When former KPMG boss Bill Michael resigned for telling his staff to stop “playing the victim card” and describing the concept of unconscious bias as “complete and utter crap”, he reignited an ongoing debate about workplace equality.
“There is no such thing as unconscious bias, I don’t buy it,” Michael said in his now infamous virtual meeting. “Because after every single unconscious bias training (UBT) that has ever been done, nothing’s ever improved.”
While studies have repeatedly shown the prevalence of bias and discrimination in the workplace, Michael may have unwittingly touched on a truth: that one-off training sessions might not be the best way to address this.
Data shared with the Guardian has revealed that – despite 81% of companies conducting unconscious bias training – there was diminishing confidence among leaders that it alone was enough to ensure a fair, consistent and effective process.
According to equality campaigners and behavioural scientists, UBT must be one of a number of steps taken by companies to address issues around diversity and representation.
The data, for which 250 business were polled by recruitment firm Arctic Shore, showed that three in four companies are reviewing diversity hiring practices and one in four ranked unconscious bias as number one challenge to solve in the recruitment process.
After a year in which the Black Lives Matter movement was catapulted to the front of the news and social agenda, Robert Newry, the Arctic Shores chief executive, said it was positive to see businesses saying removing unconscious bias was their top priority.
“The survey also highlights that there is a problem between company training and actual delivery of diversity objectives,” Newry said.
He explained that currently there was a trend to explore bias in a curated training environment rather than trying to establish cultural change within companies, which would in the long-term lead to better outcomes.
“We need to sharpen our focus on measuring what actually matters and challenge the old school ways of hiring,” he added.
The sentiment was echoed by Hannah Burd, a principal adviser at the government’s behavioural insights team (BIT).
Last year the team, nicknamed the “nudge unit”, conducted a research review after being commissioned by the Government Equalities Office to analyse the effectiveness of unconscious bias training.
The review, subsequently published by the Houses of Parliament, found that “there is currently no evidence that this training changes behaviour in the long term or improves workplace equality in terms of representation of women, ethnic minorities or other minority groups” and sometimes had unintended “negative consequences”.
In December last year the civil service scrapped unconscious bias training (UBT) and urged other public sector employers to do the same.
Burd told the Guardian: “Unconscious bias is a very common action organisations take to improve equality, but the evidence behind it just doesn’t stack up for it being effective.”
She added that there was a lack of research into the effects of unconscious bias training. “If we run our unconscious bias training in an organisation, do more women and minorities get promoted or get hired?”
The academic samples that BIT did use to reach their conclusions – including a paper published five years ago in the Harvard Business Review by sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev called Why Diversity Training Doesn’t Work – led them to claim that, while some types of unconscious bias training may have some limited positive effects, there is currently no evidence to suggest it changes behaviour.
A 2018 report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) called Unconscious Bias Training: an Assessment of the Evidence for Effectiveness, also found that the training could have mixed effects.
Alastair Pringle, executive director at the EHRC, said: “Our research found that UBT was not the best way to change an organisation’s culture, individuals’ behaviours, or make permanent improvements to the workplace. Employers have to think about their structures and processes too.”
He added: “For example in recruitment, an organisation can’t just focus on its hiring managers, it must look at the entire process, making sure that its applications focus on skills, it’s using blind applications and has diverse recruitment panels.”
Pringle added the training could have the opposite of the desired effect. “When people are made aware that they hold possibly firm biases, it could actually reinforce those biases rather than helping to reduce them.
“That is why it is essential that UBT is not used in isolation, but instead used alongside other initiatives and evaluated thoroughly to identify what really works to make workplaces more inclusive.”
But Binna Kandola, a business psychologist and the author of Racism At Work: The Danger of Indifference, questioned the timing of the criticism being levelled at UBT training.
“You have to ask why now? Because it’s about race. You look at the discussions around this – ‘it doesn’t work, we shouldn’t be doing it.’ The two things are not coincidental. If race had been kept out of it I firmly believe there would be no issues with the training,” he said.
“A two-hour training session alone won’t make a difference but it’s a start. If you are resistant to change then nothing will ever improve.”