Meta

Managing Unconscious Bias

By Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer

Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world. To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for our business.

One of the most important things we can do to promote diversity in the workplace is to correct for the unconscious bias that all of us have. Studies show that job applicants with “black sounding names” are less likely to get callbacks than those with “white sounding names” – and applicants called Jennifer are likely to be offered a lower salary than applicants called John. And organizations which consider themselves highly meritocratic can actually show more bias.

Managing bias can help us build stronger, more diverse and inclusive companies — and drive better business results. At Facebook, we’ve worked with leading researchers to develop a training course that helps people recognize how bias can affect them, and gives them tools to interrupt and correct for bias when they see it in the workplace. The course consists of case studies, workshop sessions and presentations.

Many people have asked if we’d be willing to share our training outside of Facebook, so today we’re making the presentation part of the course available to anyone. Whether you want to customize the training for your organization, or simply understand your own biases, you can now watch it here: managingbias.fb.com.

Managing bias is an essential part of building diverse and high-performing organizations. We know we still have a long way to go, but by helping people recognize and correct for bias, we can take a step towards equality – at work, at home and in everyday life.