When Waleed Aly raised the spectre of unconscious bias in his Logies speech, it struck a chord. It's an issue my workplace has been exploring in a very practical way, and the results of our experiment have been illuminating, writes Michael Bradley.

On winning the Gold Logie (which, confusingly for his haters, means he's the most popular person on Australian television), Waleed Aly chose to do what people from minority backgrounds often do when handed an opportunity in the spotlight - he said something about prejudice.

Someone who is in this room - and I'm not going to use the name they use in the industry - said to me: "I really hope you win. My name is Mustafa. But I can't use that name because I won't get a job."

This isn't another "Waleed nailed it" piece. However, he raised an interesting point and one which, by coincidence, I've recently been exploring in a very practical way.

The issue is unconscious bias in employment. Each of us should know whether we're consciously racist or sexist, or otherwise prejudiced, and presumably those of us who do discriminate on that basis are happy with their choice (even if not usually prepared to openly acknowledge it).

However, unconscious bias - the unintentional application of discrimination based on a subconscious layer of prejudice - is as hard to identify in yourself as it is in other people. There are tons of research data supporting the conclusion that unconscious bias is a universal and profoundly influential phenomenon.

To take one random example: a Stanford University study in 2013 looked into why the percentage of women musicians in orchestras had increased from 5 per cent to 25 per cent over a period of time. It turned out that this was not because more women were applying, or playing instruments, or because those conducting the auditions had become less sexist. The reason was that, in the 1970s, orchestras started conducting auditions from behind privacy screens so that the applicants' gender wasn't known.

An Australian National University study in 2010 produced a stunning outcome. Four thousand fake job applications were sent to employers who had advertised low-level jobs. The applications were identical except for one thing: the applicants' name. A variety of obviously "ethnic" names were used. The result: to get an interview, a person with a Chinese name had to submit 68 per cent more applications, and a person with a Middle Eastern name 64 per cent more applications, than someone with an Anglo name.

Looking around you is also instructive. About half of Australia's population was born, or has a parent born, overseas. Put aside the ABC and SBS, watch some TV and note the sea of white faces.

Given that the educational and talent requirements for being a "face" on commercial television are, well, idiosyncratic, there are only two realistic explanations for the monochrome spectacle: conscious bias or unconscious bias. We've established that Australians are totally not racist, so I guess it must be the latter.

Anyway, armed with all this troubling research, in our business we started thinking about whether we were as afflicted by unconscious bias, when employing new staff, as everyone else seemed to be. We like to think of ourselves as an equal opportunity employer - we have always been more than 70 per cent female and boast an impressively diverse range of ethnic backgrounds. But we were wondering whether, nevertheless, we still exclude good people for bad reasons.

The experiment we've just run has been fascinating. We recruit a few law clerks each year - they're current law students and we give them a 6-8 week paid internship. It's extremely competitive.

This year we ran a "blind" application process. The applicants were required to post their applications to us with no identifying information other than a mobile number - no name, gender, address, no school or university names - none of the usual things by which we ordinarily identify ourselves in social terms. All we were left with was what they chose to tell us. We then selected 30 out of the 215 applicants for interview.

The result has been informative. What's no different from what we got in previous years when we had all the usual information is the gender and racial/ethnic mix. That indicates that we don't have an unconscious racial or gender bias. Good news.

In fact, we've identified only two material differences from our prior experience. One is that we've been interviewing some candidates who have not done very well at university; normally they'd be rejected out of hand. Some of them are people we're really glad we've met. It's caused us to think more about the degree of importance which we place on academic results, because not everyone has a smooth path through their studies, and they perhaps at least deserve the opportunity to tell their story.

The other difference is that the cohort of interviewees has a significantly higher than usual representation from the less established law schools. We know now therefore that, without realising it, we have been applying a bias in favour of some (not all) of the older, more "prestigious" law schools (more precisely, those we think are the best based on our own subjective experiences).

It reminds me of the TV show "Suits", in which a glamorised fictitious law firm hires exclusively graduates of Harvard. There's a solid argument for this kind of bias: the best law schools get the best students and therefore produce the best graduates. It has an element of truth.

The bigger picture however is that, if we automatically reject graduates of the "lesser" schools, then we participate in perpetuating a stratification which is not based on actual excellence (personally I think a particular law school in Sydney which takes in many of the most intelligent students also produces many of the least useful graduates) but on a collective perception of merit which over time can become completely unanchored from the reality on the ground.

The point for us is that the experiment proved we were susceptible to unconscious bias, albeit in a narrow context, and we need to do something about it.

Why does any of this matter?

Two reasons. It sucks if you're on the receiving end of discrimination, conscious or not. Arguing that life is a level playing field is easy when you're in the majority, or you haven't noticed the selection bias that actually exists everywhere.

Yes, that does include so-called reverse discrimination, which makes it harder for a white person to get a job in an Asian restaurant, or a man to reach the highest grades of netball umpiring. Discrimination is discrimination. Truthfully, it affects all of us. Its only potentially rational justification is affirmative action to redress historical discrimination which has become so entrenched that direct steps are needed to reverse the flow.

Secondly, we all lose. Our workplaces miss out on countless opportunities to build a stronger workforce because of our bias to exclude that with which we are less comfortable.

As Waleed Aly brought to our attention, our TV screens are missing most of the beautiful, colourful diversity of this amazing nation we share; monochrome is both literally and metaphorically a depiction of this loss.

Michael Bradley is the managing partner of Sydney law firm Marque Lawyers, and he writes a weekly column for The Drum. He tweets at @marquelawyers.