Tips for Rooting Out Hidden Bias

Introduction

Jennifer Allyn is not someone you’d expect to embrace the notion that a woman’s place is at home. She earned a master’s degree from Harvard Kennedy School, served as an HR consultant to Fortune 500 companies and is currently leading diversity efforts for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. She sits on women’s leadership boards, won a Feminist Press award and is her family’s primary breadwinner.

So it stands to reason that when this accomplished professional sees the word “career,” she thinks of women as often as men.

Except she doesn’t.

Somewhere in her subconscious—so deeply buried that she isn’t aware of it—Allyn associates women with families and men with careers. So says the assessment she took called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a well-respected tool designed to uncover hidden biases about everything from race to gender to age.

Somewhere in her subconscious—so deeply buried that she isn’t aware of it—Allyn associates women with families and men with careers. So says the assessment she took called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a well-respected tool designed to uncover hidden biases about everything from race to gender to age.

“I was raised in a family where my father was the breadwinner and my mother was the caregiver,” says Allyn, who was stunned by the IAT results. “It’s a pretty good jolt when you realize that no matter what your conscious mind may think, there are other dynamics at play.”

Those “other dynamics” may be biases that we embrace on an unconscious level—deep prejudices or stereotypes imparted by upbringing, culture and mass media that influence our perceptions about people and our behavior toward them.

“Hidden biases are not a sign of a bad person,” says Zabeen Hirji, CHRO of the Toronto-based Royal Bank of Canada, which in 2013 co-hosted, with Ernst & Young, a forum on hidden bias for 300 corporate and community leaders. “Most people have them. Once we accepted that … it allowed us to talk about these issues in a nonjudgmental way. What’s bad is not trying to understand what your unconscious biases are.”

Skin color, gender and age are generally what people think of when they consider biases, but individuals can harbor unconscious prejudice about myriad characteristics, including:

• Height and weight.
• Introversion and extroversion.
• Marital and parental status.
• Disability status (for example, the use of a wheelchair or cane).
• Foreign accents.
• Where someone attended college.
• Hobbies or extracurricular activities.

All of these characteristics and many others can imperceptibly influence everything from who gets interviewed to who gets hired to who gets fired. They can affect the way people are mentored, how employees socialize with one another, who is given plum assignments and promotions, and much more.

Which is why a growing number of U.S. corporations offer training programs aimed at rooting out hidden biases.

“Most of our large clients are doing some kind of unconscious-bias training, compared to five years ago—and this is happening globally,” says Margaret Regan, president and CEO of The FutureWork Institute, a global diversity consultancy. “It is probably the one topic that is requested for global and U.S. training by all of our clients going into 2015.”

“Most of our large clients are doing some kind of unconscious-bias training, compared to five years ago—and this is happening globally.” —Margaret Regan, The FutureWork Institute

Sara Taylor, a diversity expert and founder of deepSEE Consulting, says unconscious-bias training is among the top three e-learning subjects requested by her clients. “More people are starting to see this as something that we’ve got to pay attention to,” she says.

None Are Immune

Lest you think you’re immune to having hidden biases, try taking one of the IATs at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit. Chances are you’ll be surprised by the results.

Test participants, who click on specific letters on the keyboard to sort words into one of two categories, respond more quickly when they perceive that certain words—such as “men” and “career”—are closely related. One version, the Race IAT, reveals that 75 percent of its takers, including some black individuals, have an implicit preference for white people over black people. 

Other versions show that Americans prefer thin people over fat people, heterosexuals over homosexuals, and young people over old people. Most Americans, like Allyn, tend to associate women with families and men with careers, according to some versions of the IAT.

Research by a leader in the field of hidden bias—Mahzarin R. Banaji—shows that the human brain is wired to make lightning-quick decisions that draw on one’s assumptions and experiences but that may also be based on misguided generalizations.

“People make judgments and decisions that are totally wrong,” says Anthony G. Greenwald, a University of Washington psychology professor who created the IAT in 1994. “This automatic operation of the mind can lead to behavior that produces disparate impacts—totally without any awareness or intention.”

Most recruiters, HR professionals and managers are taught to avoid behaving differently toward people based on obvious traits such as gender, race, age or disability. Harder to recognize is the disparate treatment that occurs based on subtler biases. For example, is the applicant a married man, and does that make him appear stable? Is she a single mother, and does that make her seem unreliable? Does he speak with a Southern twang, which may give the impression that he’s not terribly bright?

Hidden bias can have legal repercussions. International organizational consulting firm Human Facets asserts on its website that “unconscious bias is increasingly being used in employment litigation to prove discrimination.”

Indeed, it was a central issue in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in which 2 million women sued the retail giant for gender discrimination. Unconscious-bias arguments have also been used in class-action suits against Home Depot and FedEx, with the companies settling for $87.5 million and $53.5 million, respectively. And hidden bias has been raised in class actions against Fortune 500 companies such as Best Buy, Johnson & Johnson, Cargill, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, American Express, MetLife and Morgan Stanley.

Retraining Your Brain

Recognizing the pervasive effects that hidden bias can have on the workplace, companies large and small are hiring consultants—or turning to their HR departments—to do something about it.

At the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), Hirji embarked on hidden-bias training by having Banaji speak in May 2013 to the bank’s CEO, as well as to senior managers from RBC and Ernst & Young (EY). The response was so positive that RBC and EY then hosted their hidden-bias forum with 300 Canadian leaders from corporations, academia, government and diversity advocacy groups. Today, about 1,000 RBC employees have participated in training sessions on hidden bias, which involve a mix of speakers, discussions and test-taking. The bank also has an internal social media platform that allows employees to talk about unconscious bias.

The training has had a palpable effect. Hirji tells of one executive who confessed that, after receiving training, he caught himself reflexively deciding to pick one of his male stars for a plum overseas job. “He stopped and thought about who else might be on his list, and it ended up being a woman,” Hirji recalls.

Fiona Macfarlane, EY’s chief inclusiveness officer for Canada, admitted that, as a South African immigrant, she tended to give other new immigrants special access and privileges because she empathized with them.

Macfarlane has developed a pamphlet for managers encouraging them to take people who appear very different from themselves to lunch or to include team members who may seem like outsiders in social events. The pamphlet notes that diverse teams perform better than homogenous ones.

In 2011, global pharmaceutical company Pfizer held a three-hour workshop on hidden bias for company leaders. Today, before managers interview job applicants, they’re given a “tip sheet” that helps limit hidden bias from playing a role. Whenever possible, job interviews are conducted by a panel of diverse stakeholders.

Before PricewaterhouseCoopers managers write performance evaluations, Allyn sends them reminders to be on guard against “prototype bias” (the tendency to habitually think of the same people for choice assignments) and “affinity bias” (the inclination to identify with employees who have interests similar to the manager’s).

Some experts suggest conducting “blind” reviews of resumes—that is, assessing resumes that have been stripped of identifying information such as name and gender—when narrowing a list of applicants. In this approach, the company creates objective scoring systems: A master’s degree might earn more points than a bachelor’s degree, for example, and points may be earned based on number of years in a relevant position. This gives managers a method for ranking resumes without knowing whether an applicant is a man or a woman, Asian or white, 25 or 45.

For Smaller HR Shops

While the RBCs and Pfizers of the world have the money and staff to invest in training about hidden bias, that’s not always possible for smaller companies.

Lisa Whealon is director of human resources for the GL Group, a midsize, family-owned company in St. Louis with about 200 employees that distributes and sells books to schools.

“Larger companies tend to have protocols and processes in place to limit the possibility of bias,” Whealon says. “I feel it is companies our size and smaller that really have to watch out for these biases during the recruiting and hiring process.”