Jacob Rees Mogg revamping Civil Service training

[achillestoes]

It’s a sad day when you see Jacob Rees Mogg doing anything and you’re happy about it, but here we are. He is calling time on Civil Service training budgets being used for ‘ridiculous’ diversity courses that open the CS up to ‘mockery’ and don’t represent value for money. He’s writing to all government departments to make it clear that staff development should be about providing workers with the training needed to do their jobs.

I don’t like JRM but if anyone thinks the general public aren’t behind him on this, they’re deluded. Most people don’t believe training in your role should amount to moral indoctrination about your privilege, or requiring you to describe yourself within the frameworks of ideologies you don’t accept.

Unconscious bias training did cover a lot of protected characteristics, it has however been ditched in our department.

www.gov.uk/government/news/written-ministerial-statement-on-unconscious-bias-training

Quite a number of us do our jobs properly, on an evidence-led basis and in line with our duties under the EA2010, not on the basis of Stonewall law

Unfortunately, it seems quite difficult to be confident about the type of training that people will receive and its content. I note a PP's comment about "a few disparaging remarks about Catholics."

So this is also my concern with a lot of the kinds of diversity training that people think may be helpful. Possibly because I'm in Canada and I think we've gone further with these kinds of initiatives.

I am a big supporter of workplaces being really thoughtful about things like qualifications for a position, for example does it really need a university degree? Lots of jobs ask but many really don't. Opening them up has benefits for all.

But I am less convinced that the promotion of diversity is really all that it's promoted as. A certain amount of diversity, which is actually often quite narrowly defined, can be a benefit, but in a lot of cases it's actually pretty irrelevant to the quality of services offered, and it's disingenuous and I think unwise to try and push greater diversity on that basis. In some cases it can actually make workforces more difficult places.

What should be highlighted to some extent is fairness.

We now see here in Canada such a focus on diversity that you see not only qualifications opened up to a broader set of backgrounds, but qualifications for certain groups, say people of African descent, opened up, while for others they are not. There is a huge push to either meet quotas directly or at least visibly have "diverse" groups - even in locations where that doesn't really reflect the local population. There are posts in universities that simply won't accept non-diverse candidates and professors (themselves diverse) who have been denied funding because they refuse to hire TAs on the basis of ethnicity. If you run a radio show on the CBC, you have to fill out a diversity profile for every guest, no matter what topic they are speaking about, and you have to justify it if the individual you have on is not diverse.

And all of this comes out of government policy deciding to push this particular idea at all levels in all sectors, and it started with these schemes and training that seemed at first more reasonable, but very quickly once people accepted that, weren't.

I'm bothered because of the misinformation, JRM is trying to cause trouble and wind people up, to deflect. It's really frustrating.

Maybe people should stop giving him the material then.

I'm that rare bird

Are you a creature who tweets?

Sex!

In the public sector? I highly doubt that, if an MTF wanted to be classed as a woman.

The thing with unconscious bias training is that it is not evidence based, at all.

As far as the research it is based on, there were three (or four?) people involved. One of those people is now very involved in promoting this type of training. The others say that the research does not work that way and it's an inappropriate use of the research.

In fact the results of the research are now under question. Not because they were dishonest, but in the way a lot of research comes under question, it's not repeatable, the conclusions drawn from the data are challenged, and so on.

And maybe most importantly, there is no evidence that this type of training has the outcome of decreasing bias, and some that it increases bias.

So I would really dispute this idea that it's worthwhile training. I think it happens because people want to be seen to be doing something.

Stop the world! I want to get off! 🤪

Thank you, you’ve written this much better than I could.

The department I work in has to change the appraisal system constantly due to this.

Unconscious bias course is only about an hour, if that, of e-learning. It just briefly summarises the equality act.

Apart from knowledge or work-based training for my role, I've had online safety training and health and safety in the workplace training. I've been to some lunchtime talks about women's health (like managing menopausal symptoms and work) and we have a women's network, but these are optional things i've done in my own free time. For context, I worked in the private sector for 20 years and had the same sort of thing, plus i joined a working parents network, had sessions on a healthy lifestyle, well-being etc.

That’s the time when these unconscious bias courses really are worthwhile - when you look at the recruitment figures and discover that 90% of people recruited are coming from the same small subsets.

I also work in civil service and have had no courses around this. In fact any training is around casework matters and it is very much all hands to the pump to catch up on covid back logs. There is support for those who need it but it is not something that mandatory in my experience.

I wonder why Old Etonian multimillionaire and extreme rightwinger Jacob Rees Mogg is against any form of diversity training ?

Well I'm not making that up for my organisation. Why would I? The public sector isn't one amorphous employer either.

If someone has a GRC the EA2010 states they are legally the sex they have transitioned to, so they are protected under both the sex and gender reassignment elements of the EA2010. So in that instance, yes they would be classed as a woman. However, the number of people in my organisation who that would apply to is so small. We're a large organisation and less than 0.1% of our staff have a GRC. This is why correctly labelled data collection and an evidence-based approach to equality is so important.

I agree that just throwing out 'unconscious bias training' is seen as some sort of equality panacea by many organisations, and done like that I don't think it's particularly effective.

However, I do think there is value in thinking about our unconscious biases at work. Not so much as an abstract concept, but in relation to how it can impact on decision-making scenarios in the workplaces.

For example, whilst there absolutely are studies that question the effectiveness of 'unconscious bias training', I also think it's a fairly true generalism that we feel more warmly to those who we perceive to be 'like us' in some way. It was called 'halo and horns effect' back when I did my CIPD training. It could be sex, ethnicity, age, educational background, accent, class, shared hobbies and interests, politics, whatever.

That can come into effect when we're making decisions about who we recruit and who we promote, who's a 'good fit' for the organisation and so on. I think being aware of your 'biases' in those situations and questioning yourself as to why you think x is the best candidate is always a worthwhile activity. But of course people have to want to engage with that concept and there are those who never will! In my experience though, there are a lot of individuals who do engage because they want to give everyone a fair chance and view it as part of developing their skills as a manager.

That's not quite halos and horns, those are typically used to describe rater biases where someone does something very good/bad on one assessment category that biases you on all the others. Not really about their in group/out group status. That would be homophily/similarity attraction.

I agree though, bias training is important if based around assessment biases in specific scenarios rather than "you're biased, sort it out across all your work" type approach.

So you think there's no racism in the civil service? How did the windrush scandal happen then?

I've had great diversity training that used examples of different cultural norms (like body language) to build up an understanding of how we all tend to use our own cultural norms as a baseline, to help us learn to recognise when we were doing that and making assumptions or judging other people's actions or words from a false premise and prompt us to try and step back and look more critically at what was actually happen.

It didn't use gay Japanese grandfathers, concentrating on examples from more common British demographics (women's tendency to apologise when they aren't sorry and really just wanted you to shut up and listen, different ethnic groups having different personal space norms and the ways that could be misinterpreted, the need for eye contact in deaf culture, etc).

I already tried to mindful of differences but some of the specific information was new to me and helpful and the general practice in trying to take a step back and see it through different eyes was usefull personally as well as in helping to make it a workplace norm.

I've also had pretty crap diversity training that was basically someone who was pissed off at being in a minority having a rant.

‘I also think it's a fairly true generalism that we feel more warmly to those who we perceive to be 'like us' in some way.’

Do we? I’m not sure I do.

‘So you think there's no racism in the civil service? How did the windrush scandal happen then?’

I’m fairly sure I didn’t say that. Do you think that scandal was the result of unconscious bias?

‘It didn't use gay Japanese grandfathers, concentrating on examples from more common British demographics (women's tendency to apologise when they aren't sorry and really just wanted you to shut up and listen, different ethnic groups having different personal space norms and the ways that could be misinterpreted, the need for eye contact in deaf culture, etc).’

I’m not saying this is never going to be helpful, but I think it’s just as likely to be unhelpful. I don’t apologise unless I’m sorry. It’s just not something I do. I’m not sure it’s something women do.

Bird lady is definitely one of the Tit variety, I’m absolutely certain of it 🙃

.If someone has a GRC the EA2010 states they are legally the sex they have transitioned to, so they are protected under both the sex and gender reassignment elements of the EA2010. So in that instance, yes they would be classed as a woman. However, the number of people in my organisation who that would apply to is so small. We're a large organisation and less than 0.1% of our staff have a GRC. This is why correctly labelled data collection and an evidence-based approach to equality is so important.

As less than 6000 GRCs have been issued in the whole of Britain your numbers are incredibly high. Even with small numbers, however, how do you ensure that the sex pay gap is not tainted by including people who are male in this data? Given that male people who identify as women are not subject to the same discrimination in the workplace as are women. Moreover, if this data is not sex disaggregated, surely you are discriminating against employees with the protected characteristic of sex.

‘I wonder why Old Etonian multimillionaire and extreme rightwinger Jacob Rees Mogg is against any form of diversity training ?’

Why do you believe he is?