‘Goodwill is not enough’

There has also been an increase in the participation rates for minority ethnic
students over the last 10 years. -

If this is the real picture and there has been this general increase, surely the
question that needs to be raised is - what is actually taking place when the
graduates leave higher education to face the world of work? Are our
graduates unknowingly stepping into the unconscious bias that appears to be
operating across and within organisations? Workplace bias by gender, race
and ethnicity is a reality in organisations large and small, in executive suites
and in entry level production and service jobs, in both the private and public
sectors. Workplace bias can be defined as differences in career outcomes by
gender or race/ ethnicity that are not attributable to the differences in skills,
qualifications, interests, and preferences that individuals are able to bring to
the employment setting.

Racial bias can generally be defined through the concept of intergroup bias.
Hewstone, Rubin and Willis (2002), refer to intergroup bias as the systematic
tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group (the in-group) or its
members more favourably than a non-membership group (the out-group) or
its members. Dovidio et al. (2004) suggests that intergroup bias appears in
different forms, which range from attitudes and beliefs about other groups to
emotional reactions and behaviour towards members of a group or towards a
whole group as a whole. Understanding this particular concept of Intergroup
bias, which, has four key components: prejudice, stereotypes, affective
reactions, and discrimination moves us towards working through the variant
forms of racial bias that are found today.

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