Erasing Institutional Bias: How to Create Systemic Change for Organizational Inclusion

All humans have bias, and as a result, so do the institutions we build. Internationally sought after diversity consultant Tiffany Jana offers concrete ways for anyone to work against institutional bias no matter what their position is in an organization.

While it is easy to identify intentionally built systems of oppression like Jim Crow or the paralysis caused by the glass ceiling for women in the workplace, confronting systems that perpetuate subtle, unconscious bias is much harder. Erasing Institutional Bias will help people tackle structural bias regardless of their positional power. Eliminating systemic bias can seem an insurmountable task from the vantage point of an ordinary individual, yet Jana and Mejias empower readers to recognize that each of us has the ability to affect systemic bias through a deliberate, coordinated effort. Institutional bias afflicts all industries --including business, education, health care, government, tech, the arts, nonprofits, and finance and banking. Among the types of institutional bias addressed are hiring bias, gender bias, racial bias, occupational bias, and customer bias. Jana and Mejias focus their attention on bias in the workplace and give readers practices and activities to create organizational trust to challenge these implicit biases. Erasing Institutional Bias will help people recognize that each of us has the power to affect systemic bias. Each of us can evaluate our own current role in perpetuating systemic bias and define our new role in breaking down systemic bias.

About the Authors

Tiffany Jana is the co-founder of TMI Consulting Incorporated, a diversity and inclusion management-consulting firm founded in 2003 and headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. TMI Consulting is a benefit corporation as well as a certified B Corporation and earned the 2016 Best for the World honor from the nonprofit B Lab that certifies B Corps worldwide. She is the co-author of Overcoming Bias, which received an endorsement from 2016 Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Kaine and an internationally known keynote speaker on the topic of diversity and racial equity in the workplace.

Ashley Diaz Mejias earned her MA in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and her MDiv at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond. Ashley has devoted her academic work to researching and writing on racial bias and has written for blogs and led curricula for institutional conversations on race, systemic bias, and mass incarceration.