Case Scenario:
The University of Manchester had an apparent lack of diversity across the senior level positions. In an attempt to remedy this issue, the university analyzes equality data regularly which then guides strategic incentives. However, there seems to be little change over time and the senior management team is looking for more guidance on how to solve the problem. Unconscious bias is presented as a potential source of this problem, both from the recruitment process but also in promotions. The university used the IAT (Implicit Association Test) to determine how biases and attitudes generally towards ethnicity may be affecting hiring decisions. The results found implicit bias did exist which then influenced their explicit behaviors. Factors such as speaking with an accent and ethnic sounding names can result in biases informing hiring decisions. Often biases influence decision making and as noted in the article, these biases are unciascious with the decision-maker not intending harm or malicious effects - nonetheless, the impact persists. From this article, it seems that university leaders were not aware (or conscious) of the impacts of bias as they had implemented equality strategy years ago in attempts to remedy the unequal demographic variances. It's clear that overcoming discriminatory issues is not as easy as putting a team or a policy into place. There is much more work that needs to be done to understand where these biases are coming from and how to overcome them. Since a single field on an application, such as a name, can lead to implicit bias there needs to be awareness from the very beginning of the hiring process and through to the end to prevent unconscious bias from influencing the hiring decision.
Question 1: What are some measures the university could put into place to overcome the unconscious bias found in their studies?
Question 2: How might this differ for the new hiring process versus the promotion process?