Carrie Clark has written a new briefing for the Free Speech called "Unconscious Bias Training: Social Lubricant or Snake Oil?"
How would you react if your employer introduced mandatory astrology training at your workplace?
What would you make of an organization that spent thousands of pounds teaching its employees that their character is predetermined by the alignment of the stars and that, despite what they might consciously think or how they choose to behave, their actions are ultimately dictated by invisible cosmic forces?
Now imagine that your employer claims to be fighting the scourge of racism by introducing this training. Bizarre as it seems, employers across the UK are dangerously close to doing just this. Workers up and down the country suddenly find themselves forced to undergo mandatory unconscious bias training, ostensibly to make them less racist.
Carrie Clark doesn’t deny that racial discrimination is still a problem in the workplace, and nor does she deny that unconscious bias is one of the causes of discriminatory behaviour. However, the evidence suggests that it’s a minor cause and UBT does not reduce it and may make it worse.
To make a medical analogy, lavishing time and resources on UBT in order to address the problem of racism in the British workplace would be like spending the lion’s share of the NHS’s annual budget on homeopathic medicine.
You will enrich the salesmen of homeopathic cures, but you won’t do anything to make people better.