9 Summary

This week you have developed your awareness of some of the barriers to encouraging and nurturing diversity in your workplace, including unconscious bias and privilege. You’ve considered what can go wrong with diversity training, including different causes of diversity fatigue, and you’ve looked at some potentially sector wide issues, such as occupational segregation.

You should now be able to:

• describe unconscious bias and the impact it can have on our approach to diversity
• reflect on other potential barriers to diversity in your workplace, including privilege and diversity fatigue
• understand the impact that your sector and location might have on diversity.

Next week, you’ll start to look at some of the tools available, both personal and professional, to help you overcome these barriers and advance the diversity and inclusion agenda within your organisation.

You are now halfway through the course. The Open University would really appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future improvement in our optional end-of-course survey [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , which you will also have an opportunity to complete at the end of Week 8. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.

You can now go to Week 5.