Sexism and Harassment Are Still With Us In recent years the focus on how unconscious bias hampers the advancement of women and diverse individuals at work has unnecessarily, caused attention to be diverted from a different problem which has never really gone away, namely the pernicious effects of deliberate everyday sexism and the blight which is closely …
Harvard Business Review has just published an article which highlights that those leaders who are not inclusive tend to overrate their inclusive capability and those who are inclusive tend to underrate themselves. Whilst this disconnect is not surprising, it poses huge risks to the realisation of an organisation’s D & I strategy because the very …
How do you convince judges – who pride themselves on their ability to make unbiased decisions – that they too have unconscious biases that may affect their behaviour in (and out) of the courtroom? Symmetra has been gratified by the success of its first unconscious bias workshop for judicial officers of the South Australia Magistrates …
At a recent Women of the Future event, foreign minister Julie Bishop described her experiences as a single female minister together with nineteen men in the cabinet of Tony Abbot. “It was pretty lonely. I would be sitting in a cabinet with 19 men and me.” Ms Bishop then related what seems to have been …
At this point in the twenty first century we are already immersed in and often unnervingly confronted at work and socially by the accelerating pace of change of the new digital age. We see it on our TVs which depict the arrival of driverless cars, in telephone answering systems which identify us by our voices …
History Revisited The hullabaloo swirling around the plebiscite on same sex marriage and the dire consequences envisaged by some if it becomes law, is reminiscent of the overwrought situation in Australia in 1984 when the Federal Sex Discrimination Act was being debated in Parliament. By 1984, three countries with which Australia identifies most closely, culturally and historically, …
Male Champions of Change Diversity and Inclusion Workshop, 2017 AFAC Conference While AFAC have long recognised the need for a diverse and inclusive sector as fundamental to maintaining the capability of the Fire and Emergency Services workforce, changes have been slow to occur over the past 20 years. As a result, AFAC has taken a …
Heather will be presenting “Debiasing decisions” at the Lex Mundi Asia/Pacific Regional Conference, Sydney, 6 October 2017, which will bring together approximately 110 senior lawyers from every continent for learning and networking opportunities. Debiasing Decisions We know we can’t remove unconscious bias, but we can change the environment in which our decisions are made. Explore how …
Nowadays, hardly anyone who is interested in the study of decision making doubts that human thought processes are impacted by a vast array of biases. And most accept that our decisions would be better if we could eliminate or at least reduce the negative influences of unconscious biases. Controversy arises, however, as to how to …
For some years now, the notion that increasing diversity in organisations results in greater innovation has been broadly and increasingly accepted. Quantitative data to support this proposition has certainly been available, though largely based on anecdotal case studies or loose correlations between increasing female board membership and better financial returns and even statistical computer modelling …