THE LONG GAME
Kiwi businesses are embracing diversity training to address unconscious bias, but change will not happen overnight.
It sounded innocuous enough. In March last year, the New Zealand police announced they were embarking on a major research project with the suspiciously bland name, “Understanding Policing Delivery”.
However, the anodyne title couldn’t disguise the hugely confronting issue the project sought to tackle: whether our police have systemic bias – either unconscious or implicit – against non-Pākehā New Zealanders, particularly Māori.
The project, in conjunction with the University of Waikato, is only just beginning but it seems highly likely our police officers are subject to implicit biases, simply because unconscious bias is widespread in New Zealand workplaces.
According to the most recent survey by Diversity Works NZ, the national body for workplace diversity and inclusion (formerly the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust), more than 57% of respondents indicated that conscious and unconscious bias influenced decisionmaking in their organisation. Bias was the second-most-significant workplace diversity issue for workers rs after wellbeing.
In fact, the prevalence ence of conscious and unconscious bias as is likely to be greater than that figure ure suggests. According to Diversity ity Works chief executive Maretha etha Smit, the research shows larger arger organisations tend to o be more sensitised to the issue, ue, while myriad smaller businesses nesses in New Zealand may y not be. “What we have is s just survey results coming ng from those who are already thinking about out diversity. There is a whole host of smaller organisations that don’t even touch the survey. So there is a lot out there to still be addressed.”
The news isn’t all bad.
Smit believes the issues ues of diversity and inclusion have now reached critical mass in New Zealand. “The awareness around this conversation over the past few years has increased tremendously and significantly.” What has also increased significantly is the size of the diversity training industry, and of workplace initiatives to combat the likes of unconscious bias. Yet the figures for bias in the Diversity Works survey went up between 2020 and 2021.
“I think unconscious bias training has had a bad rap because there is the expectation that doing the training means you’re fixing the bias. The training isn’t going to fix the biases. All that you do is to create an awareness of what bias is and how it manifests and how to interrupt it. Then it is over to the individual to do the work.”
Smit says some in the diversity training industry have overpromised, too. “You can’t change the mindset of a person through one training intervention. It is not possible. There is so much that sits psychologically within the biases that develop over somebody’s lifetime.” Diversity Works’ research also suggests too few organisatio organisations with diversity initiatives are evaluating their effectiveness. “I find often that unconsciousness bias training gets d done as a tick-box exercise because p people found themselves to be i in a little bit of a hot spot.”
For all that, Sm Smit says good training around unconscious bias can a and does work – helped by the country’s new op openness in talking ab about the problem. “This is a long game. We are talking ma massive, massive cu cultural and so societal change. T That’s not going t to happen o overnight.” on a weapon,” Nordell writes. “Yet Yanez, predicting violence, shot. Mind, body, history and institution: fused together to lethal effect.”
LONG-TERM DAMAGE
For many black Americans, particularly young men, being perceived as a threat by others is part of their everyday experience. However, even when everyday bias doesn’t bring with it the threat of being shot by a police officer, the everyday experience of unconscious bias – be it sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia – inevitably has ongoing impacts on lives.
The cumulative effect of unexamined bias over the course of a career or a lifetime is largely an unknown. In preparing The End of Bias, Nordell approached dozens of researchers who were studying prejudice and discovered that no longterm studies of the effects of unconscious bias had been done.
The reason for that is simple enough: the history of the study of prejudice — any kind of prejudice — is not old, and our psychological understanding of prejudice has been subject to change. Until the early 20th century, a lot of what is now thought of as prejudice, psychologists just thought was true. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the psychology community – which eventually defined implicit bias – started to recognise prejudice and the idea of human hierarchies as problems that needed solving.
“So if you think about that, maybe it’s not so surprising that it took us a while to understand implicit bias, because prejudice itself wasn’t really recognised until 100 years ago. Then, over the following 100 years, there were a lot of different ideas about what the causes of prejudice were, from pathological personality types to institutional problems. It wasn’t really until the 1980s and 90s that people started to connect the idea of unconscious, automatic, spontaneous mental processes with this notion of prejudice.”
The lack of research into long-term effects gave Nordell an idea for another experiment. With the help of a computer scientist, she created a computer-based trial to simulate the effects of unconscious sexism on a number of women in management and supervisory roles in a company she dubbed “NormCorp”.
The experiment was partly influenced by a 2011 US Supreme Court decision, which found against a class-action suit by 1.5 million female Walmart employees
who maintained the company denied them promotions. The company records, despite its equal-opportunity policies, showed there were huge disparities in pay and conditions between men and women across its operations. Even so, the Supreme Court found against the plaintiffs because the justices believed it was not possible for such disparities to occur without a co-ordinated master plan for prejudice. The real possibility that individual managers making decisions over a long time had created the problem, without some sort of nefarious corporate plot, was discounted.
The NormCorp computer simulation found that even mathematically tiny differences in the treatment of men and women had an enormous cumulative effect on the number of women in supervisory roles, with the biggest difference in senior management. Nordell was surprised such a small amount of bias resulted in such a male-heavy senior leadership in her fictional company. “But at the same time, the numbers that we ended up with are actually sort of similar to what we see in the real world,” she says. “So, in that way, it wasn’t a complete shock.”
NormCorp simulated just one implicit bias – one resulting in sexist hiring and promotion by individual managers – across one organisation over a limited period of time. In the real world, of course, individuals subjected to unconscious biases can face a lifetime of frequently subtle, and often plausibly deniable, “everyday” prejudice. The long-term effects can only be known to them.
REAL-WORLD SOLUTIONS
Nordell didn’t want to write just about a problem. She has spent the past 15 years doing just that through her journalism about unconscious bias, its impact and how, scientifically, it works. With The End of Bias, she is genuinely in search of the end of implicit bias through real-world solutions.
And her book is filled with examples, primarily though not exclusively American, of how implicit bias is being combated in companies, university departments, medical trauma centres, hospitals, classrooms, law practices and police forces.
Some of the solutions involve carefully designed training workshops (including one created by Patricia Devine from Wisconsin-Madison).
Some involve culture, policy and structural changes within organisations. Yet others can be as simple as creating a checklist to make sure that unconscious biases are avoided.
There is no silver bullet for putting an end to the phenomenon of unexamined bias, Nordell believes. But an understanding of history seems to be essential in transforming minds and cultures, something suggested by what is called the “Marley Hypothesis”.
This takes its lead from two lines – “If you know your history/Then you would know where you’re coming from” – in the Bob Marley song Buffalo Soldier.
“The Marley Hypothesis holds that as a person’s understanding of history increases, their ability to recognise present-day discrimination also increases. There is some early promising research that suggests that this is true,” Nordell says.
Importantly, too, there is a solid business case for minimising unconscious bias in the workplace. “When people feel they are being treated unfairly, it really negatively affects people’s commitment to their jobs. So even a cold-hearted analysis from a business owner would reveal that this is a really important thing to do if you want to keep employees actually engaged and committed to work.”
What is also quite clear from her research is that eliminating bias, even within transformed institutions and workplaces, requires individuals to mindfully, actively and continually recognise and confront their own implicit biases – something that Nordell has had to do herself. Throughout researching and writing The End of Bias, she had to face her own prejudices, just as she did in that university library.
So what bias did she discover in herself ? “Every one in the book,” she says, then laughs. “I had to confront how ideas of male supremacy had influenced my ideas of my own worthiness and my ideas about the worthiness of other women. I had to confront how the patriarchy had infected my thinking. I had to confront white supremacy and how the idea of white supremacy had infected my thinking, and my own unexamined notions of racial hierarchy. I had to confront ageism.
“I had to confront all of these biases; they all live inside me. So there was no way to separate myself from the material.”
So is reducing unconscious bias the responsibility of individuals, like her and me and you, or should it be done through topdown structural change in organisations, or perhaps through better anti-discrimination laws?
“I don’t think laws are the complete answer. We’ve seen that already. We have had civil-rights legislation, we’ve had equalopportunity laws. Laws only put a limit on how bad things can get.
“I think, certainly, it is our individual responsibility – and privilege, honestly – to change and transform. And it is also our role to create new and better structures, too.” ▮
The End of Bias: How we change our minds, by Jessica Nordell (Granta, $36.99).
As a person’s understanding of history increases, so, too, does their ability to recognise presentday discrimination.