What is unconscious bias and how it effects your management decisions?

How many decisions you take everyday? hundreds? thousands? think about how many decisions you take in every second daily. Do you take all those decisions consciously? not exactly. If you have a brain, you are automatically wired to be bias and if not you are not a human. So being bias unconsciously, is it a bad thing? the answer is it depends on the situation. As I explained earlier, we take a lot of decisions everyday, and it's impossible for us to take all those decisions consciously, it just not happens. For example, lets say you are crossing the road and you see a speeding car coming towards you; do you really do the math how speed it comes and how long will it take to run you over or do you just immediately jump away from it?

Now lets see how unconscious bias can affect your workplace decisions. When it comes to work life, most of the time we make gender biased decisions. Ever thought of this when you prepare a job description? Check the below statement

"Ideal candidate must admit patients by managing the admissions process; providing revenue information and commentary; identifying admissions trends; providing admissions function interface within the hospital and he should be able to control financial, reimbursement, and other supporting systems"

Did you spot the bias in the above statement? If not read again and try to catch it. The statement starts with "Ideal candidate" but at the end of it it says "He", did you spot it now? The company is biased towards male candidates for the position. This is not a good thing in an organization. Some may say this is discrimination, if it was done intentionally yes it is a discrimination but most of the time this happens unconsciously because of may be the nature of the job opening. Now you don't see many male secretaries too right? Sometimes even if you do the job description right, after you get the applications, you will shortlist those CVs with unconscious bias based on the school they went or even the location where they live. But as a manager, you must identify these unconscious biases and make sure you take the correct decision.

Reason study by Google says "Unconscious bias is why we don't have a diverse workplace." They have statistics about this through a research done with the employees working at the silicon valley companies. According to that research, only 11% from the total employees who work at silicon valley are woman. But is it really because of the unconscious bias?Unconscious biases are created and reinforced by our environments and experiences. SO what if, the reason why the woman involvement is poor because the companies can’t get diverse workers to stay? This is why I earlier said "you don't see many male secretaries" because everyone have experience with woman secretaries not male. Imagine the picture that comes to your mind when I say "a secretary".

More and more organizations are accepting this fact and raising awareness through "unconscious bias training." This typically involves teaching people about how bias works and giving them experiences that reveal some of their own biases, like Harvard’s online Implicit Association Test (IAT).

So go ahead and take the test, see how you score.

Watch the video here to understand what "Unconscious bias" in detail

And this too: You don’t know what you don’t know: How our unconscious minds undermine the workplace