According to business psychologist Binna Kandola OBE: “There is a problem, and the problem is us. We are all biased, and we’re not prepared to talk about it.”

Kandola spoke about the unspeakable and took a packed room of HR professionals from the private and public sector through awareness-raising exercises at the Royal Commonwealth Club in London last week as part of a two-hour diversity masterclass on eliminating unconscious bias.

“We’re hearing from organisations that they’re making progress [towards workforce diversity] but they would like to be further along than they are,” Kandola said.

Skin colour is the first thing people tend to notice, Kandola said, and gender is the second. However, people often try -; unsuccessfully - to pretend they don’t notice skin colour in an effort to appear unbiased. “Colour is the first thing we notice,” he said. “It’s become the last thing we want to talk about.”

Experiments have been conducted that involve pairing up people of different ethnic and racial groups who are then asked to describe people depicted in a selection of photographs. Typically, a white person paired with a person of another colour is least likely to mention skin colour as a descriptor while other participants, such as white with white and non-white with non-white, tend to mention it. Then when an video footage is shown of the exercise, audiences usually vote for the person who avoids mention of skin colour as the least likeable participant.

“To try and pretend we don’t notice something takes effort. Suppressing knowledge is difficult,” Kandola said.

Bias comes from the need to establish one’s own identity, a process that involves categorising ourselves and others, as well as comparing our group with others.

Removing inherent bias requires, among other steps, setting fairness as a goal, seeing things from others’ point of view and leaders’ behaviour, Kandola said.

It also requires taking a solution-focused approach as opposed to a problem-focused one. He gave the example of exploring how to help a person with a disability to succeed in a role instead of concentrating on the disability would prevent someone from succeeding.