How Facebook is promoting diversity in its offices

In a blog post last month, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg revealed the firm had "more work to do" with regards to creating a diverse and inclusive workforce.

In line with that announcement, the COO has now released the company's “managing unconscious bias” internal training programme to the public.

The programme aims to help employees recognise their unconscious prejudices so as to reduce the negative effects of such discrimination.

"Managing bias can help us build stronger, more diverse and inclusive companies — and drive better business results," Sandberg stated in a new post.

"At Facebook, we’ve worked with leading researchers to develop a training course that helps people recognise how bias can affect them, and gives them tools to interrupt and correct for bias when they see it in the workplace."

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The course is now being shared with the public via a new website, complete with videos and presentations on various topics.

The videos in particular cover four areas of unconscious bias, including stereotypes and performance bias, performance attribution bias, competence/likability tradeoff bias, and maternal bias.

"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," Sandberg explained.

"And organisations which consider themselves highly meritocratic can actually show more bias."

She added the company is aware it has a long way to go to becoming a truly diverse workplace, but it aims to take a "step towards equality" by helping "people recognize and correct for bias".

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