Community Post #1: Exposing Hidden Biases at Google to Improve Diversity

The article presents an interesting view on whether people are able to overcome our hidden preferences if we are more self-conscious about them an their influence on our worldviews. Recently Google's leaders have expressed their discontent with the company's poor gender diversity and underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics within its employees. The company has created diversity training workshops that aim to improve these numbers. I think Google's workshops will prove effective in helping the company improve its gender and racial diversity.

The workshops center around a concept of social psychology called unconscious bias, people's hidden, instinctive biases, which influence their perception of the environment around them and their decision making. In the past, unconscious bias has proven to be effective in contributing to Google's lack of gender and racial diversity within its work place.

So how can workshops help Google's employees to overcome their hidden biases? Well, first and foremost, employees must be made aware that they have hidden biases and that these biases influence their views and decisions. Because of this, the first lesson that the workshops teach is that everyone is a little racist or sexist. Though not everyone wants to admit this.

To test this theory, I took the Implicit Association Test which evaluated whether I had unconscious or automatic associations of "good" and "bad" with Black and White people. A different version of the test evaluated whether I had stereotypic associations of "career" and "family" with females and males. The results showed that I have a slight preference of Whites to Blacks and a moderate association of "career" with males and "family" with females in contrast to "career" with females and "family" with males. Before and after taking these test I agreed that I had personal biases.

In being more self-conscious that they have hidden biases, Google's employees are more likely to not only recognize situations in the work environment where unconscious bias is present, but also stop and consider both sides of a  decision before automatically siding with their instinctive bias.  I think this is so because the more concerned the mind is with a thought, in this case the potential harm of unconscious bias, the less likely it is to neglect that thought. In providing a series of workshops aimed to make employees more self-conscious of their hidden biases, Google is instilling into them the repeating thought that unconscious biases are influencing their worldviews, potentially in a way that harms the company. Therefore, the presence of unconscious bias and the need to overcome it become a concerning thought for the employees and the more likely they are to eliminate unconscious bias in the work environment. Though there is no statistical evidence that the workshops are effective in improving diversity within the culture of Google's workplace, anecdotes suggest that a less biased and more diverse culture is emerging within the tech giant's work force.