unable to actually address this issue in any major substantive way. Yet, we know a lot. We know that the single most important contributor to the lack of diversity and inclusion in our organizations is a culture. What is the culture? We know we use the term it's the way we do things around here. It stands to reason that if you have a culture that is in some way opposing, providing obstacles, draw more diverse and inclusive environment while you tackle that would nearing, but we don't. People who sell what's culture will take a long time to change. Well, we might know that saying and how it will freeze over. Well, that's what's going to happen if we don't tackle what is the elephant in the room when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Over the last 5-10 years, many organizations have embraced the idea of unconscious bias. This is the attitudes. This is the implicit thoughts and stereotypes that we carry around. This is what's underlying what we're doing that's actually creating barriers to diversity and inclusion. Here we now have an industry some would say in unconscious bias. Most organizations, large and medium, in Australia will have set staff and particularly managers to unconscious bias training, and yet do we see much change? No. Not a lot. In fact, you would have seen the statistics that project how long it will take us before we actually get some parity in areas such as women in the workforce. What is it about unconscious bias that we find difficult to tackle? Well, partly it's because unconscious bias means that we're going to have to examine our own feelings, our own attitudes, and the behaviors that arise from that. We also are going to have those conversations with others. What is unconscious bias? It's often called implicit bias. This is something that we might display a particularly unfavorable view or belief about a particular group of people. Now this bias is actually often based on very little evidence at all, and it comes out of that part of the human brain, that part of our thinking that's been developed over millennia to, in fact, be able to recognize very quickly, to process very quickly a whole range of stimuli, to be able to tell us if something is dangerous or if something is going to be safe. Now it's been estimated that our brains would typically process more than 11 bits of information at any one time, and we can only really process 40. Unconscious bias is something that snaps into place. We read some cues and we act. Now some of you may have seen the very popular cartoons that are used in unconscious bias training that shows the caveman being faced with the saber-toothed tiger and being afraid. So that is there to illustrate that we see a saber-toothed tiger. We'd better run or we'd better throw a spear. Unconscious bias for us today, given how much greater and complicated the world is, is often there to protect us. But that level of protection in our organizations, in our decision-making about others in general can be very damaging to decision-making. The fact that we haven't acknowledge unconscious bias as being a problem, that automatic response that's born out of something in our psyche that has developed over a period of time. We can see and we can demonstrate how it colors our decisions about who should have a job, who should be a leader, what sort of person will fit into our organization. You will have heard about stereotypes and we talk about that a lot. Stereotypes, unconscious bias. Is it the chicken or the egg, whatever it is they connected. We live in a world where we are inundated with stereotypes. Many of these stereotypes were very particular to your particular country, your culture, your religion, your family. These are the forces, the influences that help to develop these unconscious biases. Of course, when we live in a country or in a world in which there is so much stimulation, television, radio, films, the internet, books, often those unconscious biases are reinforced with stereotypes. For example, women are very good at looking after people. Men are good at fixing things. We know the stereotypes about race. We hear things like Asians are very good at Maths, but really bad drivers. These are stereotypes that have come out of something that we probably can't even identify. They may seem inconsequential but as I've said a few minutes ago, when these biases are actually impacting in a negative way on decisions that will unfairly impact on an individual and also impact our organization negatively, we need to be aware and doing something about them. The thing about developing the strategy, if you remember back to the first couple of modules, we talked about the business case and the argument for diversity and inclusion, recruitment. One of them was about action and that inclusion is about action. Well, unconscious bias training is important. But only important if we actually see action taking place after that training. How do we do this? Well, later in this course, you will actually find some ways. We will be looking at the recruitment process in particular. But one of the things we need to do, first of all, is to actually interrogate our decisions. By that I mean, we need to look at our recruitment processes. For example, many of you would be aware of the studies where academics, researchers have taken the one application for a job. The one application is exactly the same and then they make copies, but they put different names on them. They might put Chinese names, they might put Greek names, and then English sounding names. In this study, which has been replicated in many, many ways around the world, what we find is that based obviously on the name, people have not been shortlisted, and yet it is a very same application. That in itself is enough for us to say, well, let's have a look at our application process. Let's even look at some of the decisions. Now of course, if we move back and think about our recruitment strategy, one of the things that we want to be able to do is to expand our candidate pool. Besides looking at who's applied, we can also look at the extent to which people are attracted from a broad base. Unconscious bias requires us to interrogate our decision-making. It's not enough to say, I know about unconscious bias. We need to accept the fact that we all carry unconscious bias with us. There are lots of examples. We see in history when different groups of people have been treated less than fairly because of unconscious bias, which is reinforced with stereotypes. We also know that there have been times in the world's history and I'll just talk about Australia, but I'm sure that we can draw parallels from this. In my lifetime, it hasn't been until the 60' s, where indigenous Australians were considered to be citizens, could vote. Up until then, there has been a view that potentially couldn't be responsible, didn't know how to vote, didn't have any interests. I mean, that's in a lifetime. Now, view's challenge, women and there's plenty of unconscious bias, if not conscious bias around women. Some of it, we see shifting. But for example, women not being able to have the vote, women not being able to drive, women not being considered leadership material. Again, there are plenty of studies that show that the identification with male or female is a determinant in terms of outcome. When we think about how do we deal with these issues, we cannot only deal with them in an abstract, intellectual way. We need to challenge ourselves. We need to be able to say, "Well, hey, I don't think that I am biased. I don't think that I discriminate against a particular group." Well, I would say, like me, you might find that you do it. Does that mean you're a bad person? No. What it means is that you're operating with unconscious bias. Having unconscious bias is not bad. Having unconscious bias, knowing the impact it has on outcomes, on the decision-making within the organizations, that perhaps is the biggest problem. One of the things that's really important to think about is the influences around unconscious bias. I talked briefly about things like television, radio, media in general. These are very, very strong images and these are images that unfortunately carryover. It's very rare to see a woman, it's very rare to see people from an Asian background in positions of leadership in television or film programming that's located in a non Asian contexts. These are things that we carry that have impact on us, that we need to be aware of. The impact of unconscious bias also shows in terms of expectation. If we have an expectation that people, because of whatever reason, but because we believe it, are unable to succeed or contribute, then that's what we will look for. There are some very famous studies about telling teachers that children who were very unruly poor learners were in fact gifted and talented. The expectation of the teacher was that they were gifted and talented, and actually changed the way they taught. Similarly, if you tell a group of students that they're really good at something and they read that before they do the test, the chances are their confidences will make them do better than their anticipation. There's lots and lots, as I said in the beginning, of evidence of studies that tell us the impact of unconscious bias and stereotyping on decisions, and organizations can't ignore it. We can't continue to say we're trying. The reason for that is we looked at it's a global issue, we need to be able to tackle these issues, but also organizations to tie how much time do you want to continue to do the same thing over and over again? If in fact you introduce unconscious bias into your organization in the sense of doing something about it, my advice is do not do it. As I said, only in an abstract way. Get people sitting around a table. As we will in later modules, we will look at actual job descriptions, actual interview questions. We will look at how unconscious bias is translated into the process of language of recruitment. Unconscious bias is something that sometimes can be funny. We can say that we can learn some things, it's funny. We also get quite defensive. I have suggested in the module that you do an online unconscious bias test. You might be quite shocked to quite defensive. There is no need to be. As I said earlier, the only problem with unconscious bias is when people like you and I, and our organizations do nothing about its negative impact.
