[MUSIC] Hi, my name is Kimberly Jones, and I'm excited to be here with you today to talk about a very important topic, overcoming bias. So a little bit about me, I am an instructor at the University of California Irvine, and also senior member of the human resources team, Widely Enterprise Talent Strategy Organization. And so this topic bias, in particular is really important to me. I want to give you guys a little bit of history just to set the context for it. So I took my first bias course in 2013, and it was a session that centered a lot around employment and hiring as I said. And of course that recognized a lot of the things that we have been sharing with hiring managers about bias in the hiring process. And so what came really natural to us as HR professionals, not necessarily so to employees in general. These first offerings were really alluded in this topic of unconscious bias, and attributing these actions and decisions to what it is, unconscious things that people would just do. What then became to happen, but what started happening was as the topic grew as more trained facilitators were out in organizations. You started hearing in the public, often in the news incidents with customers or the public in general. And then the release of the ceremonious corporate statement citing regret for some unfortunate incident, and the promise to offer unconscious bias train. As in training, there's a cure for everything. But not all of these situations were really rooted in something unconscious. The topic kind of present day now, seems to be synonymous with being labeled racist, because a lot of these really public or publicized events were around someone being treated in a less than professional or respectful way, more often than not someone who was in a minority group. And so now when people hear the term bias, they automatically believe, I'm being called a racist. So people now tend to somewhat avoid the topic all together, or they might be reluctant to listen or attend training or enrichment sessions. So I took on this topic because I want people to really know what bias is. All of the definitions of bias, how bias and manifest in our daily lives, how it impacts our work lives and how we can overcome it. In the material, the videos, the readings that you will encounter through this particular session, you will read a lot and learn a lot about biases. I am hopeful that these experiences will challenge you and do something that I'm going to call challenge assumptions. Assumptions that you may actually have, and also revealed to you things that you may have experienced or may have actually facilitated. I'm looking forward to your experiences with this material, and I'm hopeful about how they will help you learn and grow. Module one includes reading material, and some course content, that will flood you. And I mean this in the most extreme way, will flood you with definitions. There are so many things that you probably experienced through your life that you didn't even recognize, can be or should be attributed to a bias. But these definitions will really help you and more importantly, help you identify some of your own actions, things that might be rooted and bias. So I look forward to what you will experience, what you will learn, what you may potentially change. But I also look forward to how you may eventually share this information with others around you, so that we can create a more bias, neutral, or less of an environment where bias is a negative impact. So look forward to seeing you at the end of this course, and intermittently, as we make our way through this course.
