HUBweek What Works: Designing Inclusive Organizations

This week marked the second annual HUBweek, a celebration of art, science, and technology in the Boston area. As part of a series on “Ideas to Impact,” Professor Iris Bohnet presented insights from her new book What Works: Gender Equality by Design in conversation with Meghna Chakrabarti, host of Radio Boston on WBUR.

Professor Bohnet began by describing Heidi Roizen, a successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the protagonist of a case study used by business schools around the country. Researchers at Columbia University provided half of a group of students with the case with Heidi’s name attached; the other half received the same case, but with Heidi’s name replaced with “Howard.” Both male and female students rated Howard and Heidi similarly in terms of competence, but they didn’t like Heidi and didn’t want to work with her. Heidi defies our norms in two ways – she’s not what we expect a venture capitalist to look like, and she defies our conception of what a “good woman” is.

Why are our brains doing this? We are all accustomed to certain patterns in this world, and we try to fit our circumstances to these existing patterns. Look at the figure below: are boxes A and B different colors? Initially, it appears that A is much darker. However, when we eliminate the extraneous context, we can see the squares for what they really are – the same color. This is precisely what Professor Bohnet says she is trying to achieve with behavioral design.

What can behavioral design do for us that other approaches can’t? Previous studies have suggested little evidence that interventions like diversity training are working. Our minds appear to be pretty stubborn when it comes to implicit bias. Instead of trying to change mindsets, we can more effectively change environments to promote gender equality. 

Professor Bohnet gave examples of using behavioral design to promote gender equality in the workplace, including holding structured interviews for job candidates, including work-sample tests as part of the evaluation, and not allowing managers to use employee self-evaluations in their own assessments of employee performance. However, we can begin employing behavioral design much earlier. Standardized tests like the SAT that incorporate a penalty for guessing may disadvantage women, who are generally less willing to take risks. Though the test isn’t designed to encourage or reward risk-taking, there can be an appreciable score difference between students who guess and those who just skip questions, regardless of academic ability. As part of a larger revision of the SAT, College Board has now removed the penalty for guessing and, in doing so, mitigated a major source of gender bias. (For more findings like this, be sure to check out our Gender Action Portal!) 

In her first question, Ms. Chakrabarti discussed her reaction to hosting Professor Bohnet on her radio show in April. The potential for behavioral design both inspired her and caused a little sadness, as it confronts us with the idea that implicit biases are so difficult to overcome that it’s more effective and easier to make environmental or structural changes. Professor Bohnet replied that there’s good news and bad news associated with the prevalence of implicit bias – the good news is that it’s about all of us (not some “good” unbiased individuals versus “bad” biased ones) – but the bad news is that we’re all biased! Seeing is believing, she says. Changing the environment means that we start to see different role models, counter-stereotypical images, and our brains begin to create new patterns that mitigate implicit bias.

In thinking about the A and B squares image, Ms. Chakrabarti asked whether there’s such a thing as removing too much context, such that you no longer see the whole person. Perhaps in implementing interventions like using only structured interviews for hiring, we’re missing out on other diverse perspectives that applicants bring to the table. In response, Professor Bohnet said that we have to continue to measure. We need to understand what factors are predictive of future performance and which are not. Structured interviews can still measure “soft” skills that we think are important. Employers need to be intentional about what values they want to test – be it emotional intelligence or social competence – and incorporate those into questions in their structured interviews. 

Ms. Chakrabarti asked whether there is data utopianism in this approach, a sense that measurement will solve all of our problems. Professor Bohnet responded that generally, organizations just don’t measure enough to know what works and what doesn’t. Even if it’s not a panacea, we still have a long way to go in terms of collecting data so that we’re not just relying on internal stereotypes. Where we have been able to measure, the data show that these structural interventions are effective in a short amount of time. In the UK and Australia, civil service employees are now evaluated blindly. This intervention started with a pilot test, and since its implementation has doubled the number of women in senior leadership positions. The starting point is to recognize that everything is designed and become more intelligent about how we structure our world.  

The question and answer session raised a variety of issues, from the potential for gender bias in the presidential debate format, whether it might be possible to design in positive hiring bias toward diverse perspectives, and how to include transgender and gender non-conforming individuals in using behavioral design to promote gender equality. These conversations are an important starting point in generating new research, new innovations, and new behavioral insights.

International Women's Day: Focusing on What Works

A lot has changed since March 8, 1857. That was the day when female garment workers in New York City marched and picketed, demanding decent working conditions. Their ranks were broken up by police. A lot has also changed since March 8, 1908, fifty-one years later, when female workers in the needle trades in New York City marched again, demanding the vote and an end to sweatshops and child labor. The police stopped them then as well. Today, on March 8, 2016, women around the world, can celebrate the distance they have advanced in protecting their rights. And they might wonder whether their work is finished.

It is likely your answer might be no, and indeed, many agree that the work is not done. Consider what happened to major orchestras in the U.S. when they first introduced curtains for auditions in the 1970s. Evaluators were forced to listen to the music coming from behind the curtain, remaining blind to the musician’s gender and appearance. The result was that the percentage of female musicians rose from 5% to 35%, and orchestras were able to recruit the best talent! But have all organizations managed to introduce such blind evaluations? Have they fought off other sources of gender bias?

It has proven hard to achieve true equality because unconscious bias is everywhere. Our minds are just wired that way. We create shortcuts and generalizations that help us navigate the very complicated world that we live in. While sometimes helpful, these shortcuts can lead us down very negative paths. They are the reason we find it intuitively more difficult to trust a male preschool teacher or a female plumber. Our minds tend to equate competency with looking the part because talent is not easily visible to the naked eye. Gender can get in the way of us truly recognizing talent.

On International Women’s Day (IWD), we commemorate the work of those who came before and inspired us by continuing to work towards gender equality. Professor Iris Bohnet’s timely book comes out on this day, marking the 105th Anniversary of IWD, and offering a pathway of where to go from here. In What Works: Gender Equality by Design, she provides tools to keep advancing, in 2016 and moving forward, towards gender equality by working around our biases. These tools are inexpensive and easy to implement, and can be useful to people in all levels of organizations: “Right up to board level, companies should find in What Works not only food for thought, but a guide for effective practical action as well”, avows the Financial Times. Want to learn more? Watch this video and pick up a copy of the book starting today. Want to do more? Check out our step by step guide!

What Works: Gender Equality By Design (Part 2!)

Fresh from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Professor Iris Bohnet presented the second half of her forthcoming book “What Works: Gender Equality by Design” at the first HKS WAPPP Seminar of the spring semester.  Professor Bohnet had presented the first half of her book at the first WAPPP Seminar in the fall, and the group was eager to hear more about her focus on “de-biasing organizations” rather than “de-biasing mindsets.”

Professor Bohnet is the Director of the HKS Women and Public Policy Program and Co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Center for Public Leadership at HKS. Her research demonstrates a powerful truth: No matter how well-intentioned they are, people can still fall prey to bias. Instead of trying to break people of these often unintentional biases, we should be looking to organizational design to “make it easier for all of us to do the right thing.”

The limits of diversity training

Professor Bohnet began with a survey of existing interventions to overcome bias in the workplace, including diversity training, negotiation training, leadership training, mentorship and sponsorship, and networking. Despite being a billion-dollar industry, the evidence on diversity training is mixed. After hundreds of studies, it is hard to be optimistic about diversity training, if only because it is incredibly difficult to de-bias minds. Beyond stereotypical thinking, humans rely on a number of other cognitive shortcuts that are very difficult to unlearn.

The rest of these interventions are geared toward helping women navigate the workforce more effectively. One critique of this approach is that it places the onus of fixing gender discrimination on women. However, it is important to be pragmatic and to consider how these methods can be helpful. The evidence from mentorship and sponsorship networks is particularly encouraging. Female economists who participated in mentorship training workshops were more productive, more likely to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and more likely to get tenure. This is some of the best causal evidence to date about the impact of mentorship and sponsorship and demonstrates the positive impact of these interventions.

Using behavioral insights to move the needle

Behavioral insights and organizational design present an opportunity to develop novel interventions to decrease bias and improve diversity. For organizations looking to attract the best candidates, Professor Bohnet suggests they look at the language in their job advertisements. She presented a job advertisement for a teacher reading in part, “Looking for a warm and caring teacher with exceptional pedagogical and interpersonal skills to work in a supportive, collaborative work environment.” Gendered language like this resonates with women rather than men and can inhibit great male teachers from applying. And with boys falling about a year behind girls in reading and writing by age 15, partially because of the lack of male role models among their teachers, it makes a difference.

There are numerous behavioral interventions that workplaces can develop to overcome bias. Two simple things organizations can start with: get rid of “potential” rankings in employee evaluation, and stop managers from seeing employees’ self-evaluations before giving their own rankings. There is an enormous amount of bias in potential rankings. In another iteration of “seeing is believing,” a lack of female senior partners at a firm may lead to biased thinking that women don’t have the potential or desire to ascend the career ladder. While it’s not clear how to get rid of this bias, it is simple enough to remove potential rankings altogether in evaluating employees. Similarly, there can be a significant difference in employee rankings. On average, women are inclined to give themselves lower self-evaluation scores than men. If managers can see employees’ self-evaluations before making their own judgments, they may be influenced by these scores and give women lower scores (and men higher) than they otherwise would.  Instead, the manager could have conversations with team members about their performance, but wait to see a numerical self-evaluation until after they have made their own evaluations. These two findings are low-hanging fruit for organizations looking to reduce workplace bias; research increasingly shows that mindsets change once behavior has changed, and these low-impact methods reduce the effect of bias in the workplace.

Gender diversity in teams

In recent years, the “business case for diversity”—evidence that more diverse organizations do better than those that are more homogeneous—has attracted a lot of attention. A meta-analysis of 120 studies finds a small diversity premium for diverse corporate boards. However, these studies are just observational: it could be that diversity really does pay, or that companies that are high-performing are also more inclusive. One study measuring collective intelligence found that gender diverse teams outperformed homogeneous teams on each of the tested tasks. Gender diverse teams demonstrated complementary skill sets and a greater tendency to listen to and build on others’ ideas. Gender diverse teams are much more likely to avoid groupthink, which increases their effectiveness.

However, Professor Bohnet emphasized, we should care about gender equality because it’s the right thing to do, not just because of the business case for diversity. In closing, she discussed several organizational improvements that could encourage equitable behavior, including a “comply or explain” system for corporate diversity. Goal setting, transparency, and accountability all play a crucial role in changing behavior and, by extension, changing mindsets. Professor Bohnet’s book is available on March 4—be on the lookout for more bias-reducing, diversity-maximizing insights!

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!