Facebook, a Silicon Valley company struggling with employee diversity just like the rest, has just made public its own diversity training course.
Now, anyone can watch what Facebook employees watch when it comes to what Facebook calls unconscious 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,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
“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.”
The entire course is now available on Facebook’s new Managing Unconscious Bias page.
The course covers stereotypes, performance bias, performance attribution bias, competence/likability tradeof bias, maternal bias, and more.
According to Facebook, it would like other businesses to use its diversity training course as a “framework”:
“Our goal in publishing this portion of our managing bias training is to achieve broader recognition of the hidden biases we all hold, and to highlight ways to counteract bias in the workplace. We invite you to treat this as a framework for action. Please add to or amend this content based on challenges relevant to your organization,” says the company.
Last month, Facebook shared its second-ever diversity figures. As of today, Facebook’s employees are 55% white and 68% male. A year ago, when Facebook reported its first diversity data, those numbers were 57% and 69%, respectively. And in terms of Facebook’s senior leadership, things are pretty stagnant. A year ago the top-level was 77% male and 74% white. This year it’s 77% and 73%, respectively.
Facebook recently committed to a version of the NFL’s “Rooney Rule”, requiring the “underrepresented” be considered for all open positions:
