CHENNAI: The meaning of bias, anyone?” asked an enthusiastic Sunil Vishnu K, co-founder & director, Evam, to a packed audience consisting of delegates, media persons and corporate brass, at the beginning of ‘The Dirty Dozen: Theatre Workshop on Unconscious Bias’, the fourth session of the Diversity and Inclusion conference hosted by AVTAR Group in association with Working Mother, in the city recently. “Partiality”, said somebody from the audience, “Prejudice!” shouted another.
Before Sunil could say anything else, muffled voices interrupted him. We could hear some questions like “But, can they understand Hindi?” “Will it be like last time?” When the confusion subsided, we understood that the theatre actors were discussing the audience, rather judging the audience’s ability to understand a certain language. “This right here is bias,” laughed Sunil as the actors sang along and danced impromptu to the ‘Unconscious Bias’ song.
In the next 40 minutes, elements of drama, exaggeration and funny references were employed with appropriate detailing to explain the 12 kinds of bias that we unconsciously promote, using the mini-plot of Bias Babu, the protagonist. From being an unassuming victim of the Social Comparison bias at birth (What should we name him? Abhishek? No way. He will be famous because of his father and wife), to being an active perpetrator of the Framing bias (Where Babu tells a subordinate that a lack of promotion will actually prove beneficial in the future), Babu is all of us.
“Evam has been a significant part of corporate training programmes for six years now, as part of the Training Sideways initiative. We believe that presenting difficult topics such as bias in the form of interactive theatre will help more people understand the gist of the problem that has become normal in our daily lives,” explained Sunil.
Though the workshop began on a rather fun note, it ended with the message that awareness was the only way to counter bias. “We developed the content based on a disciplined research mechanism that took into consideration more than 300 companies, where the aim was understanding how to increase retention of women in the workforce and curb attrition,” he explained.
“Bias is omnipresent and both genders get affected by it. So we had a clear idea of what we wanted and conveyed that to Training Sideways,” said Saundarya Rajesh, founder-president, AVTAR Group.
Many in the audience could relate easily with the workshop. “They showed a sales conference - where everything is decided beforehand and there is not really any room for discussion or development - that was spot-on,” pointed out Srimathi, AVP, HSBC Bank.
Others, like Philip Joshua Assey, head-HR, Netmeds, argued that the portrayal of HR personnel as ‘jobless’ and ‘free’ in the show was very relatable. “It is true that most people look down upon HR. Also, the fact that women are still considered to be less productive after they conceive or return from a maternity leave is true even today.”