The Obama administration has launched a comprehensive program to eliminate “unconscious bias” in the government, a trait that leaders believe makes it harder for them to achieve diversity in the federal workplace.
Acting Office of Personnel Management Director Beth Cobert described the mission in a speech this week as part of a “summit” meeting on collaboration and innovation.
Cobert told her audience that unconscious bias in the workplace is “one of the most challenging barriers to diversity and inclusion.” She said unconscious bias is the tendency of people to favor things or people most similar to themselves, which can affect decisions to hire people.
“Probably the most unconscious bias exhibited during the hiring process is the ‘like me’ bias,” Cobert said in her prepared speech. “The ‘like me’ bias means leaders and managers typically look to hire or promote people who look like themselves.”
“A white male will select a white male, for example,” she added.
Cobert said that to fight these tendencies, OPM has launched a program that has already trained thousands of federal managers.
“At OPM we’ve been working with agencies to help leaders across government understand just what unconscious bias is and how to guard against it,” she said. “More than 15,000 federal employees and managers have been through the New IQ course that promotes the use of inclusive behaviors.”
Cobert said the U.S. Department of Agriculture is already using a blind application process when hiring senior officials. She said in this process, USDA looks only at the qualifications of applications, but not their names, which removes gender and race bias.
“That means the names of applicants — a common indicator of race and gender — were not on the paperwork the selection panels reviewed,” she said. “There is evidence that screening job candidates anonymously yields more inclusive results.”
She said that as a result of this change, USDA has been hiring more women for the last several years.
“From 2009 to December of 2015, the percentage of women in the SES at USDA increased by 41 percent,” she said.
Cobert said the government is also taking steps to hire more people with disabilities, and to ensure that all federal workers — not just those favored by management — have a chance to hear about new job opportunities in the agencies where they work.
