According to a recent article in Business Week, many large class action employment discrimination cases are relying on the notion of unconscious bias, a theory put forth primarily by a sociologist named William T. Bielby from the University of Pennsylvania. He has applied the findings of social psychologists that people use categories to reduce complexity to claim that white men can't help themselves from being biased against women and minorities. For a full text of the Business Week article, see www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_20/b3984081.htm.

It seems that courts are increasingly recognizing the unconscious bias claim as legitimate and ruling against employers. Consider, for example, Thomas v. Eastman Kodak Company, a 1999 case that agreed with the plaintiff that her termination was influenced by stereotypes and unconscious bias. Some critics argue that stereotypical thinking only comes into play among strangers; once people are acquainted with one another, decisions are made on specific traits rather than implicit assumptions. However, Michael Harris's review of the literature does not support that difference very well. His reading of the evidence concludes that unconscious biases can affect performance ratings even when people know each other.

Perhaps the most telling criticism of the application of unconscious bias research to the workplace is the statement made by Mark S. Dichter, an attorney at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP in Philadelphia: "At the heart of his [Bielby's] analysis is a stereotype statement that men are going to act in a certain way, without any analysis that men in [a] particular company are in fact acting that way." Time will tell whether white men can or can't be held responsible for what they supposedly can't help doing.