This is a piece I wrote for my personal blog a few years ago. It talks about the perils of unconscious bias, which is one of my favourite topics to cover in group training sessions. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it…

I had a conversation about unconscious bias with some friends of mine a few weeks ago and I honestly didn’t think it was something I was influenced by. That was until I encountered a situation at work that challenged this assumption.

I was looking at a complaint that had been conciliated by the Australian Human Rights Commission to draw upon during some training I’m going to be delivering. The complaint involved a woman being offered employment with the respondent supermarket. But after she had disclosed, she had depression during a pre-employment medical assessment, the offer was withdrawn by the supermarket Manager. This case has already started to demonstrate the dangers of unconscious bias. The Manager’s decision was based on their own assumptions about the woman’s ability to fulfil the requirements of the role. And just to debunk any myths here, the Australian Public Service Commission’s guide to Promoting Mental Health and Wellbeing at Work tells us that “Organisations employing people with mental health conditions report good attendance and punctuality, as well as motivation, quality of work, and job tenure on par with or greater than other employees.”

Something really interesting occurred while I was drafting the discussion questions for this case study. I found myself writing the word “he” when referring to the Supermarket Manager. “Hang on a minute,” I thought as I read over the wording of the case once more. Nope – not once was the sex of the Manager actually revealed. I had simply drawn my own conclusion that they must have been male. Statistics tell us that women are still largely under-represented in senior Management and leadership roles. Not because of inability, but because of inequality. And so it is that the status quo serves to unconsciously shape our own expectations about who is doing what in the workforce. But this unconscious bias then compounds the issue even further, so it’s a vicious cycle.

Leaving work that same day, I headed over to the Buddhist Centre that I’ve started attending. We got into a discussion about what it meant to have an unconditional acceptance of others, and I drew a lot of parallels between this discussion and the topic of unconscious bias that I had been considering earlier. Unconscious bias, as we saw with the case study I referred to, can be shaped by more than just societal norms and expectations. It is often the product of pre-conceived ideas that are based largely upon ignorance. And as we started to unpack this issue further, we concluded that it was something that we were all guilty of.

Regrettably, judgement is a standard part of the human psyche. At a party, for example, we will naturally gravitate towards the people who are most like us and unfortunately, that won’t always be the man in the wheelchair or the woman wearing the hijab. A couple of the girls at the Buddhist centre have even turned this into a game. I’m not sure how ethical it is, but it’s an interesting social science experiment all the same. When they encounter someone new in a social setting, they’ll have a conversation about what they expect that person to be like based on physical attributes alone. Then they make an effort to go and talk to that person and get to know them a little better. From this, they have learned to be mindful of unconscious bias, as their assumptions about others are rarely close to the truth.

In some ways, I think those of us who are blind actually have the upper hand here. I still remember the first time I realised this. I was at the pub with some friends – one of whom had brought along another friend who I had not met. We chatted about anything and everything for the better part of the afternoon, until he said something about a converted car that didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It was at that point that someone saw my confusion and told me that the guy I’d been talking to for the last five hours had no arms. And I found this fascinating – only because it made me question whether I’d have sat down and happily chatted to him about life, the universe and everything had I been able to observe this fact. I like to think I would have, but who knows? I can’t really remember how ignorant I was as a sighted person.

Anyway, back to the drawing board. How then, can we cultivate an unconditional acceptance of others when our thoughts are so readily influenced by factors that we’re largely unaware of? The first step is mindfulness. Through mindfulness, we are able to develop a greater awareness of our thoughts and actions and recognise when judgement is coming into play. This allows us to shift it from the unconscious to the conscious where it is less likely to cause damage. Let’s say you’re on a recruitment panel for example. Amongst the Candidates you’ve interviewed, there is a woman in her mid-20s and a man from a culturally and linguistically diverse background. In this situation, it would pay you to stop and reflect on the transparency of the recruitment process and consider how decisions about the Candidate’s suitability for the role had been made. Had they each been judged according to merit and merit alone? It’s shocking, but unfortunately not surprising that having a male name will get you further in the recruitment process; even if there is a female candidate whose application is identical in every other way. The same is also true for candidates with Anglo-Saxon-sounding names, and I know this because experiments have been undertaken on this very subject.

Since losing my sight, I have come to realise that for the most part, discrimination is just a fancy term for ignorance. And this extends beyond just the topic of disability. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we don’t know what we don’t know. Everyone should be given equality of opportunity, regardless of their personal attributes. But much of the time, as we’ve already seen, we don’t even realise the role that we play in restricting opportunities for a group of people who may not be identical to ourselves. We need to be more mindful of the decisions we make and recognise when assumptions or pre-conceived ideas are clouding our judgement. And if we work at this hard enough, I believe that real change can be achieved.