WISELI
Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute

Breaking the Bias Habit®

Workshops to Promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

WISELI can typically present this workshop during the spring and summer semesters (January–August), but not during the fall semester (September–December). Please contact WISELI for more information about scheduling and hosting a workshop.

The Breaking the Bias Habit® workshops introduce academic audiences to the concepts of implicit or unconscious biases and assumptions about diverse groups of people by treating the application of such biases as a “habit,” with a focus on race, ethnicity, and gender. Participants will uncover their own biases, discover the underlying concepts and language used in the psychological and social psychological literature to describe such processes, participate in interactive discussions about the potential influence of implicit or unconscious bias in their department/unit, and learn evidence-based strategies for reducing the application of these biases. One workshop is aimed at general academic audiences, and the other is tailored specifically to academic medicine (BRIM).

Both workshops ares based upon our previous workshop that focused on gender bias and was the first randomized-controlled study of an intervention that aimed to reduce the impact of bias in academic settings. The content and some of the materials from the gender bias workshop are available in the supplementary materials to our 2012 paper, “Promoting Institutional Change Through Bias Literacy.”  See below for full reference.

Contact us for more information about the workshops, and costs for bringing the workshop to your institution.

For information about scheduling a Breaking the Bias® workshop with a UW–Madison department or unit, click here.

Institutions Visited

  • Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center/Wisconsin Energy Institute. May 5, 2021. (Virtual mini-workshop)
  • Washington State University. November 10, 2020. (Virtual workshop)
  • University of Indiana – Purdue University at Indianapolis (UIPUI). March 28, 2017.
  • Washington State University. October 3, 2016.
  • American Family Insurance. July 27, 2016.
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology. April 2, 2016.
  • Kansas State University. February 2, 2016.
  • Alliance of Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Societies. November 17, 2015. (Mini-workshop)
  • University of Virginia. March 9, 2009; October 22, 2009; October 15, 2015.
  • Howard Hughes Medical Institute. December 16, 2014.
  • University of Maine. November 20, 2014.
  • University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. October 31, 2014. (Mini-workshop)
  • Emory University/Laney Graduate School. January 27, 2014. (Mini-workshop)
  • Louisiana Tech University. October 10, 2013.
  • Johns Hopkins University. January 12, 2012. (Mini-workshop)
  • Reykjavik University. September 8, 2011. (Mini-workshop)

Relevant Publications

Media Coverage