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According to some relatively new research, hidden or “implicit” discriminatory bias may be far more common than we thought. Even so, with proper training, people with implicit biases can learn to hold their biases in check and avoid violating employment discrimination laws.
This research shows that most of the bias (70%) is targeted against African-Americans. There is now a way to measure whether you are biased or not; it is called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and you can take this test online.
To take the test, visit this IAT website.
Experts recommend a number of practices to weed out bias in organizations and avoid discrimination.
Among the important ones, I think, is the “diversity dashboard” that looks at a range of diversity metrics. Companies should look at hiring and promotion rates, career path movement, and compensation among different employee groups to spot potential employment discrimination. All of these HR decisions can be examined statistically to determine whether there are meaningful patterns suggesting discrimination in employment.
Experts also suggest that hiring and evaluating decisions be done by panels; group interviews and multi-rater performance review systems can help reduce systematic discrimination, especially that caused by hidden biases.
Stay tuned for a lot more research and practice on this topic; it will be interesting to see how the courts view it if it is raised in employment discrimination lawsuits.
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Very interesting, Michael. For those who do not take time to try the test, I’ll give a brief description.
You are shown pictures and asked to use two keyboard keys to identify whether they belong to the minority for which you are being tested (e.g. “fat” or “thin”).
Then you are shown words and asked to identify them as positive or negative (e.g. “good” or “evil”).
Next you are shown pictures alternating with words and asked to do such classification — under time pressure (if you do not do it quickly enough, you are forced to repeat it).
One time through such a sequence you are asked to use the same key for the minority and a negative word (e.g. “fat” and “evil”); the next time it is switched (e.g. same key for “fat” and “good”).
Apparently the theory is that implicit bias is disclosed when you make more mistakes failing to properly classify a positive word after a minority (or perhaps a minority after a positive word).
Seems like a clever design. Probably has good science behind it.
But I would be quite surprised to see a court allow expert evidence of this research as proof that such unconscious bias exists, let alone allow such testing of witnesses.
Common sense tells us that such bias exists — Harvard scientists are not needed for this purpose.
And the job of the judge and jury is not to speculate about whether a decision maker harbors unconscious bias, but to examine evidence of the decision and surrounding circumstances for facts tending to establish that the decision maker acted on such unconscious bias.
Heck, the courts typically exclude from evidence most statements of conscious bias if they are not closely related to the decision.
Finally, some of my favorite quotes from the SHRM article:
“U.S. employers will face a shortage of skilled workers by 2010, and organizations that allow hidden biases to infiltrate personnel decisions won’t succeed at properly hiring, training, engaging and motivating certain types of workers, which will put them at a competitive disadvantage in the war for talent.”
“Unstructured interviews can be biased and a poor predictor of actual job performance because interviewers ‘have a tendency to make snap judgments based on superficial criteria, and then spend most of an interview confirming first impressions rather than getting to know the candidate in an open-minded way,’”
“Setting up a blind applicant review system also can help prevent biased selection decisions.”