Women in Financial Services
Unconscious Bias – Briefing and Outline of Session for Client
Tina.Freed / 30 Nov 2017
E2W is the go-to place for women to manage their financial services careers and for financial institutions wishing to collect the gender dividend – the economic benefit of investing in women.
We have built, and manage a community of senior women in financial services and provide long term career support to them via different levels of engagement: collaboration, knowledge sharing, networking and coaching via our business teams, our platform and workshop events.
We work with clients who strongly support the business case for gender equality and who value diversity as an integral part of their strategy for competing in the current and future marketplace. Thanks to our experienced career coach, Rhian Bowler, we are able to provide training on a range of issues that impact gender recruitment and diversity.
Unconscious bias
Unconscious bias is when we classify and, perhaps, favour people according to characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity, weight and education. Everyone has unconscious biases. They are perceived negatively but they’re involuntary reactions: they are simply the brain’s way of coping with and organising all the information we receive daily. The brain has to make so many decisions that it simplifies some of them to make life a little easier for us.
Sometimes, our biases come to the fore unintentionally and this is what organisations want to try to combat. The impact can be discriminatory.
The more we expose ourselves to ideas, images and words that challenge negative stereotypes, the less discriminatory we will be. It is not only understanding our own biases and their impact in the workplace, but working with others to eradicate biases and supporting each other to ensure they don’t creep back in. Understanding human behaviour and applying it to real life decisions can help us understand and explain what is likely to go wrong, and how these biases can be minimised.
The client
Norman & Sons commissioned E2W to run a workshop as part of their monthly training and development programme to address unconscious bias with specific consideration given to:
- Unconscious bias within internal teams;
- Unconscious bias in internal and external language that can be perceived as a barrier (e.g stopping women applying);
- Unconscious bias when working with external clients, what to be aware of and how to address/deal with signs;
- How to recognise value in differences.
E2W’s addressed these considerations in an interactive session with scenarios that supported, challenged and addressed the objectives.
E2W went back to basics covering
- What is unconscious bias?
- Why we have unconscious bias;
- How we can identify it;
- How to avoid unconscious bias
Mercedes Gozalbo-Moragrega, Head of Practice at NORMAN & SONS, was encouraged by the “interactive session which discussed real scenarios that addressed the challenges and delighted that the team were open and honest in sharing their experiences. The actions that were agreed during the session will be implemented as part of our strategy going forward. E2W were able to tailor the workshop to our specific needs and provide a good understanding of how we can adapt our approach”
If you would like further information about the E2W Unconscious workshops, please contact Tina Freed, tina.freed@e2w.co.
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