Sara Sanford on Why Unconscious Bias Training doesn’t Work (and what does)

Sara Sanford’s TED talk “Designing gender bias out of the workplace” has been watched over 2 million times. Sara’s groundbreaking research at GEN (Gender Equity Now) has identified 212 cultural levers within an organisation that can foster or counter the impact of gender in the workplace. These can be as simple as the position of a gender tick box on a job application form, or introducing thinking time in meetings. Understanding and pulling these levers creates business results. By integrating the top five set of inclusive behaviours, tech companies, for example, have ended up creating 18% more patents per year. In this episode of Newton Talks, Sara speaks to Newton’s Camilla Wigmore about how companies can do more than make pledges to address gender equity, and use data to drive meaningful action to tackle gender bias, why over-representation is the real problem we should be talking about, and in turn create positive commercial impact.   Sara also explains to Camilla, and us, what ‘designing gender bias out of the workplace’ means in practice, why every company already has the tools to do it and why treating gender equity like any other business critical function is the only way to walk the equity walk.   Newton is an implementation-focussed consultancy with a difference, brimming with people who have a passion for cracking really tough challenges . Find out more about the way we work at newtoneurope.com, join the discussion with #NewtonTalks by following us on Linkedin.