Many educators hold fairness and egalitarianism as core values that they strive to uphold in their professional work and personal lives, and they hope that they evaluate and support students based strictly on student potential and achievement. However, everyone holds unconscious beliefs about social and identity groups. This implicit (unconscious) bias is far more prevalent than explicit bias, and unconscious biases often conflict with one's conscious beliefs and attitudes. In this paper, the authors explore via five illustrative factors how, despite unprejudiced conscious values, unconscious bias can cause engineering educators to contribute to an uneven playing field that influences who gets messages to enter chemical engineering, as well as who succeeds in chemical engineering and who does not. While the literature on implicit bias in chemical engineering is scant, they draw on literature related to STEM more broadly and we use chemical engineering examples where possible.