Who me, biased? Yes, you. Well not just you, all of us.
Most of you are probably thinking – I am the exception. I know I thought that when I first heard this. However, through my role as a diversity leader I have been challenged to think about equality and diversity differently, to seek out the latest research on what drives inequalities in our company, our industry and society.
Here is what some of the research tells us about the way we think and process information:
According to a 2014 Fast Company article“You're faced with around 11 million pieces of information at any given moment…..The brain can only process about 40 of those bits of information and so it creates shortcuts and uses past knowledge to make assumptions.”
These assumptions, or what we call our “unconscious bias”, are applied constantly in our daily lives to form positive and negative perceptions of a person, situation, statement, etc. These assumptions or biases are not all negative, in fact they help us process information more quickly. However, the fact that we are often not aware of their influence on us makes them even more powerful and challenging to address.
{Click here to register with Project Implicit of Harvard University and test for your hidden biases}
As a diversity leader, my primary goal is to break down inequalities in our workforce and culture. Symantec’s ability to attract, develop, promote, retain and fully engage a wide range of talented individuals enhances innovation in our products and services and improves our competitiveness. We therefore continue to develop leading diversity policies and programs to ensure we have a diverse workforce and inclusion culture, and have set a goal to increase the diversity of our workforce at all levels of the company by 15 percent by 2020 (using a FY14 baseline year).
Tackling Unconscious Bias
Tackling unconscious bias has become central to meeting this goal, but also to creating a truly inclusive culture. Culture is what makes our processes effective, it makes us able to reach and surpass our goals. As our VP of Corporate Responsibility Cecily Joseph stated in a recent Huffington Post article at Symantec we are now asking'how can we bring in more diverse employees?’ but also, 'how can we change our organization's culture so that it embraces diversity?'
For this reason, unconscious bias is now integrated into our global diversity and inclusion road map and will help us deliver across our three strategic focus areas: talent acquisition (increasing our access to a more diverse talent pool), leadership accountability (establishing executive level metrics on talent to drive change) and talent development (building and retaining a talented workforce).
We are looking at three key avenues to accomplish this:
- Education: What is the science telling us about our unconscious biases, and how can we further educate our employees on how to recognize and minimize them?
- Impact: What impact is this having on Symantec’s ability to recruit and retain the diverse workforce we need, the diversity of perspectives and knowledge to continually innovate?
- Action: What actions can we take at Symantec to minimize the role of unconscious biases? While we recognize that we cannot eliminate them fully, we are confident that by educating our employees on the topic and providing them with disruption strategies to address bias, we can minimize their presence and impacts.
Our first step is a training on unconscious bias that will begin with our executive leadership, followed by our people managers, our diversity champions and advocates, and finally to all employees.
What can you do?
I encourage everyone to learn more about the topic and challenge you to think about what your unconscious biases may be. As I mentioned before, we all have them, and they are not all bad. But it is important to acknowledge them and think about how they are affecting you, and others? What are the drivers behind them? And how can you address these to help your company, organization or community continue to foster an equal and inclusive culture.
{Wondering what your unconscious bias is? Click here to register with Project Implicit of Harvard University and test for your hidden biases}
Antoine Andrews is Symantec's Director, Global Diversity and Inclusion