Businesses know the value of diversity in the workplace, but this potential is hard to realise when some minority groups are grossly under-represented in successful endeavour. Why are some minority groups the majority when it comes to educational failure, unemployment, and crime, to name a few?

As with many of the thorny socio-economic issues faced by employers and employees, it turns out a lot of it has to do with collective underlying attitudes and expectations, and it starts very early in life.

Picture a child living in a low socio-economic area of South Auckland, down the road from gang headquarters. They are Pasifika, their parents are working two jobs each just to make ends meet, and while they have great hopes for their children to succeed in school, they struggle to navigate their way through the school system. Statistically speaking, fewer than one in ten of these kids will end up in university.

Ten years ago, Ant Backhouse from I Have a Dream committed himself to a year 4 class of 53 kids from a low-decile school in South Auckland. Most are Pasifika, and for most, English is not the mother tongue.  

Fast forward to today and Backhouse is making trips to Dunedin to visit some of these kids in their first year at Otago University.

Surprised? It smacks against expectations of what these kids can achieve.

The kids Backhouse and his team supported out-performed a control class (the year level above) at every level of NCEA. While only 11 per cent of the control kids achieved NCEA Level 3, 44 per cent of 'dreamers' did. In 2003, these kids were told that only three of them were expected to go on to university study. Thirty are now in tertiary study.

So what has contributed to this success? Backhouse believes it's all about expectations. Low expectations of kids from certain backgrounds are a major problem in our schools, particularly for Mâori, but for Pasifika as well.

Researchers Russell Bishop and Mere Berryman have extensively researched what matters for Mâori educational success. They posit that "deficit theorising by teachers is a major impediment to Mâori students' educational achievement for it results in teachers having low expectations of Mâori students".

Teacher expectations are predictors of success or failure, and research shows this may be even more important for stigmatised groups. And this exacerbates and perpetuates the achievement gap.

So where do these expectations come from? Some are based on automatic stereotypes we don't even realise we have, but are in fact possible to measure. Researchers use a tool - the Implicit Association Test (IAT), to delve deep into our psyches to understand what kind of latent prejudices we have.
  
In 2010, Dutch researchers, concerned about the educational disadvantage of immigrant children, used this test with teachers to look at their prejudices about ethnic minority groups. Using the IAT, they looked at the speed at which teachers categorised names into Turkish/Moroccan or Dutch categories.

The trick was that sometimes these categories had the word 'good' or 'bad' attached to them. The words 'bad' and 'good' had nothing to do with the categorisation but the idea is that difficulties associating certain categories together, like 'bad' and 'Dutch' would result in longer reaction times. Indeed, teachers

overall were quicker to make negative associations with Turkish/Moroccan names than Dutch names.

Indeed, these results have been duplicated in experiments in the Western working world, with an identical resume receiving more call backs if the name was white sounding rather than foreign.

And interestingly in the Dutch study, their explicitly stated attitudes to different ethnic groups bore no resemblance to their underlying attitudes measured by the more subtle reaction time test. This matters in teaching because arguably, the IAT better represents the split-second spontaneous interactions that teachers have with their students.

So why do these underlying prejudices matter? Because they directly influence expectations. In the Dutch study, teachers with implicitly negative attitudes towards Turkish and Moroccan names had much lower expectations of Turkish and Moroccan children.

And in turn, the achievement gaps between Dutch and Turkish/Moroccan children were greater in classrooms with teachers who held those underlying negative associations.

There are huge differences in what we say, what we think, what kinds of deep underlying attitudes we actually have, and the fact that we carry these with us into the workplace and classroom. Bringing our own prejudices to light is a starting point in dealing with why some groups in society fare worse than others. 

Source: On the prejudice of business