 Hello everyone. Welcome to the, welcome to our first diversity inclusion session for day one at Picon India. This session would be on the importance of the unconscious bias awareness for diversity and inclusion. We have Dr. Sandhya with us who would be speaking on this topic. Over to you Dr. Sandhya. Thank you so much. So I'm very happy to talk this evening about the importance of unconscious bias. Now, if you look at the corporate sector, as all of you were aware, in the last three to four years, most of the companies have picked up the theme of diversity and inclusion. And so one of the initiatives when an organization gets into the bandwagon of diversity and inclusion. So one of the major activities that they take up is bringing in awareness into unconscious bias into the organization. So now this is a very, very important topic because they cannot do this as a corporate. It cannot be done as a one-off program because if you do it as a one-off program and people are going to forget about it and we get back into the way we used to be doing things and we don't want it. So this is an ongoing initiative that organizations take up and they drive it across the organization across multiple teams and with different individuals on a very, very regular basis. Bringing in an awareness into unconscious bias. So I'm very happy that I've got to speak on the unconscious bias today. So as we speak on this, the most important thing when we learn about bias, especially unconscious bias, is that it's the way the brains are programmed. So it is also one of my favorite topics to speak about a little bit of neuroscience to help you understand how unconscious bias works. Because that's the first step to reducing this bias and when you reduce this unconscious bias is when you truly embrace diversity and inclusiveness as a choice and as a culture. So this is a very interesting part is to understand how our brains work. So you see, usually in my sessions I tell people, I ask this as a question but because of the nature of the stock, I'm going to say the answers myself. So you see, if you take your cell phone and if you look at how your cell phone has evolved in the last 20 years. You see, something like 16, 17 years back is when we, a common person started using the cell phone on a regular basis. And if you remember your first cell phone to the, you know, or the phone that was around that time to the phone that we have right now. The phone is very different, isn't it? It's a lot more smarter and faster and the technology is very, very advanced now. So you see something very similar has happened to medical technology also. So what has happened is, earlier there was a time we could only see cross sections of brain as a picture. From there we came to a stage where we could see advanced imaging technologies. To now, we have more understanding on neuroscience especially with the advancement in functional MRI. So when we speak about unconscious bias, we are speaking from this space. That is a space where neuroscience has advanced and has come a long way. So now there is one thing we know. It is that unconscious bias is a shortcut the brain uses. So to understand the significance of this shortcut, we need to look into how the brain has evolved. So I would like to speak a little bit on that. So this is what bias is. Bias is our prejudices, our inclinations towards certain choices that we have. So some things that the brain has considered as this is how it is before even it has a chance to look deep into that person or that group. The brain decides this is how it is. That is unconscious bias. Now, like I said, this is an evolutionary response. So if you see the most advanced brain in the whole world across different species is our brain, the human brain. Now, when you look at the human brain, you see the current human, the human homo sapiens as we know, we have appeared something like 80,000 years ago. But the brain had started its journey a lot before that. So this is the most advanced brain, the homo sapiens. Now, to understand that we need to look into how the brain actually evolved. So you see, if you look back into how the evolution happened, the life originated in the ocean. So this was the fish. And so then it came on to the land. So the amphibians, both capable of living in the ocean and on the land. So from there we have reptiles and then birds to mammals, right? So among mammals, human brain is the most advanced. So you see, as you can see here, the brain behind brain was a predominant structure and the mid brain was a predominant structure. You see the forebrain is what evolved and you see this is the forebrain in human. You see the size of it is incredibly large in humans. So we're very advanced. We have a language, we can speak, we can write. We have advanced very complex cognitive functions, very strategic thinking, our cognitive abilities, all of it. So it's all thanks to the neocortex, right? So the whole idea is the behind brain we speak about in all of these species. It's predominantly meant for our survival. The function is to make sure that we survive as a species. Now this is very interesting because this is more or less the consistent and it has truly, truly advanced what we have right now. And this is a very, very quick response brain. So it acts very, very fast. And similarly, the mid brain that we have and including in humans, it is somewhere goes here. So the mid brain, this is a feeling brain. So the survival brain, like I said, also takes action once it finds a threat against us. And we have the mid brain, which is our feeling brain. It makes you feel things. And then we have the core brain or the neocortex, which is the advanced structures are over there. So our speaking and cognitive abilities, strategy planning, all of it is actually sitting over there. So the whole idea is this. The mid brain and the hind brain is much faster than the fore brain. So what does it mean? So what it means is this. The neocortex actually takes decisions a little slower. The other two are much, much more faster. So when we talk about functions like intuitions and gut feelings, they actually come from your mid brain. Because there is a structure over there, which is known as amigtala, which helps you go into the past experiences. Probably memories that you had, the exposures you have gathered from other people's incidences and things like that. All that information is actually sitting there. And it takes out, you know, when you go through something, it quickly goes through that information and connects it. So it finds a pattern and it tells you this is what's going on now. Now, these two brain, your mid brain and your hind brain actually operates in a very subconscious way. So you don't have to really do anything about this. Your brain scans the enrollment for information. So as you know, the brain takes this information through the five senses. So through all the senses, it gathers information, then it processes it and it tells you this is what it is, this is what it is. So you see, so with regard to our survival, when the brain takes a very quick decision, and you don't even know which information it has actually processed and figured it out. So you have a feeling that something is wrong. This is not right because it's a feeling because it comes from your mid brain and from your hind brain. That brain doesn't speak. It is not verbal. And sometimes when you consciously look at different things and you engage your complex cognitive functions, it speaks to you. So I look at something and I say, okay, so I'm looking at a resume right now and all the qualifications are very good. So there is excellent skill set. There is very good domain expertise. So I'm consciously looking at all of this and speaking in my mind. So that's my neocortex. And as we know from this diaper, the mammalian brain, especially the human brain has the most advanced neocortex or the forebrain. And that's why we function at these levels that we have. But what happens is you see, so the brain functions at a very, very fast speed. So it cannot look into something, make an active detection and then take a decision when it comes to survival or a lot of decisions that it has to take quickly, like forming impressions for one. So this happens from the feeling brain. So it doesn't exactly tell you what to do, which is why this whole thing is known as unconscious bias. You're not conscious of it. You don't know why you think so. You don't know what's the basis for this, but you know this is how it is. Okay. Whereas if you are talking from the forebrain, then you exactly know which one has connected to what because your brain is capable of speaking to you. It's a verbal brain. Right. So this is why we call it unconscious bias. Now the good part of unconscious bias is that now that I have told you there is something like this. And next time you come across something that we're going to discuss, you will remember this. You'll remember this conversation and you will remember, okay, so this is an unconscious bias. My brain is being biased right now. So bringing awareness is what helps in organizations bringing diverse group and including all of those people and having inclusiveness as a culture. So which is why we've spent all of this time talking about how the brain evolved and how the brain functions. So like I was telling, when we look at the different biases, what happens is the way we function. The way our experiences have formed us, especially the cultural practices, what is happening in the society around us. And the way we are brought up and all of this has given a lot of information into the brain and the brain has gathered all that information. And like I said, when it has to do something now new, it looks at the older experiences and everything that we have. It gathers the pattern which is similar to what we are looking at now and it runs a simulation as to so what's going to happen here. So this is how the brain functions. So it looks at the previous experiences, exposures, the cultural learnings that you have had and all that memory is just stored in your brain, especially your feeling brain. So this happens in a very, very subconscious level and you're not very actively participating in it. Sometimes you are, especially when you have to take a very conscious decision. But there is a lot more processes which goes at a lightning speed in the more older sections of the brain. Now, when I say all of this, please remember that all these three parts of the brain functions together. It's not like three separate brains or anything like that. They function together as one unit. So the whole idea is that the brain has formed shortcuts based on the previous experiences that it has had. So it has a ton of bias. So I have listed it down in here and the most common one being gender bias. And I also understand that is of a lot more importance today to speak about. So you see, so based on you take a scientist who's a woman scientist. There are many tests, especially a test known as implicit association test by Harvard University. It's an online test to figure out how much biased people are. And it's called the IAT and it's very commonly used in training sessions for unconscious bias. So you see, we believe, all of us believe that we are not biased. We're very rational people. We take very sophisticated and thought through decisions. But the truth is, when you put yourself through one of these assessment tests, you will see that our brains are biased. Now, I must tell you that I have ran these tests multiple times. There are quick tests also. And so there is a word association test we usually do in organizations. It's very fun even online, we can do it. So I usually use it even in my other training sessions for emotional intelligence and all of that. So the idea is this, you could be a scientist, you could be an engineer. But then suddenly the word science, the word engineering is mentioned. You see people associated with a certain gender, a male gender, right? Now you could be a woman and even then the word association works like that because that's the way the brain has formed that shortcut. Now similarly, we have our own assumptions about age and all of this like beauty and height, you know, all of this will just return here. There's one thing I would like to speak about, for example, my favorite bias here is a confirmation bias. Now this is very easy to explain. Let's say you have decided to go by address, right? Have you noticed that you suddenly start seeing or noticing the dresses other people are wearing, the colors, the patterns, the new trend, the new style and a lot of these things. You see, you've been having the same routine every day. You've been not, I mean, of course, because of COVID we are all stuck in the place, but otherwise you have a similar routine on every day. You keep seeing and going through the same route or interacting with people and all of it. But the day you decide that I'm going to go do shopping because I need to get a nice, you know, jacket for myself. And then you will see that suddenly you start noticing a lot of fit, right? So this is how actually your brain actually works. It throws that information to you consciously. Now let's say that you decided that this style is the fastest moving now because I find a lot of it. Then you will start noticing more and more of it because your brain will try to confirm this idea that you have. So that is confirmation bias. You have an opinion already. Your brain will throw more of that information to you. So if you look at one person and if you feel one of their characteristics, Dom and Lee is very good. He comes to work early or she is late to leave, you know, which is a good thing. If you think that's a good thing or you find something which is not good about them, like they come to work late. You see, then we tend to associate a lot of other things similarly. So you're good at this. You are good at everything. Most of the things you're not good at this. It's likely that you have, you know, you're not good at a lot of other things. Okay. So I'm not going into all of these biases, but I just meant to say that so we have a lot of a lot of bias. Now, if you ask me, so what if we have bias now? What's wrong with it? Because our brain is trying to function faster. So what's wrong with it? See, the problem is, this has an impact. The biases we have have an impact when we have to take decisions about people, especially about people, which means when we talk about recruitment, hiring people, promoting someone, you know, looking at whom to mentor or appraisals that we have, these biases affect the decisions that we take. Now you could be a woman manager and recruiting. You could still be biased because that's all the gender bias work. So we believe that if there is a certain amount of physical effort required, men are better at that. We believe that if someone has to stay back and do the job and there's a lot of travel involved in it, then a man is in a position to do it better. So like this, so you could be a woman manager and doing hiring, or you could be a woman manager deciding whom to mentor. So it doesn't matter whether the decision is being taken by a man or a woman. You know, there would still be a lot of bias because that's a very unconscious bias actually works. So your brain works in shortcut. Now, I have an example here just to explain how this works. Now, see the first three words here, a born leader, aggressive, demanding. These are very, very commonly used in advertisements, especially job advertisements, right? Now, when you look at these three words, do you feel male or female if you do a word association for yourself? So just take a look at this and think of a gender, born leader, aggressive or demanding. You see something like 52 or 60% of the women also associate these words with male characteristics. Okay, like this. These are some of the words women, you know, if you write in a resume, it's assumed fair, nice and supportive. Women mostly tend to use these words and when the resume has these words fair, nice and supportive, it's assumed to be of gender female. And you see, a lot of us are very aware of it because the very famous book Harry Potter CDs, right? So it's a book that actually brought back a reading habit into a whole generation of people and we're very fond of that book. So JK Rowling, why is the name JK Rowling? Why did she choose not to write her first name there? Why did she choose JK Rowling? Because and she says that in the interviews that she has done, she says that the reason the first time my book got rejected so many times. And instead of writing her real name, which is Joanne, you've decided that she's a publisher also suggested that she writes a name of JK Rowling. So it is perceived as made and therefore it is perceived as very serious writing and a good book. So you see, so this is how human brain works. So we know that JK Rowling went on to make billionaire and made a lot of success with her books and movies, right? So this is how the unconscious bias works. So you take a book, you look at the other and then we subconsciously tend to decide, okay, this is the quality of the book. This is how it is. So now the big question is, what do we do about it? So we have unconscious bias. Now we know that we have unconscious bias. What can I do about it? So the most important step and the one which is predominantly being used by organization towards so is to bring awareness, right? So now that I have told you all of this, I mean, even though this is a very short conversation, you're going to remember these things and that helps when you have to take a decision tomorrow. So if the manager may not be made, you know, when they are in a position to make a hiring, make a promotion or in appraisals or mentoring decisions, you see, so they can actually correct the words. The way when we are writing job advertisements, we can choose the words correctly, neutral words probably, or make sure that there are equal amount of gender suggesting words in the advertisement we have used. We don't mislead that particular advertisement by using these kind of words that usually use in advertisements for jobs. Similarly, when people write about their resumes, they can also take care so that it's not perceived in a certain way and look down upon. So they pull the whole ideas to bring awareness into organizations, especially into people who are in a position to take decisions or managers, leaders and people like that. So what we do is most of the organizations, especially service organizations, if you look at they have these routine training and this training is not one of the training that you attend and you let go. It's one of the important steps. So everyone undergoes this training where they are told their biases like this and they are told how to correct that bias. They're told how to make sure that we don't overcome by this bias or we take care of this bias in that type of bias, how to take care of it. So this is the first step. So we conduct extensive training programs and organizations for different levels of people. Usually these are a single day training programs where half of the day we talk about we profile people and show them that they are actually biased because everyone including me believe that we are not biased. But the truth is this is the way the brain is wired. And if you tell yourself that there is something like this, it helps. So we profile people and then we spend a lot of time discussing these bias. We give them case to these and situations where they identify what type of biases happen there. And then we spend time on understanding how we can correct this bias. So this is a very important intervention when we speak about how to overcome unconscious bias. So training is the first step. And so if you're an important person, especially a very senior leadership person, they also take up a lot of coaching services, which is one on one and learn this more aggressively and vigorously. And so this is the first step to it, bringing awareness through training and coaching sessions. Now the second step, this actually is my favorite intervention in fact. So you can mitigate unconscious bias when you improve yourself awareness and you show assertiveness as a quality and show adaptability and impulse control. You see impulse control is very significant because when you see something you judge and you know this already and you confuse yourself because you think this is an intuition and therefore it is correct. It's not. If you give it time, you really look into that intuition and then you realize oh no, this was not an intuition per se. This was a bias because I was in a haste and I wanted to close it off. So that's where we exercise self-awareness and impulse control. So this is where, when we speak about unconscious bias, it is important to make sure that our managers and leaders have a good element of emotional quotient because when we work on increasing the emotional intelligence in people, that brings a lot more awareness into unconscious bias because the person improves in these four qualities. Being self aware, being a lot more assertive and learning to adapt to situations and being in person control. Now if we look at working on emotional intelligence for organization as you might be aware, many organizations do take up this also as a program and widely with people, with teams, we work on it. And there are organizations in India where we've been working with them for something like eight years plus. And these two becomes, whereas diversity and inclusion as a theme is relatively, I would say relatively newer compared to emotional intelligence as an intervention. So they work on these and effectively once you run these programs so many times with so many groups of people and team after team after team and department after department, you see we come to the theme of diversity and inclusion because when you overcome or at least mitigate your unconscious bias, that's when you can embrace diversity. That's when you can truly achieve diversity because people have more clarity in taking decisions and they have more quality or better quality decisions. Now once they have that, a work is very easy. We can do inclusiveness as a choice. Anybody can give you a diverse team. Your challenge as a manager is to make sure that there is inclusiveness. If you have a diverse group, especially people who come from heterogeneous backgrounds and all of this, you know, different genders, different generations these days, age groups and all of that. Regions and all of this, you see, it's a very heterogeneous group. And the one reality is that there's going to be a lot of conflict there because of the differences. And as a manager, as a leader, the major challenge is to go is to make sure that there is inclusiveness within that group. So he needs to or she needs to learn as a leader how to bring in inclusiveness. So the one thing the manager can actually do is to make sure that they are aware of their own unconscious bias. And when you become aware of your unconscious bias, you learn how to take better decisions and how to bring in true inclusiveness into the group. And you learn to look beyond these biases we have beyond that face that we actually see and look into the capabilities, the skill sets and domain expertise that people have. So these are some of the interventions or the most two most important interventions occurring to me. And in my experience, what I have seen is once we tell people, we bring in awareness. And then we tell people how they can influence these biases or how they can manage these biases and mitigate these problems. Then half of the problem is actually taken care of. And then all we have to do is give them continued support till they have learned this as a part of their routine. They have internalized that learning and we make sure that we have other systems and procedures in place within the corporate organization to make sure that this learning is carried on. It doesn't get dropped off and it gets carried on and we make sure that people who show good inclusiveness culture the groups which show good inclusiveness get rewarded for that or they are in various ways. I'm not talking about tangible rewards but that is being done into a case studies in many organizations and goes in the newsletters and we speak about it and we bring in more and more awareness. See the team has done it successfully. Why can't we all do it? So such good examples being modeled after. So all of this actually helps in reducing unconscious bias. And this is something we need to embrace both in individual level and also as an organization as a group. So as an individual you learn unconscious bias and you learn to overcome it. And as an organization the organization supports this individual in the journey to mitigate and remove this unconscious bias to any extent that we can and reward people who are capable of doing it. So this is the good thing about bringing in awareness into unconscious bias because it's easy to put a heterogeneous team together. You bring in diversity when you do that. But the real challenge is in enabling the manager or the leader on making that team into an inclusive team, making everybody feel home and have a lot of wellness in that workplace. So mentally, emotionally they are taken care of and they feel their productivity going better because they truly feel inclusive in that workplace and they give you more productivity and become a lot more effective in their work. If you have a team which has problems and conflicts because everyone is different and there is a lot of diversity. Diversity will be achieved but inclusiveness will not be and achieving inclusiveness is actually the more challenging part of it. So to embrace that the best thing to do is do a lot of programs on unconscious bias, show people how brains are biased. So they take tests and they understand it for themselves. And since usually I see that people get truly surprised when they see their bias scores. So we keep saying I'm not biased. Being a woman, I'm not biased about gender or being of a certain age. I'm not biased about generations, cross-generational people about cross-generational communication. But when we actually take the implicit association test, we will be very, very surprised on how an individual brain works. So the truth is the brain has formed this shortcut and to be aware of it. And then in the next step, learn what can actually be done to overcome this. So this is what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. And thank you so much. Here are my details. Over to you, Suganya. Thank you Dr. Surya for an insightful session. Folks, if you have any questions, you can post it in the chat. I have one for you. So in the society or in a world that we live in, like you told about many programs that are being consciously taken by service industries. Or as a matter of fact, any industry to educate the employees about the potential dangers of unconscious bias. But then, okay, now that's the industry sector. And those who are pursuing those training, they get to identify those implicit associations that you were talking about. But in case an organization is not pursuing that. And if someone has to convey their seniors, especially that you are being unconsciously biased in a more gentle manner. So how is it, how can it be done? I mean, given that we live in a orthodox society till date. Okay, so Suganya, I mostly work with IT organizations and be good partners of late, especially like I said in the last three or four years. Many organizations have picked up this diversity as a theme. And so we don't have to tell them about unconscious biases because once they sign up for diversity and inclusiveness as a theme. And most major IT organizations for that matter, we know, and services organizations also, they have accepted it. And they've taken this as a theme. And once they take it as a theme, they have to follow it up with initiatives that help achieve that theme, right? So in my experience, maybe some years back it would have been very difficult to explain to them that there is something like unconscious bias and therefore it is like this. But these days HR teams have done a lot of benchmarking and they have done a lot of analysis within their own setups in the organization. And they have identified these disparity which is occurring and therefore they have realized that there is a lot of bias which is somehow gripped into the system. And to correct that, they have, you know, and we have of course conferences like this and which brings in awareness into that fact. So they look for UVT, Unconscious Bias Training as one of the interventions. And usually the problem is it's only a manager or a leader or who get to come to these sessions and attend it because the, I won't say the budget is less but, you know, it's not, they've not yet started including everyone. But the truth is, if we want to change, make a change, cultural change, we need to have more people from all levels attending it. So today somebody is a manager or a leader, tomorrow we have a regular associate who's going to be a leader. So you don't have to wait till they actually become a leader or a manager. So the only thing is currently we mostly struggle with getting everyone to undergo this particular training. But once they are on to this diversity and inclusion as a team, then this is one of the major interventions they do. So yeah, so I think they have realized from the HR perspective, they have realized from the lack of diversity they have, the disparity that is existing, that they need to be looking into this seriously. Yeah. That's good to know. Thank you so much. We don't have any further questions on the chat. We do have a real time instant messaging platform. If anyone gets back on this topic, I surely will connect with you. Thank you Dr. Sandhya for this insightful sessions and thank you for your time and accepting our invitation to speak on the conference. Thank you. Thank you for the night and it was my pleasure to speak this evening. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. You can use the leave button on the top right corner of this. It was looking at it. Thank you.