Unconscious Bias and Recruitment

The existence of unconscious bias is a good reason to exercise positive discrimination in recruitment.

That got your attention!

Gender and racial equality are enshrined in legislation in a number of areas, including recruitment, but as we know, this is not enough to ensure that unconscious bias – or automated bias as we prefer to call it, believing that this is a more accurate characterisation of the phenomenon – doesn’t play out in a number of contexts.

In recent times there has been a lot of coverage of the gender-pay gap, much less about issues relating to ethnicity, pay and progression, although those gaps are certainly there too. 

Studies have shown time and time again that you can put the same CV into a selection process, varying only the name to imply gender or ethnicity of the applicant, and the apparently white male will invariably be progressed in the process much more frequently than the female or the BAME individual (unless of course, there are firm role stereotypes in play, an example of which might be that women are best suited to nursing). 

Further on in the process, when candidates come into contact with selectors, there is the compounding problem of ‘you look like me and so I can identify with you’; that is, if your gender and ethnicity (and let’s not forget social class) match those of the candidate, this generally leads to more positive perceptions of the candidate by the selector. 

When the BBC conducted research into the gender-pay gap, the independent report found no evidence of intentional bias in recruitment, pay and progression decisions. Of course, very few people (except those who are consciously prejudiced) actively set out to discriminate between one group or another on the grounds of inherent characteristics not legitimately related to ability to perform the role in question. However, most of us have some internalised ‘norms’ in our thinking, specific habits of thought if you like, that suggest to us, for example, that females are not generally as funny as males and therefore it would be a huge risk to put a woman into the role of primetime chat-show host; or that men are not as naturally ‘nurturing’ as women and so might find it difficult to operate successfully as a reception class teacher. These are notions to which if we gave some thoughtful consideration we might easily dispel. But we often don’t give careful consideration to them; they come from shortcuts in our thinking - our mental processes - built up over years of processing and internalising information that we have received from varied and numerous sources. If our Janet and John ‘learn to read’ books (I know, that really dates me) show women as nurses, girls as remembering to bring the sandwiches and boys as being brave, then we begin to internalise the notion that females are nurturers  and boys are bold. If we see few black faces on TV as doctors or lawyers, we begin to associate BAME individuals as lower achieving. And so on. This may be somewhat of a caricature in the 21st Century, some of the more egregious stereotypes having been reduced through legislation and some becoming more subtle through modernisation, but the point still holds. Thus, arise automated biases.

So, what is to be done about it? There are of course no easy fixes in addressing automated biases in our thinking that have developed over years and are lodged in our mental processes. These issues have to tackled on a number of fronts. But when it comes to recruitment and selection, there are a number of possibilities:

One of these is positive discrimination – a good starting point. The argument against positive discrimination is usually that an organisation will choose the best person for the role regardless of gender or ethnicity. ‘This is a meritocracy. We choose the best person for the job; we don’t want to be seen to be unfairly biasing the process’. Ha! The irony….Of course our perception of what constitutes the best person for the role will be affected by, amongst other things  (a) what has habitually come before, (b) our automated biases and (c) our identification with those who look/sound/behave like us. 

We need to take action to ensure that under-represented groups are not overlooked in recruitment and selection processes. It will be much more difficult to undervalue certain characteristics and over-value others if we have sufficient diversity on our shortlists – we will be forced to look more carefully and apply selection criteria with more rigour and objectivity.

Cognitive overload: Another mitigating strategy is to remember is that our automated biases are more likely to take precedence when we are tired or stressed. Being very careful and objective in our thinking and decision-making is an effortful process, and so we are more likely to take shortcuts at the end of a tiring and/or stressful day and the implications of this are obvious. 

Check your privilege: Reflect on where you are ‘coming from’ and how that affects your evaluations and decisions. As we know, self-awareness is only half the battle, but it is a necessary precursor to understanding how your decisions may be affected or biased.

Promote diversity on your side of the table: it is always good practice to interview in pairs (or more) rather than one on one. Clearly if you have some diversity in your selection panel  this will help to narrow the possibility of automated biases impacting decisions.

Go on, take another look at your shortlist…..