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. 

Are Women Less Competitive Than Men?

A recent New York Times article asks, “Why are there still so few women in science?” Focusing on American society, the article explores some of our cultural biases related to women in science. The TV show “The Big Bang Theory,” for example, features a crew of geeky men with physics PhDs with a few token women (the “hip” ones are all math duds), while in the movie “Mean Girls,” the female lead hides her mathematical talent to impress a boy and fit in.

But does it start even earlier? In Thursday’s WAPPP Seminar, “Gender,Competitiveness, and Career Choices,” Stanford University’s Muriel Niederle, presented some of her research on whether there are some non-cognitive reasons: do women simply shy away from competition? Do men compete too much?

In her experiments of simple math competitions, Professor Niederle found that even the lowest performing (i.e. “stupidest”) men were much more willing to join a competitive game with rewards than even the smartest women. In fact, 73% of all men chose to enter the competition while only 35% of all women did. (There was pretty much an even distribution in peoples’ actual results and intelligence, by the way).

Muriel Niederle, “Gender, Competitiveness, and Career Choices”

What adds to this are a few factors: women tend to be more risk-averse generally; and despite their objective talent, women also tend to rate themselves as lower than they are. And though these tests were done on college students, apparently similar trends on willingness to compete are visible by age three!

Though proclivity to compete with other people per se ought not determine aptitude and success, the reality is that it does. In the classroom, this has path-dependent effects: how young women perceive themselves to be at math influences which course of study, and later career, they pursue. And years later, we see the effect of that in the paucity of women in math and science---but not in subjects like literature.

Some fields have had lower and harder glass ceilings than others. The reason for that may certainly be structural, in terms of decision-makers denying career mobility. But those structures start to oscillate based on the stories we tell ourselves and each other. Eileen Pollack, the author of that Times piece, writes that “the most powerful determinant of whether a woman goes on in science might be whether anyone encourages her to go on.”



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Social Norms and Stereotypes: What Happens When Everyone's a Little Bit Sexist?

Upon seeing one of those “reuse your towel” cards in a hotel, have you ever wondered how many people were actually reusing their towels? An experimental study found that when the message was supplemented with information that “nearly 75 percent of hotel guests reuse their towels,” the guests receiving the message became more likely to reuse their towel than the guests who got the standard note. This is an example of the power of social norms – when the desired action is perceived as the norm, compliance increases. The same mechanism is at work in reverse for an undesirable behavior – people are less likely to litter when they perceive that only a few “anti-social types” litter.

Social norms are often more powerful than explicit messages. The signs in the Petrified Forest National Park used to read something like this: “Don’t take petrified wood, 14 tons a year are being stolen in small pieces.” That last part essentially signaled to the visitor: “everybody is doing it.” When that part was removed, compliance improved.

Now, let’s connect this information to racial and gender stereotyping and bias – generally, people view bias as undesirable and actively work against it. However, the 2000’s saw a growing body of research on unconscious biases. The notion that most people have unconscious stereotypes and biases captivated the popular press. The cover of the Washington Post Magazine on January 23, 2005 read: “Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are.” So, it’s like the song from Broadway musical Avenue Q, “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.”
 
But what does that mean for social norms? Does knowing that everyone has unconscious biases make it seem permissible to let our own biases slide?

Those are the questions Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, set out to answer with her colleague Michelle Duguid, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School. Thomas-Hunt and Duguid designed a series of creative experiments to test how messages of high and low prevalence of stereotyping affect behavior.
 
In one of the experiments, pairs of women and men were negotiating a car sale. All of the men were told to avoid thinking of others in a stereotypical manner. Some of the men were primed with a “high prevalence of stereotyping” message – they were not told what gender biases might be, just that an influential body of research finds that the majority of people do stereotype. Other men were primed with a “low prevalence” message – that very few people hold stereotypical misconceptions. Yet another set of men received a “high prevalence of counter stereotyping” message – that most people actively try to overcome biased misconceptions.

After the negotiation, the women, who did not know anything about these messages, were asked to rank their opponents' assertiveness. The researchers also compared negotiated price outcomes. The men who were told that most people stereotype, despite being cautioned not to do so themselves, consistently claimed more value in the negotiation and were ranked as more assertive by their female counterparts than were the men in both other groups. The division of value was more equitable in the pairs where men received “few people stereotype” and “most people work to avoid stereotyping.” The men were also perceived to be less assertive by their female counterparts. In other words, the men who perceived the social norm to be in line with stereotypes of women as weak negotiators were more likely to treat them as such, while the men who thought the social norm was to counter stereotypes treated their negotiating partners more equitably.

Thomas-Hunt’s and Duguid’s experiments point to the conclusion that it’s not enough to be aware that we have conscious and unconscious biases. We need social norms to counter these biases. We need a culture in which most people work hard not to stereotype. In companies, this could be a consistent internal message from the highest ranks, but in society it will take all of us holding each other accountable and working not to be even a little bit sexist.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt presented at a WAPPP Seminar titled, "Condoning Stereotyping: How Awareness of Stereotyping Prevalence Impacts Stereotype Expression in Negotiations and Beyond," on April 4, 2013.


Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.