GO BEYOND BIAS TO ACHIEVE EQUALITY

WHAT DEI TRAININGS GET WRONG AND HOW TO EFFECT SYSTEMIC CHANGE

- DAMIEN MARTIN

Anti-bias training might mean well, but it doesn’t work. Even if training brings attention to it, bias is still unconscious in the moment, say gender bias experts Andie Kramer and Al Harris. Instead, to eliminate bias in decisionmaking, organizations need to revamp the systems that allow bias to creep in and change the context in which decisions are made. Their third book together, “Beyond Bias: The PATH to Ending Gender Inequality and Work,” examines why debiasing doesn’t achieve the goals it sets and what methods would work instead. They sat with BOSS to discuss their findings.

“No study has ever confirmed that teaching people to be more aware of their biases in any way improves their behavior in the sense of leading it to become less biased,” Harris said.

People are simply not aware of when bias is influencing a decision. We have a thought and we act on it, we don’t slow down deliberation enough to trace the origins of that thought. The solution, then, is changing the input.

THE STATUS QUO

Every publicly held corporation in the U.S. is required to give the Securities Exchange Commission the names and some identifying information of CEOs, CFOs, and the next three highest-compensated employees in their organization. Of these named executive officers, only 12% are women, which provides a snapshot into the state of gender inequality at the highest rungs of the corporate ladder.

“Corporations, law firms, the medical profession all made enormous progress during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,” Harris said. “Since the 1990s, however, there’s been little or no progress. We are sort of stuck.”