Discrimination and social inequalities continue to pervade the workplace. The UK's Gender Pay Gap website, Equal Pay Day and the global #MeToo movement are but a few examples that highlight the growing awareness of deeply-embedded structural inequalities against women at work.

These inequalities come about in part because of conscious and unconscious biases held against women - but it isn't just women who suffer. Bias is rife in the workplace towards other disadvantaged groups such as ethnic and racial minorities, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and the LGBTQ+ community.

Although recognition of these problems is growing, businesses struggle to find solutions to level the playing field. What can we do to help reduce inequality and discrimination at work?

The goal of the BIG IDEAs (Behavioural Insights: Gender, Inclusivity, Diversity, Equality, and Access) initiative is to use causal interventions to reduce bias in the workplace, to help create more equality at work.

This project leverages the latest insights from across economics, psychology and management to design interventions that are currently being tested in large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs) within several UK organisations. These interventions will lead to a better working knowledge of how we create more fairness in the workplace through observing the actual hiring, promotion, and retention outcomes of disadvantaged groups.

Gender bias is now a well-recognised phenomenon and many organisations try to tackle this problem through "unconscious bias" training. However, there is little evidence that this training works towards the advancement of women and, if anything, it can backfire, giving those completing it the false impression that they are "cured" of unconscious bias (Dobbin & Kalev 2016; Atewologun et al. 2018).

The problem in fact goes much deeper: bias is often deeply ingrained in our minds and affected, even amplified, by the institutions and social environment in which we live (Thaler & Sunstein 2008). A combination of conscious and unconscious bias have likely negatively affected the career developments of women (Bohnet 2016). But these biases extend also to other disadvantaged groups: workers from racial or ethnic minorities often face discrimination in the workplace, too; and so do individuals from a lower socioeconomic background (Bertrand & Mullainathan 2004). The BIG IDEAs initiative goes beyond the study of surveys which have looked at correlations of bias and work outcomes; instead, interventions to reduce bias against different disadvantaged groups are introduced and causally tested to create a more equal workplace on the ground.