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Diversity and inclusion are being taken more seriously than ever before. Legislation has obviously helped - not only to punish those found guilty of discrimination, but to create a climate of much greater awareness. And it is inconceivable that 20 or even 10 years ago, we would have been discussing whether Sir Menzies Campbell has been unfairly treated and maligned on the basis of his age.
The changes can be seen in organisations, too. Many leading organisations now have diversity policies and strategies, and the more commonplace these become, the greater the pressure on those that do not have them.
There is an established approach that could be considered best practice, which involves examining processes, creating network groups, diversity weeks, etc. And yet, despite all of this, change is occurring very slowly. For example, the unemployment gap between ethnic minorities and the general population has been around 15% to 16% for the past three decades. Women's pay in relation to men's has hardly changed over the past 20 years. Despite representing close to half the workforce, women are still a minority when it comes to senior positions. And across the European Union, women constitute, on average, just 10% of the highest level executives in the top 50 publicly quoted companies.
So how can such sustained effort over a couple of decades yield so little? The answer may lie within ourselves.
As human beings, we are all biased. Work we have been conducting at the University of Sheffield's Institute of Work Psychology has been focusing on our unconscious biases. We have found that many of us like to think of ourselves as being fair when asked to complete paper-and-pencil questionnaires on race or sex prejudice. These explicit measures show very little prejudice. However, tests of unconscious bias show very different results. In other words, we may well not be aware of our own unconscious biases, which drive our behaviour, affect our decisions, and impact on our interactions with others.
Getting to grips with understanding unconscious bias has to be an import
