Unconscious Bias Training
Unconscious bias is a term used to describe the associations that we hold which, despite being outside our conscious awareness, can have a significant influence on our attitudes and behaviour. Regardless of how fair-minded we believe ourselves to be, most people have some degree of unconscious bias.
This 3-minute video by the Royal Society explains it well.
For universities, the risk of our biases impacting on our key decision making processes, such as decisions affecting recruitment, assessment or provision of feedback to staff and students, can have an impact on the ability of those staff and students to achieve their full potential.
On this basis, provision of training in relation to unconscious bias has been a priority for Trinity in our gender equality action plans. This training has been provided to a number of senior decision-making groups (academic promotion committee Chairs, the Provost’s Executive Officers Group and others), with the training supplied by external training providers.
As part of our objective of extending availability of unconscious bias training more broadly across the university, our Director of Diversity and Inclusion, Tony McMahon has trained as an unconscious training provider, and is now actively working with various groups across the university delivering face-to-face unconscious bias training.
If this is something that’s on your agenda, or something that you would like to consider for your area, feel free to contact Tony at t.mcmahon@tcd.ie to arrange a discussion.