Conscious Inclusion
All people have a bias, that can be for many quite a very loaded statement to make and one which some disagree with. However due to the complexity of human nature, the brain and many other external aspects...it's true. For disabled people and the perception that many have about disabled people bias is quite rife when it comes to the employment life cycle. The statics are quite clear.
Disabled people remain significantly less likely to be in employment than non disabled people.
Over a third of people tend to think of disabled people as not as productive as everyone else
Unconscious bias against disabled people appeared to be higher than any other social group
Over 1 in 3 people show an unconscious bias against those with a disability, higher than levels of bias of gender or race
Every day all of us make countless decisions without even realising we are doing it. At any given moment, we can be assaulted with 11 million pieces of information and because our brains can only process about 40 items efficiently, we need to rely on shortcuts and past knowledge or experiences to make safe assumptions. This creates what we call ‘unconscious bias’.
People argue that this theology seems to indicate that people are automatically racist, or ableist, it doesn't. The issue arises when as individuals we don't challenge ourselves and our biases.
You may have heard of some of the types of bias that fall under unconscious bias, but the whole topic of bias is far more complicated that just fitting it into specific categories.
This diagram shows some....but if you think this is pretty much it...bias once looked at more closely can be linked into more than 72 different types. More recently reports and the media have suggested that ageism bias, disability bias and name bias is quite problematic in the work environment. If you want to know what at least 50 of them look like you can click here.
There are many things that we can do to challenge our bias...one of the first things is to change the language and understand the different steps to aim for unconscious inclusion. People tend to do a lot about raising awareness and organisations get to the point of dialogue but that is where it ends. We need to give people the tools to 'flip the question' and challenge our biases to ensure all get parity and equity of outcome.
You may be thinking...all that is theory based and what can be done in practical terms to even tackle some of this as unconscious means that a lot of the time we don't even know we are doing it. One tool which can be used is the SEEDS model.
