Suppressing prejudices against personal characteristics such as race, belief, age, gender, sexual orientation and disability merely strengthens them, a chartered psychologist has told a London audience.

Speaking this week at the launch of the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (enei), Dr Pete Jones of psychology consultancy Shire Professional said that while only 10% of people admit to having what he called ‘explicit bias’, 10 times that many harbour some sort of unconscious bias.

Given the rather high rate of unconscious bias, enei chief executive Denise Keating told Recruiter that the newly launched organisation plans to tackle this widespread concern early on.

See the video below for Keating’s comments: