Like a handful of other tech companies, including Slack, Airbnb and Pinterest, Asana is working with a diversity consultant startup called Paradigm, led by Joelle Emerson, to implement unconscious bias (a.k.a. anti-racism) training and ultimately develop a strategy to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace.
Implementing unconscious bias trainings at tech companies has become a thing over the last year or so.
In the last couple of years, Facebook has implemented unconscious bias trainings and, more recently, trainings around managing inclusion and being an ally.
In order to combat some of this, tech companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Asana, Square and Pinterest have brought on board heads of diversity and started implementing unconscious bias trainings.
Campbell says she also proposed a mentorship program pairing men and women together, increasing paternity leave to show Magic Leap valued child-rearing as both a male and female role, tying diversity to bonuses and implementing unconscious-bias training — all of which the suit says were ignored by senior executives at the startup.
Ultimately, the culture at existing startups needs to change, and big and small companies alike need to implement sensitivity and unconscious bias trainings for employees.
This is due to the fact that their procedural memory, the ability to learn and implement behavioral skills at an automatic, unconscious level, remains very much intact [ 52].
Regarding promotions and compensation — two key places where unconscious bias can often show up — Square has begun to implement three specific initiatives.
To explore perceptions and unconscious psychological processes underlying handwashing behaviours of intensive care nurses, to implement organisational innovations for improving hand hygiene in clinical practice.
However, this study did not implement subjective/objective awareness reports after each trial (Seth et al. 2008) and it is therefore difficult to confidently determine whether the activations indeed reflect unconscious language processing.
According to the post, the service has implemented new policies, including providing unconscious bias training to greater than 5,000 hosts, improving their customer service and using technology to fight bias.
