Becoming Conscious of Unconscious Bias
How Discrimination Happens
Discrimination, often viewed as a conscious choice, is primarily driven by unconscious biases that can lead to unfair treatment based on group affiliations, as explained by psychologist Valerie Purdie Greenaway, who highlights its varying impact across different groups and situations.
How Bias Compounds
Psychologist Valerie Purdie Greenaway highlights in her video lesson that micro-inequities, though subtle, can accumulate to significantly harm individuals and groups in the workplace, leading to talent loss, universal vulnerability to discrimination, and increased stress impacting performance and health.
Reduce Subtle Biases Against At-Risk Groups
Psychologist Valerie Purdie Greenaway's video lesson offers strategies to combat subtle biases against LGBTQ+ individuals, older adults, and overweight individuals, emphasizing the importance of awareness in fostering an inclusive workplace.
Recognize and Address Bias Triggers
Unconscious biases, shaped by our backgrounds and experiences, can be managed by recognizing personal and situational triggers, practicing self-awareness, engaging in difficult conversations, articulating hiring decisions, and employing cluster hiring to promote diversity in the workplace.
Avoid Building Structural Discrimination into Your Company
In this video lesson, psychologist Valerie Purdue Greenaway discusses how structural discrimination is embedded in institutional practices and offers strategies to address it, emphasizing the importance of inclusive assessments and workplace cues that promote shared experiences among diverse groups.
Overt, person-to-person discrimination often gets the headlines. But professor Valerie Purdie Greenaway says subtler acts of unintentional bias can be just as damaging, if not more so — and we’re all capable of committing them. Fortunately, we’re also all capable of addressing them.
Learning Objectives
- Identify and reduce biases specific to your organizational context.
- Recognize how micro-inequities can have broad consequences.
- Guard against personal and situational bias triggers.
- Minimize bias in your organizational tools, cues, and workspaces.
- Understand how bias shifts in different contexts.