2 February 2016, 10.30 am
Yay! This is fun! We are doing a little workshop thingy to help design some webinars on unconscious bias. Unconscious bias is what happens when it is so obvious to you that everyone else is inferior that you don’t even notice you’re making that assumption, and anyway it is not an assumption it is a Fact of Life. There is no unconscious bias in the IP professions. But there are quite a lot of Facts of Life. The nice man who is designing the webinars is a psychologist, so it is the kind of meeting in which people are careful with their body language. We begin by telling the nice man about his likely audience. We explain about patent attorneys being scientists, and therefore that they will want to see evidence, and statistical analyses and confidence levels, and don’t forget to specify your units and the ambient temperature and pressure. The nice man smiles happily. He reminds us that he is also a scientist. It seems churlish to point out that patent attorneys do not generally regard psychology as a science. I explain some more about the personality profiles of patent attorneys, ie that they are pedantic and detail-orientated and negative and socially unskilled and – on second thoughts, I say, perhaps we shouldn’t bother after all. He says no it’ll be fine, but he is only a psychologist and I don’t think he really understands the enormity of the problem here. The enormity becomes more apparent when the nice man asks us about the recruitment processes that patent and trade mark attorneys normally use. We shift uneasily in our seats. Well, we say, some CVs come in, and we have a little look, and then we invite some people for interview, and then we have a little chat and see if we like them. And how do you short-list for interview? he asks. Well, obviously, we say, we look for the academically gifted, who you can spot because they have gone to Good Universities, and we look for people with a right and proper command of the English language and a nice way with idiom, and we look for those who are well travelled and enjoy a fine wine, and then if we still have too many we go for the ones who play the oboe because our senior partner plays the oboe. Or sometimes we weed out the ones who live in Kent, because we already have too many people from Kent and we know that Diversity is important. And obviously we throw away any CV with a mis-placed apostrophe, except if the misplacement can be attributed to recruitment agents’ or can be excused because the candidate has since obtained a PhD in the harmonic oscillations’ of jungle frog retinal cells. The nice man sighs. He appears not to care about his own body language, which is now conveying deep anguish. “How do you interview people?” he asks, in a way that suggests he does not really want to know. We tell him about the describe-a-bulldog-clip aptitude tests, which we are proud of because they are almost Objective; and about the grammar tests; and about the friendly, make-you-feel-at-ease chats that we are also proud of because they show our human side. He says: what do you ask about in your friendly chats? Oh, all sorts, we say, like When do you plan to have babies? And Do your parents live nearby to look after your babies? And Has your husband given you permission to relocate? And (for the men) Does your wife have a little job? Or if necessary, When do you plan to get a wife? For today’s discussions, we have managed to find ourselves not only some women, but also a real live Muslim. The real live Muslim is an IP litigator. Over lunch, we ask her what kinds of challenges she’s come across as a member of a minority group. (We mean being a Muslim, not being an IP litigator; obviously the main challenge in being an IP litigator is having to work with other IP litigators.) She looks long and hard at the lunch platter, on which the bacon sandwiches sit next to the cheese sandwiches, and says: sometimes I go hungry in meetings. This is a humbling moment for all of us. Oops. Towards the end of the workshop thingy, when we have all exchanged our worst anecdotes about the unconscious or indeed fully conscious and occasionally downright malicious biases we have come across during our careers, I realise that whatever people say about diversity not being a problem in our dear profession, actually, it is. And actually, on that basis, unconscious bias is a good place to start the training. Or perhaps we should call it reprogramming, which has a more scientific ring to it.
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