Retaining and Advancing Excellent Faculty Through Bias Literacy©
This new WISELI workshop series introduces faculty to the concepts of unconscious biases and assumptions by treating the application of such biases as a "bad habit." Faculty will uncover their own biases through use of an Implicit Association Test, will discover the underlying concepts and language used in the psychological and social psychological literature to describe such processes, and will be provided with proven strategies for reducing the application of these biases. Workshop invitations are being issued to departments beginning in Fall 2010.
The term "Bias Literacy" was first introduced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2008, when Daryl Chubin and Ruta Sevo convened a workshop to introduce these concepts to faculty and administrators within academia. With permission of Dr. Chubin, we have used the term "Bias Literacy" for our planned workshops because we feel that it perfectly captures the goals of the workshops—to change individual behavior with regards to unconscious biases about the leadership abilities of women and men by encouraging bias literacy in all of our UW–Madison faculty members.