You can’t prevent unconscious bias from happening, so stop trying to.
Unconscious bias is, as the name suggests, unconscious. And even so, it seems that people often forget this fact when they talk of how to solve it.
On the one hand, there is great understanding that for better or worse, unconscious bias is part of the way it works. It’s part of a bigger mechanism that isn’t there to create bias, but rather to allow our brain to work quickly and efficiently. Google even put it in numbers in their presentation on unconscious bias: “We receive 11 million bits of information every moment. We can only consciously process 40 bits.” That’s 99.999996% unconscious.
On the other hand, we find ourselves wonder — how can it be that even with this understanding, employees and executives are expected to prevent their brain from functioning the way it’s designed to?
Can unconscious bias training really prevent unconscious bias from happening? When employees and executives have to deal with multitasking, deadlines, flooded email inboxes (or trying to achieve inbox zero) and more — how can they be expected to be conscious of their unconscious bias and prevent it from manifesting? In real-time, with such large amounts of information, the brain has no other choice but to ‘make it easy’ for itself. So how can we even tell them to do it, or presume to teach them how to do it by themselves?
Simultaneously, there are those who try to prevent unconscious bias using certain techniques or tools. We see this mainly during the recruitment process, when names or other identifying information is concealed on a candidate’s CV, for example. Blind CV review doesn’t really prevent bias, it just delays it to a later stage. Sooner or later, it becomes clear whether the candidate is a man or woman of color, and when that happens — unconscious bias will be triggered. The same is true for removing masculine words from job descriptions. This may result in a more diverse pool of candidates applying for the job, but it doesn’t prevent unconscious bias from happening later on in the process.
You can’t prevent unconscious bias from happening, so stop trying to. This attempt to force on the human brain certain behavior that would prevent unconscious bias is a lost cause. It is a war on evolution, and the chances of winning are virtually nonexistent.
So, ‘what can we do?’
There are quite a lot to be done, and we plan on sharing our thoughts and ideas in coming posts and events.
For now, we’ll tell you what we do. We believe that we need to pick and choose where to focus our efforts. Instead of trying to prevent unconscious bias from happening, do the exact opposite — let it happen. But once it happens, identify it and offer immediate action to correct and change it. Only through such a process, where unconscious bias is promptly met with corrective action, can it be solved.
And if you don’t believe this is possible, rest assured that this is exactly what we do.
