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'Unconscious bias is crap': KPMG staff share shock at UK chair's comments

• jfengel 6y ago
  He is, unfortunately, right that unconscious bias training doesn't help. It's the cheap non-solution that doesn't require anybody to actually do anything. Actual solutions are a lot less comfortable: making sure that there are voices in the room who can call you out on your bullshit, like saying there's no such thing as unconscious bias. It's something minorities experience every day -- including in the form of being told by a white guy that the thing they experience every day doesn't exist because he doesn't have to see it. He surely doesn't think of himself as biased, but what other name can you give to declaring that every single one of them is wrong and he is right about a thing that's right in front of their eyes. Getting those voices in the room is hard. They don't want to be tokenized. They don't want to be accused of being "diversity hires". They don't want to do a bunch of unpaid labor serving on committees. And they also don't want to lose jobs to vague "I just thought the other guy was a better fit" excuses that you can't actually prove are racial in nature... but in aggregate can't be anything but. Hard, but not impossible. The approach is different for every industry, because they face different issues. "Training" is exactly the kind of useless one-size-fits-all that people do so that they don't have to think of one.