Fearless Futures Podcast Episode 3: Unconscious Bias [Transcript]
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Hanna Naima McCloskey: Hi, you’re listening to the Fearless Futures Podcast. I’m your host Hanna Naima McCloskey, the CEO and founder of Fearless Futures. And this is the show where we unpack and interrogate mainstream methods for equity and inclusion. I’ll be sharing new perspectives as well as alternative approaches we have developed and deployed working in daring companies across sectors around the world. Each week, we will explore a new angle you won’t want to miss. So, stick around.
Unconscious bias training is all the rage. This episode, we’ll be discussing the problem with using unconscious bias and challenging unconscious bias as the framework within which we do include inequity work in our companies. Unfortunately, we’ll also be sharing what else we can do instead.
We at Fearless Futures are regularly contacted by lots of different people being asked for unconscious bias training, and we often have to share with them why we don’t adhere to that conceptualization of challenging inequity within workplace context or in society more broadly. It often comes as a bit of a surprise to people to hear that because of the hold that unconscious bias as a framing for what is, in fact, going on in our world. It has such a pervasiveness that people are often quite just surprised to think that an organization that does inclusion training doesn’t subscribe to this kind of conceptualization of what is going on.
Another term for “unconscious bias” training that people might have heard is “implicit bias” as well, and I decided to do a little bit of research as to when implicit bias testing (because that seemed to come first understandably) first came about in order to see what is the journey that we’ve been on with the whole implicit bias and unconscious bias training universe, and I found an article on The Guardian entitled “Unconscious bias: what is it and can it be eliminated?” It gave a short summary precisely of the history of how we got here. So, I’m just going to read a little bit from that article: “Spearheaded by a team of social psychologists at the University of Washington and Yale, the implicit association test promised to lift the veil on people’s subconscious attitudes towards others. Upon publishing their landmark paper in 1998, the team described (and I quote) ‘a new tool that measures the unconscious roots of prejudice’ that they said affected 90 to 95% of people.” End quoting from that article. There’s a huge amount, actually, revealed about the conceptualization of how the symptoms we’re seeing in organizations comes about, just from that short paragraph. Just to share a couple of observations immediately on this section: I think the first thing that I felt when I was reading it was 90% to 95% of people only experience these implicit biases? How can that possibly be if — and I think this is a really, really important “if”— if we are to understand that the issues at play when we’re thinking about so called implicit bias or unconscious bias are in fact systemic. Who are the 10% to 5% of people that are able to extract themselves from the systems at play? So, the first thing I think that’s really important for us to grapple with is the function of the word “unconscious” or indeed “implicit” when we’re considering the outcomes of inequities in our workplaces and society more broadly.
Why is there this commitment and investment in the unconsciousness or the implicit nature of the biases? Really, I think it comes down to the fact that there’s an unwillingness for people who benefit from existing systems of inequities to take responsibility for the outcomes of their actions. Framing their behavior and decisions as unconscious or implicit gets us all off the hook.
This reluctance to take responsibility for the outcomes of our decisions and actions is even seen in the context of some of our deepest capacity building programs. So, we will have spent extensive time with our senior leader participants, engaging them in robust analysis about the root causes and the ways in which systems of oppression operate, and they will be deep and immersed in this rigorous analysis. Then, we’ll come to analyzing and existing internal policy, for example, and have them engaged with those very same principles that we’ve been working on so extensively and that they’ve really, really grasped — only for us to engage them in some explanatory analysis of the reason why a particular policy has been designed in a certain way for them to very quickly revert back to this idea of unconscious bias. They’ll say “Oh, the reason that we don’t recruit at [insert particular university, for example, that perhaps isn’t considered to be Ivy League or in the context of the UK and Oxbridge], the reason we don’t hire there is because of unconscious bias.”
As a facilitator and educator, moments like this are sometimes moments of despair. But I share this to acknowledge how quick we are to turn back to familiar thinking habits and framing habits, and in this case, those that don’t anchor us back in responsibility taking. In the Fearless Futures paradigm, it’s not “unconscious” that those decisions are made about where recruitment might happen, for example. These are the designed outcomes of systems of oppression that elevate and uplift certain groups of people who are seen as desirable and valuable at the expense of those that these systems have created the conditions for us to see as disposable, not valuable, and therefore not worth our time, energy or resource.
Interesting, I also think, there’s a second point to this which is that by framing it as a psychological phenomena rooted deep within the individual. There’s some sort of expression that this is a biological phenomenon, and perhaps something that’s so innate to human beings that there’s nothing we can really do about them. And I think those two dynamics combined are really — for us at Fearless Futures — the starting point for why this framing can be particularly dangerous to be wedded to and to use within company contexts. It’s also really interesting (and I think only possible because it locates this problem deep within the psyche) that there’s even a view that it can in fact be tested. And I’ve already briefly touched on the bizarre idea to me and my colleagues at Fearless Futures that there are some 5% to 10% of people that [of] those who created the test think [they] can somehow be outside of these systems of inequity that are historical processes being played out in the present. That for me is an extraordinary idea that just doesn’t add up, frankly.
But locating the issue within an individual, let alone the kind of measuring that we can perhaps put to one side, really misdiagnoses where inequity comes from, how it’s produced and how it’s maintained. And that is the second key problem with the framing of unconscious bias being the reason why we have unequal outcomes [and] differential outcomes for different groups of people in our society en mass. In many ways, you could see unconscious bias being inside/outside direction of travel of the problem. Whereas we would see the ways in which inequities play out as being outside and therefore systemic and enforced by structures within society such as laws, policies and institutions that create the conditions through which us as individuals engage with the world around us. And I’ll go on and touch on why this distinction makes a difference for the solution making that we’re able to do within our organizational contexts. Which of course, in theory is the key to build solutions that challenge and disrupt the perpetuation of inequity.
The other dimension of this unconsciousness in terms of the framing within unconscious bias is of course that it invisibilises and erases and deletes — frankly, the very conscious nature of bias in workplace contexts. Again, this goes back to absolving people of any sense of responsibility that they have for their behavior, and I think what’s really interesting here is that of course, people are very quick to take responsibility for positive things they might do in their organizational contexts. It’s rare someone would say, “Oh, no that was an unconscious idea I had that made for a very profitable advertising campaign.” No one would really claim that they had no responsibility over something that had a positive outcome. But in these particular outcomes that are negatively understood, there’s a very quick distancing from one’s agency in this context, and I think that deleting or invisibilizing the conscious nature of the ways in which inequity plays out is of course, again, very, very dangerous — because it means that we’re unable to pinpoint and get specific about what is in fact actually happening.
And it’s in many ways another distraction tool, because it shifts the location of responsibility, and it shifts the burden of proof once more because if it’s unconscious, there’s nothing really we can hold anybody to account around when it comes to the issue at play. Which, of course, is a really clever tactic if the goal is to maintain the status quo while pretending that there is in fact some deep commitment to challenging the status quo. Now, what’s interesting here is that, of course, there are actually many other ways that we can articulate what is happening when inequity is being perpetuated.
For example, we need not say: “Oh, that was my unconscious bias.” We could say: “I’ve perpetuated inequity here.” We could say: “I’ve perpetuated disablism or anti-semitism or cissexism,” or whatever it might be. That could be how we articulate what’s going on which would allow us to acknowledge the systemic nature of these issues, and our individual responsibility in their continuance and maintenance. So, I think it’s very canny that isn’t how we are trained to talk about what we are doing when we’re having a negative impact that does in fact perpetuate these inequities. That most people would say: “Oh, it was totally unconscious,” or continually introduce the notion of the unconsciousness of their decision making into the conversation. The other part of the term, of course — whether it’s unconscious bias or implicit bias — is the word “bias.” Bias is really interesting as a word. Because for me, and I think many of my colleagues at Fearless Futures, we would see the term “bias” as, again, invisibilising or ignoring the role of power in generating and producing the outcomes in question. What do I mean by that?
I mean that bias alone doesn’t really reflect once more the overarching asymmetry between those who are subject to a system of inequity and those who benefit from them. So here’s a question for you: if we remain using the word “bias,” what’s the difference between having a bias against a football team? Perhaps because they’re the main competitors against your preferred football team that you have a bias towards. Okay, so we have a bias against a football team. What’s the difference between that and bias against somebody who is trans or disabled or any other position subject to a system of oppression?
Clearly — well, I say clearly but it might not be clear for all — there is a distinction that these aren’t equivalent biases, and that’s the problem with the term “bias.” Particularly, when it’s preceded by implicit or unconscious. It doesn’t reflect the material outcomes that are produced by that particular bias. So in the case of having a bias against a football team, there isn’t the structural enforcement of asymmetric power working against that football team that you might have a so called bias towards.
But when we’re thinking about the case of somebody who’s existing within a system of oppression, that bias is not equivalent to having a bias against a football team, because the bias that’s being experienced within the context of a system of oppression exists at the ideas level. So, there are those negative ideas and also at the structural level, historical laws, policies [and] institutions that are playing out in the present that create material negative outcomes for the group en mass who have this bias against them.
So, the biases of a different proportion, with a different history, with a different impact than a bias against a football team that an individual might have where that bias remains at that individual level. This is why the term “bias” is ultimately insufficient in describing the phenomenon that we’re speaking to in the context of inclusion and equity work. And so, bias in its fluidity and multi-dimensional usage lacks the specificity that’s really important when we’re kind of engaging in the analysis required when it comes to challenging inequity in our workplaces. It can take us down the garden path and lose the necessary relevance that we require if we’re focused on doing an inclusion and equity work which we at Fearless Futures would say is very much in the domain of challenging oppression.
Finally, and I think this is relevant for a lot of the language that’s traditionally used within diversity and inclusion work, is that unconscious bias is the framing and conceptualization for what’s going on in our workplaces has another consequence, which is that it removes the urgency for change. By using this individualized, almost biologically innate phrasing, it misses the deep violence that’s potentially occurring for some people in organizational contacts that are occurring every single day for them. And so, we sterilize the impact of what’s happening for people when we use terminology like “unconscious bias” or “implicit bias.” That combined with all those other dynamics really is something that I think harms the endeavors that are taking place within company context on this front.
The kinds of solutions that we are likely to develop and come up with are very different depending on whether we understand something to be an individual, psychological, potentially biologically innate issue versus something that is produced by historical processes that involve both negative ideas and structures that target negatively particular groups en mass. And the latter is a systemic analysis of inequity rather than one that’s rooted in individual acts of harm, potentially, that are almost always into personal in nature. I.e. “slip of the tongues” or slurs that might pop out, for example. Which I think is often how people conceive of unconscious bias playing out in the workplace. Where we focus our resource and energy at a strategic and company level, if we think it’s all about individuals versus the structures that are reproduced within our company context — so structures, again, being policies and laws that create the conditions for certain behavior and for particular outcomes that are going to be differential between groups — where we focus our energy is going to be very different based on one analysis versus the other.
Ultimately, we at Fearless Futures would say unless you’re operating at an analysis that accounts for the systemic nature of these issues, you will be pulling levers that will be ineffective in driving material outcomes that are going to be challenging oppression. That’s the long and short of it, of course [of] the interpersonal matters and that’s not to say that it doesn’t — but it’s also to recognize the root of these issues, and the root is not in our individual psyche. The root is external, it’s societal, it’s historical that lives out in the present and it’s also structural. Without a focus on that, we will continue to go around and around and around in circles sadly, without really giving people the educative tools for change that are required for them to be able to make the impact they wish. Should that be something that they’re committed to doing?
Thank you for listening to the Fearless Futures Podcast. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe, rate and share this episode with a friend. If you’re interested in learning more about the work that we do at Fearless Futures, please visit our website fearlessfutures.org. ’Til next time.
