During the holiday break I caught up on some of my favourite old-time movies and I was struck by the obvious bias that existed when they were made. For example, It’s a Wonderful Life, an all-time classic had a completely white cast, with the exception of one woman of colour who was portrayed in rather simplistic terms. The original Miracle on 34th Street was also completely white, even though New York in the 1940s would have had a very mixed population. Then viewing Four Weddings and a Funeral, I was struck by its focus solely on the lives of White Middle-Class upwardly mobiles.
Bias is all around us and we don’t have to look very hard to find it. But it is something that with awareness and calling out the bias, we can make considerable changes. One only has to look at modern films, even remakes of older classics to see how diverse the casting has become, but there was an uphill struggle to acknowledge bias before that occurred. One great example of addressing bias was from my writing mentor and founder of The Business Book Awards Lucy McCarraher. She noticed in the first year that whilst the entrants were 50/50 male/female, the awards went to only male authors. By focusing on what bias might exist and bringing in a very diverse judging team, the last two Business Book Awards have been exactly 50% split between men and women. What a great result.
I always say that bias has its root in choice. Our preference for a particularly flavour, brand or experience will be based on what we have found to be enjoyable or acceptable in our past. Yet that can create shortcuts in our thinking that leads to bias and discrimination of others. We can have inherent gender bias when it comes to certain roles, or racial bias when we are judging someone’s character or make assumptions based on a person’s disability.
Here’s three things that modern businesses can do to address bias:
- Use your data to understand what is going on. Bias shows up when we have homogenous groups emerging in our employee population. That can be due to how we recruit, or how we define a role or the workplace culture. So look to your data to find out what’s happening.
- Think about how you define and recruit for your business. We often don’t realise how much bias is built into our talent acquisition processes. For example we might use gendered language, or recruit from sources that are inequitable or set expectations around the job that are non-essential but automatically screen out more diverse candidates. There are lots of resources out there to help you to look at this more closely and create a more bias-free recruitment approach.
- Encourage a feedback culture. So many examples of bias happen in the moment. A joke or a throwaway comment can be derogatory to an ethnic minority or be gender-biased. When your employees feel comfortable calling that out and opening up a conversation it leads to a much more open and transparent culture. Equally being ‘called out’ should be about learning, not naming and shaming. As a leader you can infuence this by role modelling giving, receiving and asking for feedback. That can be scary, but it can lead to a much deeper and more effective working environment that will bring positive benefits to your overall business performance.
If this is something you would like to address in your organisation, let’s talk about the range of support we can provide to help you build a business of belonging. Book in for a free chat here: https://letsmeet.io/agents2change/consulting-initial-call