Disrupting bias: why specific prejudices require a tailored intervention

In December 2020 the UK government declared that unconscious bias training was being scrapped for civil servants in England because, ministers said, it doesn’t work. At Rare Recruitment, we came to much the same conclusion about a decade ago.

Over the past couple of years, we have worked with  several top law firms to develop the Race Fairness Commitment, which lays out exactly how we believe firms can bring more fairness and equity to their workplaces.

It requires participating organisations to sign up to a series of commitments around ethnicity pay gap monitoring, retention and promotion analysis, anti-racist policies—and training.

But it was when we were conducting in-person traditional unconscious bias training sessions for our clients, including law firms, that we discovered the drawbacks of traditional training formats.

Drawbacks of conventional training

The problem with conventional unconscious bias training—including the sessions that we used to conduct ten years ago—is that it is too broad to provoke a truly thoughtful, individual response.

There is a misapprehension that you can do one 90-minute training session and be done with it. We’re talking about addressing years of social conditioning which will take sustained, proactive work from each person to unpick.