Diversity and Inclusion: Learning Journal Activity One:

Diversity and Inclusion: Learning Journal Activity One: Bias and Judgment The workplace is becoming increasingly diverse. Numerous laws have been enacted to curb discrimination and make the workplace more inclusive of minorities; however, prejudice and bias still remain a major problem in work settings. In fact, as O'Brien (2013) points out, most people do not even know that they are biased, and so, they do not do anything to correct the same.

I took the IAT test for race and gender to determine my degree of bias towards people of different genders and races. The scores and their corresponding interpretations were as follows: Race: Preference score 2 - I moderately prefer whites to blacks Warmth Score 6 -- harbor more warmth for whites than blacks Gender Preference score 1 -- I strongly prefer males to females Warmth Score 9 -- harbor more warmth for males than females I partly agree with these scores.

There was this time when I was chosen to lead a sales drive for a newly-launched product among university students, and I had to pick twenty students from each of the three universities within my assigned zone to be part of the sales campaign. From the very onset, I had this preference for male candidates, and wanted all the three teams to be led by males because I considered males to be more aggressive and work-driven and females.

Well, I had my way, and had the three groups led by males; but we encountered a lot of difficulty winning female customers, and since the organization had specific targets for both and female customers, we ended up losing the number one spot to a different group. Perhaps we would have reached the target and made better sales for the organization if I had not underrated the performance and ability of female candidates.

I keep thinking that females would have better understood the needs of female clients and raised concern with the organization before it was too late. Activity 2: The Impact of Affirmative Action in Institutions of Higher Learning Affirmative action in institutions of learning refers to all actions that have been taken to increase the representation of minorities in colleges and universities (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011). They range from quotas granting a specific number of admission spots to minorities, to selection policies granting minorities lower entry points.

Besides bringing about balanced representation, affirmative action is geared at compensating minorities for wrongs committed against their forefathers in the past. Based on my undergraduate experience, I have no doubt that affirmative action plans have made the university community more diverse, and students more appreciative of cultural differences. However, I think they raise some serious ethical questions.

First, they unfairly breed grounds for reverse discrimination because they work to deny qualified and deserving majority students a chance at success just because the university admission policy requires there to be a specific number of minority students in the total admissions made every year.

Secondly, they lower the accountability standards needed to drive minority students to work hard -- I mean, why work hard to attain a GPA of 4.0 if you can obtain a university admission with 3.2? Thirdly, affirmative action, in my view, is condescending to minority students, painting a false image that they cannot succeed on their own, and need some kind of assistance to be able to match up to their majority counterparts.

I think the concept of affirmative action was initiated with very good intentions; however, as long as these ethical concerns still exist, I remain a strong skeptic, particularly of the quota strategy. Activity 3: Commitment to a Work Group I am highly committed to the groups that I work with at my place of work, some of which have been operational for more than a year.

My commitment is driven by the fact that these are the people who have shaped me to be the professional that I am today; I have perfected my work skill because these people provide me with the social capital to do so. The rules they set and the professional advice they give have all contributed to my professional growth.

Further, their richness in diversity has made me not only more appreciative of people from different cultural, religious, and ethnic backgrounds, but also able to use these differences to achieve positive outcomes. I can better relate with people from diverse backgrounds today because these work groups gave me the opportunity to meet diversity. I reckon that this kind of understanding will be crucial in helping me succeed in the workplace in the future, be it in my current organization or elsewhere.

For this reason, I feel indebted to my work group, and I would love to see its members remain united so that the cohesion is not broken. However, I reckon that I will need to take precaution so as to ensure that my commitment does not lead to groupthink and impede on my ability to make effective judgment as this would cause stagnation in the department.

Activity 4: Correcting Bias and Prejudice As mentioned elsewhere, the workplace is becoming increasingly diverse, and in order to be successful, professionals will need to learn to embrace and work with members of all diversity categories. As a professional, I want to be able to build effective work relations with the rest of the staff, but in order to do so; I will first need to acknowledge my bias towards certain groups.

This is why I took the IAT test, which was able to show how my prejudgment of females has often impaired my judgment. For this, I have lined up a number of strategies to address this problem. First, I have developed an equal opportunity policy for recruiting members into my work team (Community Tool Box, 2014).

Once I have a gender-balanced team, I will make it a personal measure to talk to the group that I prejudged so as to obtain information on the attitudes or barriers they face at work, as well as the stereotypes or portrayals that interfere with their abilities to carry out their duties effectively.

I intend to undergo diversity training to improve my handling of female employees, and to extend the same kind of training to members of my team as a way of not only ensuring unity and cohesion, but also shielding them from making the same mistakes I did. Activity 5: The Issue of Sexual or Gender Orientation.