Let’s Get Back to Talking About Bias

During a Diversity & Inclusion listening session I facilitated in 2021 for people to discuss their experiences, one person of color shared that their parents had given them a “white name” with the explicit hope of reducing the amount of implicit bias they would face growing up and building a career in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. 

At that session, I was struck not by what the individual had shared – it’s common for people from diverse ethnicities to be given Anglo-centric names or even to change their names voluntarily for exactly that purpose – but by how surprised others in the room were about the reality of implicit bias. 

Research indicating that candidates with “white-sounding names” are up to 50% more likely to get call-backs for interviews and that the interviewers are more likely to positively respond to the quality of the candidate’s resume, is not new. Similarly, research indicating that as much as 62% of an employee performance rating can be a reflection of biased rating tendencies of the reviewing manager rather than employee performance is decades old.

Yet the nature of implicit bias means that not only are many of our decisions at work potentially affected by it (including and beyond interpersonal decisions), but that not consciously thinking about these biases can result in a lack of awareness of the impacts they can have.

What doesn’t help this situation is the reputation implicit bias learning has acquired in recent years as being “unhelpful” or “ineffective.” 

Implicit biases are heuristics (mental shortcuts) developed in our psychology in a myriad of ways. They become behaviors we live with for years, if not lifetimes, and undoing them takes vastly more effort than a one-off implicit bias course. However, the solution is not to do away with implicit bias learning, but to do more of it. 

At the very least, every formal people management process should include a refresher of relevant biases that might affect decision-making; how biased decisions can impact the trajectory of a person’s career and the success of our organizations; and the steps we can take to mitigate these biases. A good example of this is Culture Amp’s 10 Performance Review Biases & How To Avoid Them.

Without regularly taking the time to understand our implicit biases and challenging ourselves to change our behaviors, we risk sleepwalking through life as unconsciously incompetent decision-makers, our biases persistently and negatively impacting the lived experience of others and our ability to generate positive outcomes for our organizations.

In a world where parents name their children not to help root them in their culture, or even because they especially prefer one name over another, but to help mitigate our implicit biases, the least we can do is regularly remind ourselves that we all have implicit biases and that there are things we can do to mitigate them.

Implicit bias is in many ways a basic foundation for Diversity & Inclusion learning, as well as broader decision-making effectiveness. Let’s get back to it, often.