Cassie Sellars* says diversity and equality are important issues for today’s workforce, but they often come to grief on inbuilt and unconscious bias.
We have done a lot to try and bring attention to gender equality and diversity as a whole.
However, research suggests that we just can’t help ourselves when it comes to our unconscious bias.
Many years ago when I first started researching diversity, I read an interesting article about sexism in orchestras.
I found a story about blind auditions held in 1952 with the Boston Symphony. To summarise it went something like this:
In 1952, the Boston Symphony was looking to diversify its male-dominated orchestra, so it conducted an experiment with a series of blind auditions.
For the auditions, the musicians played behind a screen, to remove all chance of bias and allow for a merit-based selection only.
The purpose was to increase the number of women in the orchestra.
To their surprise, their initial audition results still skewed male.
Then they asked the musicians to take off their shoes.
Why? The sound of the women’s heels as they entered the audition unknowingly influenced the adjudicators.
Once the musicians removed their shoes, almost 50 per cent of the women made it past the first audition.
The moral of the story is that overcoming unconscious bias isn’t as easy as one might think.
In Australia, we now have the Workplace Gender Equality Agency that is a Government Agency promoting workplace gender equality and administers the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012.
This is amazing, and it’s something every workplace should be a part of.
However, what are we doing about age, weight, skin tone, sexuality, race and ethnicity?
These are all workplace diversity issues, and it’s essential that we recognise this and look at how we can create our own Blind Auditions that help us overcome this.
The first step is to build awareness around hiring bias by understanding unconscious predispositions.
Understand yourself better and take a simple survey which can be found on the Diversity Australia website.
Check your language in job descriptions and job advertisements.
When writing these we tend to skew our writing to a more masculine or feminine job advertisement based on what our unconscious bias thinks should be applying for the role.
Blind the resume before it’s reviewed.
Have someone remove the name, years of experience and countries from resumes.
Better still, build an application process where people have to enter specific skills and past experiences that remove all the bias for you.
Use validated assessments, like job knowledge tests.
These tests measure a candidate’s technical or theoretical expertise in a particular field.
You can also use integrity tests, cognitive ability tests, personality tests, emotional intelligence tests, skills assessment tests and physical ability tests.
Standardise your interview questions.
Make sure you have a list of questions that will qualify the candidate’s suitability to the role.
Give each question a weighting score so you can base the suitability of the candidate by their answers and not but your intuition or personality.
Check yourself for bias against likability — potentially ask someone else entirely opposite to you to sit in the interview with you.
That way they can balance out your emotional responses.
Implement a collaborative hiring process; create a panel of interviewers that come from a diverse background.
Vary where you advertise — using various job boards as specific job boards just attracts the one type of applicant.
These are quite simple and easy to implement and by having a more diverse workforce you should see the benefits to your organisation.
What do you do in your organisation to make sure you’re overcoming unconscious bias?
* Cassie Sellars is a Brisbane-based personal trainer who offers fresh perspectives on issues of concern. She can be contacted at linkedin.com.
This article first appeared on LinkedIn.
