Unconscious bias

A brilliant young woman presented to our practice recently about the challenges unconscious bias places upon the female sex and the limiting effect it has on their ability to reach the same levels in pretty much every organisation as men.

Having started my career 30 years ago, in the last century, and having seen the attitudes of men back then, I believe it. Many of those men are still in positions of seniority in the business world. I also believe that younger men are not immune either - in fact, they may even be worse because they're smarter at hiding it and feel pissed off because they see more women in the workplace taking their slots.

But listening to the description of the problem, even though it's dreadful, I couldn't help but find it a little baffling.

It reminded me of a recent virtual reality (VR) training session I was encouraged to attend titled 'in your shoes'. A great idea to put you into a virtual world where you are meant to be a person from a non-white non-middle aged man's background and feel what's it like to be them. Except they didn't offer any VR headsets - so it ended up being a non-interactive rather bland and strangely set video.

Instead of being 'in your shoes', you were just watching some people being rude to you - and the overwhelming impression was that those people are dicks, overtly biased, and if I was in the person's shoes I'd just tell them to fuck off.

Yet strangely enough, it had the exact opposite effect for a Chinese guy I was watching the video with who said 'this is so true. You have no idea how racist everyone is. Back in the old days it was terrible.' My response was 'is it really that bad now?' The guy said back to me 'yeh, it's worse nowadays because no one says anything. But you just know it's there'.

So instead of being an enlightening, galvanising positive force, the session ended up being triggering for anyone who feels marginalised. The Chinese guy looked at me resentfully for the rest of the event.

It got me thinking - could you do more on the theme of 'in your shoes?' Maybe you could have 'in your skirt' for the transgender community. Or 'in your pants?' to make it more equal, although that one could be misconstrued.

This is the reason why I'm not called upon to help design these sessions. Usually I'm just held up as an example of the token racist, sexist, out-of-touch, privileged dude who has to say 'I agree with everything you say. Thanks for enlightening me'.