Making equality the easy choice; a moral and economic mandate
What works: Gender Equality by Design
I was so excited to read What works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet. While there are books out there on how to change behavior and books on gender equality, there has not been one that combines these two. For me, burnout prevention comes from designing homes, workplaces and societies that allow everyone to thrive equally, where everyone is recognized and rewarded for their effort. As a behaviorist, I wanted to know what we can take out of our hands and make the default. So that the behavior change happens automatically. I realize people have to adopt such systems of change and continue to implement them for them to actually work. But anything we can do to take away the cognitive load of choosing or anything that disrupts our automatic choices with a new more objectively designed default helps. For example, key cards in hotel rooms that switch off the lights. You don’t have to believe in saving energy, the system does it for you.
In this book Dr Bohnet reminds us, when we are exhausted cognitively we resort to more stereotypical thinking i.e. our unconscious bias takes over. When I read this, I stopped. Is the current burnout epidemic going to mean gender bias is more reinforced? I googled burnout and bias and found an article by Dr Dyrbye on physician burnout predicting racially biased treatment of patients. Burnout is bad for bias and bias is bad for burnout.
Dr Bohnet starts her book explaining both the moral and economic reasons for addressing burnout. For example, if there were gender parity in Japan, the GDP would grow by 20%. I know the stats for the success of women run businesses (up to 3 times more profitable) and that women could contribute trillions of dollars to the economy. But I didn’t think of the moral arguments. When women are seen as less valuable they are aborted, trafficked, and killed. The UN estimates 200 million women and girls are missing worldwide due to gendercide. As Dr Bohnet declares; this has to stop.
The simplest form of a structural design intervention to promote gender equality is the curtain used in orchestra auditions. Once the women musicians were no longer seen, or their high heels heard, they were selected. And orchestras have only benefited from this intervention, the best players are selected and more representative players result in a wider appeal to mixed gender audiences. This is the most important learning point, you want to select the best talent, not the talent that looks like you. The best talent may not look like you. And diverse teams have repeatedly been shown to have the highest collective intelligence.
Importantly, women need to learn that beating our heads against the maternal wall (which affects all women) is not effective. Redesigning the walls will be much more effective. Research shows women doing this alone is not likely to work, they are often penalized for these counter-stereotypical competencies. Dr Bohnet shows that companies need to be willing to experiment and evaluate, that way we can see what actually works. As I have been encouraging for burnout.
The first issue Dr Bohnet highlights is the inequality in promotion and pay which are caused by perpetuated stereotypes. Women are not seen as both competent and likeable. She explains the chicken and egg of this; if there are no examples of female leaders then there is no counterfactual to change the stereotype. Men will always believe women are bad leaders because they have never had the chance to experience a good female leader. In experiments in India with quotas for politicians, for example, this changed stereotypical views of women widely across society and provided parents with examples of worthwhile jobs that girls could fulfill. It seems that female politicians, even more than CEOs or board member, can change societal norms around gender bias.
Such ‘drastic’ interventions are needed as stereotypes are very hard to change. Our brains do not want to go to the effort of updating our stereotypical view. We prefer to revert back to what we have previously learned. In this way, Dr Bohnet clearly states: stop simple diversity training focused on raising awareness. It can backfire and reinforce stereotypes. And because of these self-reinforcing stereotypes, women trying to change them alone is also not likely to work. The research indicates that fathers with daughters may be the most productive allies.
To improve opportunities for negotiation, Dr Bohnet recommends increasing transparency and having people negotiate on behalf of others. In particular, pay for performance, not face time is key. To improve leadership, she recommends mentors and sponsors, training specific to our needs, and using behavioral plans to ensure goal setting and feedback. For each of my podcast episodes I include example behavioral plans as they are important tools for successful change. She recommends using people analytics to improve the hiring and talent retention process. For example, Google discovered they only needed 4 interviewers to rate a candidate saving time all around and created a predictive survey for when talent was likely to leave. When a score went below the retention threshold, they instigated an intervention to prevent it. Such analytics could equally predict burnout. Again she clearly states: do not use unstructured interviews in the hiring process, purge gendered language from job ads, and hide gender identities from applications.
Dr Bohnet describes the data on women’s lower willingness to take risk which can sometimes be baked into systems against us. For example, in the past, the SAT penalized women because it gave negative scores for a wrong answer, meaning women were more likely to skip the question than guess. The number of complete answers and scores changed when this scoring system was changed. Women’s performance can also be affected by being reminded of negative or positive female stereotypes. In contrast, showing women leaders in the board room and halls of workplaces can help counter gender bias. Again Dr Bohnet clearly states; do not use self assessments to assign promotions. Women will underrate themselves, men will over rate themselves.
In addition to creating diverse groups, because of their proven superiority in intelligence and performance, Dr Bohnet reminds us to create rules so that all perspectives can be heard. She also supports codes of conduct to encourage more gendered norms, rankings and promotion of successes in increasing gender diversity. People don’t want to be the only person not acting on diversity; remind them that the majority are taking action. Other ways to keep people honest about their diversity efforts are to get them to sign their name before making an assessment and reminding them that they will be asked to justify their actions. This often primes people to do the right thing. An example from the Black Table Talk podcast would be for hiring managers to know that interviewers will be following up and asking about the diverse candidate that was overlooked. This is how we can be an ally, ask about why our female colleagues and women of color are not being promoted.
Dr Bohnet provides numerous helpful resources including:
https://actreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-ACT-Report.pdf
https://www.bi.team/search/equality
https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/
Her most recent achievement is having 50 companies pledge to be part of a gender equality experiment and evaluation. I believe such groups could also benefit from a learning collaborative where groups are specifically supported in their experimentation by behavioral techniques, peer support, and plan-do-study-act learning cycles. Whether for burnout, for equity, or for both, the need for solutions is unprecedented and the right answers are unclear, thus we need a process to guide our progress. A learning collaborative can bring the needed accountability and problem solving. I look forward to more experimental evidence of what works from Dr Bohnet and others.
