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Your Unconscious Bias Trainings Keep Failing Because You’re Not Addressing Systemic Bias
I have watched unconscious bias training go incredibly well, but have noticed their impact diminish over time.
That is because these training opportunities only touch on the surface issues that create inequitable environments, but rarely tackle the systems of oppression and racist behavior that are endemic to the actual organization. For instance, we can learn about the impact of gender discrimination, but we don’t see the changes in the gender make-up of senior leaders of the organization in short-term or long-term measurements.
Watching the lack of change in an organization can change the motivation of people in the organization to continue working towards an equitable workplace but may not understand why.
Now we may have reasons that can be approached by organization leaders and training consultants.
Four Ways Systemic and Structural Issues Hamper Bias Training
Janice Gassam Asare, in Forbes Magazine, tackles the reason unconscious bias training may not work and how to address them in the future.
The focus of unconscious bias training is typically on helping individuals understand and recognize their own unconscious and intrinsic biases and suggesting behaviors to mitigate the preconceptions we are prone to. What unconscious bias trainings don’t account for are the systemic and structural issues (SSI) that allow biases to be perpetuated in the workplace. These are the unfair policies, the differences in opportunities and inequitable treatment that allow bias to persist.
What are some of these SSIs and how can organizations deconstruct these oppressive systems to make for a more inclusive and equitable workplace?
by Janice Gassam Asare, from Forbes.com, December 29, 2019
To summarize: we can take responsibility for changing our biased behaviors, but we can’t change the policies and environment that perpetuate and allows for these behaviors to occur in the first…
