What Works: Gender Equality by Design

Imagine the following situation: You are a young professional musician. And you are really good. Music is what makes your blood flow. Ever since you were a little girl, piano and violin lessons excited you rather than bored you. Today is a very important day for you: You're auditioning for a position in the National Symphony Orchestra. How would you feel if you knew that the minute you walked on stage, before even playing your instrument, your chances of being hired would decrease significantly?

Before research showed that having musicians audition behind a curtain, so the jury would not be able to tell their gender, increased the chance that a woman would be hired or promoted, and that these "blind" auditions alone could account for a third of the increase in the proportion of women musicians hired into top-tier American symphonies, female musicians would face just that scenario. The implicit biases of possibly well-meaning members of the jury would too often reduce women's chances to succeed in the audition.

Although we would all like to think we do not suffer from the same biases as the members of those juries, the opposite is likely true. During the first HKS Women and Public Policy Program seminar of the academic year, Professor Iris Bohnet explained that we are all biased in one way or another, "because seeing is believing". We observe patterns in the world, such as most kindergarten teachers being female, or most software engineers being male, so we come to expect people to fill those roles. Don't believe it? Take the test yourself.

Professor Bohnet is the Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) and Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. During the seminar, she presented a preview of her forthcoming book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design”, in which she argues that we can use insights we learn from Behavioral Economics to close gender gaps caused by implicit biases.

Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program

These insights allow us to create “nudges", which are small actions designed to obtain the most desirable reactions from people, building on knowledge of how the -often irrational- human mind actually works. In the book, she talks about "nudges we can use to make the world a better place", because they can reframe the environments in which we work. Best of all, they are mostly cheap and can be introduced quickly.

Professor Bohnet described previous approaches to increasing diversity in the workforce, such as diversity, leadership, and negotiation training, and underscored that there is not enough evidence to prove that these interventions work. On the other hand, interventions like long-term capacity-building or mentoring have been found to be very promising. In a study that followed the career trajectories of women economics professors who were randomly assigned into a long term mentorship program, the professors in the program fared better than those in the control group.

She mentioned many other nudges to redesign the work environment, like putting up more images of female leaders -"what you see matters in what you think is possible for yourself"-, avoiding panel interviews, assessing job candidates on a pre-determined set of questions immediately after the interview, highlighting the increased presence of gender mixed corporate boards rather than their low proportion, and many more. Professor Bohnet is handing in the manuscript for the book next week, so look forward to reading more when it comes out!

Should women be encouraged to compete?

An article on “The Confidence Gap” between men and women has been making the rounds this week. In it, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman argue that women too often doubt their own abilities as compared to men, leading to an imbalance in women’s representation in most fields. This may have to do with socialization, evolutionary biology, the structure of our social systems, or some combination.

In his seminar on whether “boys and girls respond differently to academic competition,” Prof. Robert Jensen of the University of Pennsylvania explored how this carries over into the realm of competitiveness. He and his co-authors used a real-life experiment in which a math and verbal prep technology suddenly introduced a peer competition in the form of a “leader board.” Prior to the leader board, students would simply answer a series of questions and be told, individually, how well they’d done. After the “leader board”, students were given points for correct answers and the names of the top-three point-earners were displayed for all the participants to see.

Before the points system, girls tended to perform better in both English and math. But after the introduction of the competitive system, girls performed worse than they previously had, and also worse than boys, particularly in math.

Whether it had to do with social stigma of being publicly seen as a “nerd” or just the aversion to and stress associated with competition is unclear. But Professor Jensen concludes that a competitive system simply wasn’t conducive to better learning outcomes for women in this education technology.

So should we reduce competition in how we raise and educate girls? As one seminar participant remarked, “we live in a society of competition in every sphere; to discourage that is to encourage girls to opt-out of success. Instead, perhaps we should raise our daughters and sons the same way so that they can both learn to compete effectively.” Indeed, as Elizabeth Plank writes, instead of telling women to change their personalities, maybe it's time we take a look at the entire system and adjust all of the structures that hold them back.

To this, WAPPP Executive Director Victoria Budson responds that, “Whenever the frame and context for any competition is set in today’s world, it will necessarily be biased---by gendered components, racial components. So we need to understand  what choices are made and how those choices impact outcomes. It’s not that one shouldn’t compete…but to create a new competitive frame.

“When you understand what the mechanisms are and what they produce, you can then guide how institutions create structures. Because whenever we set up structures, we’re really creating pathways toward outcomes that we can predict when we study them effectively. So rather than telling us how we should feel about this, all of these studies are just data that can help us create a world where the majority of our talent is effectively utilized.”

WAPPP Director Iris Bohnet adds that we should do both: “we should enable people to be competitive in the world that we live in, but we also have to change the world to make it easier for everyone, based on whatever preferences they have, to survive and compete in that world.”

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Gender and Groupthink: Why Don't Smart People Share Their Ideas?

As the cliche goes, we are social animals. We eat in groups; we learn in groups; some of us hunt in groups. And very often, we make lots of big decisions in groups---from corporate boards to faculty committees and elected bodies.

But in those groups, do the best ideas always get adopted? Do they even get contributed to the mix?

What's particularly tough is when good ideas from half of the people in all groups are immediately ruled out. As research by Katherine Phillips and Melissa Thomas-Hunt explored back in 2004, groups across cultures have difficulty recognizing, let alone encouraging female expertise. This is often due to their group dynamics---whether the effects of social networks, group think, or even plain sexism.

But in last week’s WAPPP seminar on “Gender and Group Decisions: Eliciting and Acting Upon Expertise,” Katie Baldiga Coffman, Assistant Professor at Ohio State University, showed how, even in the absence of explicit group dynamics, women are less likely to put their own--often better--ideas forward.

In a controlled experiment at Ohio State, women and men offered their answers in a trivia game--first as individuals, later in blind groups, and finally in groups in which they saw their partners’ faces.

The results? Men contributed their answers more often than women, across categories; women under-contributed even in the subjects in which they were more comfortable about their expertise; and interestingly, even being provided feedback about their strengths did not improve efficiencies in information sharing.

So, even without competition, and with encouragement, talented women were less likely to contribute their better ideas to a group.

How can we fix this to improve efficiencies and make sure that (i) women are more comfortable with contributing their ideas, and that (ii) smart people contribute their good ideas more often? Can we design mechanisms or shape environments that “nudge” people to share and decide according to merit?

Taking a tip from the nudging process from last week's seminar, what would happen if we change the role models that women see--rather than just provide personal feedback--so people get more used to seeing women being successful, and start to associate women with success too? When people start getting used to seeing things a certain way, will they start getting used to doing them--including sharing and adopting the best ideas?

What are some other ways of nudging a system towards the best answers---towards social equity and social efficiency?



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If you can’t change the player, change the game

How many times have you heard people try to deny that they are prejudiced by saying that “some of my best friends are” black, gay, Republican, or women? I’ll bet it’s all too often.

Try as we might, most of us have some kind of latent bias that keeps us from being completely objective, even when we really want to be. Of course, too many of us are also pretty openly prejudiced. Both of these views get in the way of two things: equity and efficiency.

By equity, I mean that women in particular are underrepresented in most places of power---corporate boards, elected office, etc---in proportion to their population. By efficiency, I mean that there are tangible economic benefits to including different people, and women in particular, in decision-making.

According to Professor Iris Bohnet, Director of WAPPP and Academic dean at the Kennedy School, who presented her work on “Gender and Decision-Making” this week, women’s smaller appetites for risk-taking, more tempered competitiveness, and complementary perspectives may account for these contributions.

So how do we overcome these unintended biases and maximize these benefits?

One answer may lie in understanding and fixing “evaluation bias”. We often assess things based on factors completely unrelated to the thing itself. Our evaluations are often driven by the context around the subject, or our other assumptions or preconceived notions.

The Chubb Illusion: We think the center squares are different colors because of their surroundings
http://www.optical-illusion-pictures.com/famous.html 

For example, in many Indian villages people didn’t typically associate ‘leadership’ with women largely because they had rarely seen female leaders. But in 1993, women were required by a constitutional amendment to serve as the head of village councils, or Panchayat Raj, in one-third of all Indian villages---a change that familiarized the electorate with female leadership, and paved the way for further elections of women. (In 2011, 50% of all seats had to be filled by women).

This legislative change was a “nudge” in the right direction. By changing the context a little bit, people’s perceptions changed a little bit too. So if we adjust the process of hiring in different firms so that, for instance, candidates are referred to as “people” rather than as a “man” or “woman,” decision-makers might not be primed by their gender-based association, and instead choose based on merits alone. Similarly, if a school has to hire 5 professors in a year, it makes sense to hire them all at once, so any gender imbalances are immediately obvious when they’re seen in a single group---rather than letting gender slip past the radar in one-off hirings.

To tweak a phrase used by the rapper Ice T, if we can’t change the player, change the game. 

Collective recruitment limits discrimination in hiring

By Julie Battilana, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School
Originally published in French in Le Monde

February 11, 2013

If the last decade was marked by the willingness of businesses to fight discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, both in hiring and promotions, it should be noted that good intentions haven’t always been followed by results. In fact, far from it.

Among active women in France, only 6% occupy top managerial positions, the same proportion as... 1995. As for ethnic minorities, although the collection of statistics concerning them is not allowed by law, an examination of the French leading class is enough to note their poor representation.
To end discrimination, stereotypes must be eliminated. Yet, these die hard, as a recent study conducted by three researchers at Havard University ("When Performance Trumps Gender Bias : Joint versus Separate Evaluation" working paper published on Social Science Research Network, www.ssrn.com) reveals.

Wanting to better understand hiring and promotion decisions, Iris Bohnet, Max Bazerman and Alexandra van Geen conducted a series of experiments, the results of which suggest a direction for effectively fighting discrimination.

Neutralizing Predjudices

Among the 654 participants in their study, which included men and women, some took on the role of employers and others that of potential employees.

The latter completed a task that tested their aptitude in mathematics. Their performance levels were, afterwards, communicated to employers so that they may choose an employee who would perform this task once more, this time to the employer’s benefit.

The results showed that employers had a negative bias against female candidates when their performances were presented individually and independently from other candidates.

Male candidates whose scores were slightly inferior to the average were selected, while female candidates whose scores were at the average were not. The stereotype according to which women would be less competent than men in mathematical tasks thus heavily skewed employer’s decisions.

Avoiding Selecting Candidates One After the Other

Interestingly, a simple manipulation allowed to do away with this bias: when the performances of female candidates were presented not individually, but at the same time as those of their male counterparts, those with performance levels greater than the other candidates were selected.

To effectively fight against discrimination, businesses should thus avoid selecting candidates one after the other, and instead use a collective method. This approach is being used more and more in recruiting, but it is less widespread in promotion decisions.

This approach is, however, essential because it forces decision makers to rely on the comparative analysis of objective information, which neutralizes prejudices. It is time, for all private and public organizations, to recognize the importance, still today, of these prejudices and to act on them.


Translated from French by the author. 

'Nudging': The Cure for Corporate Gender Discrimination

CBS Business News writer, Sean Silverthorne, investigates corporate gender discrimination, interviewing Iris Bohnet, Academic Dean, HKS and WAPPP director, in his article, 'Nudging': The Cure for Corporate Gender Discrimination.

"One reason gender inequity is not repaired, Bohnet suggests, is that bosses don’t intentionally discriminate against women. But bosses, like all of us, are victims to biases in the ways we think. We stereotype, for example. So we believe, subconsciously anyway, that Nancy doesn’t have the math skills required for this job. And we don’t promote her because she doesn’t have the leadership aptitude that Fred owns."

Closing the workplace gender gap: HKS's Bohnet researches 'nudge' approach to correct imbalance

Iris Bohnet discusses her work on gender equality nudges in the Harvard Gazette.
Full article here.

"Many organizations now want to change, want to close gender gaps, partly because it is the right thing to do … but also because it increasingly is the smart thing to do," said Kennedy School Academic Dean Iris Bohnet during an interview. "Nudges change the environment ever so slightly — they change organizational practices, they change how we hire, how we promote people, creating a more equal playing field for men and women."

Iris Bohnet on Gender Gaps in the Workplace

Full interview here: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight/management/bohnet

Behavioral economist Iris Bohnet studies gender gaps in economic opportunity and how these and related issues affect the workings of governments, economies, organizations, and individual interactions. Bohnet is a professor of public policy, the director of the Women and Public Policy Program, and the new Academic Dean of Harvard Kennedy School.