What Works

Gender Equality by Design

Iris Bohnet
Belknap Press © 2016
400 pages
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Rating Take-Aways

9
9 Applicability • “Unconscious” bias is common.
9 Innovation • Gender equality is a moral imperative.
8 Style
• Gender inequality does both social and economic harm.
• Use social norms to promote gender equality. Design groups and group processes to
  promote inclusion and performance.
Focus • Some efforts to create greater gender equality have failed; people must experiment to
determine what works.
Leadership & Management
Strategy • Redesigning work environments can make it easier to act in an unbiased and ethical
Sales & Marketing
way.
Finance • Practicing empathy and training people in clear thinking helps them act ethically.
Human Resources
IT, Production & Logistics • Role models show people what is possible and can help create change.
Career & Self-Development
• To attract a diverse array of people and evaluate them fairly, eliminate sexist language
Small Business from job postings, use structured interviews and compare for performance.
Economics & Politics
Industries
• To create change, remember the “DESIGN” acronym. Seek “data,” then “experiment,”
and as you learn, place “signposts” to guide people in the right direction.
Global Business
Concepts & Trends

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getabstract

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Relevance
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What You Will Learn
In this summary, you will learn:r1) Why “unconscious bias” is common, 2) How organizational efforts to create
greater equality succeed or fail, and 3) How to make your workplace more equitable and diverse using the “DESIGN”
process to create and sustain change.
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Recommendation
Harvard professor Iris Bohnet seeks to determine “what works” when it comes to increasing gender equality. In that
pursuit, she offers a focused, meticulous review of efforts to change human behavior to foster inclusion and ethical
practice. Bohnet analyzes surveys, lab studies, corporate actions, meta studies and the law from a broad array of
disciplines: politics, business, social science, gender studies, and more. The result can be overwhelming, but her
prose is always engaging and useful. The author is exceptionally honest. She flatly states how ineffective certain well-
intended programs have been. This clarifies her ethical commitment and makes her conclusions more persuasive.
getAbstract recommends Bohnet’s insight to anyone interested in clear thinking, social science and a more inclusive
society.
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Summary
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Why “Behavioral Design”
In 1970, only 5% of the performers in the five best American orchestras were female.
Now more than 35% are. This didn’t happen by accident. Following the lead of the
Boston Symphony, orchestras shifted to blind auditions, wherein judges hear musicians
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play but don’t see them. Directors always believed they cared only about a musician’s skill.
“Stereotypes serve as “Unconscious” bias led them to select a majority of men. When they auditioned musicians
heuristics – rules of
thumb – that allow us
behind a screen, they chose differently.
to process information
more easily, but they Increased gender equality would benefit society. For instance, equality expands the talent
are often inaccurate.”
getabstract pool: Consider how many fine musicians weren’t hired before the advent of blind auditions.
When societies exclude women from the workforce, per capita income drops 40%. Yet,
some efforts to increase diversity have failed or have had negative effects. Seeing what
works requires experimentation.

Unconscious Bias
Unconscious bias is omnipresent and hard to unlearn; it distorts people’s thinking and their
perceptions. People expect different things from men and from women in the workplace.

But as employees struggle to put biases aside, behavioral design can help. Changing
getabstract the environment around people changes how they interact. People frequently use “group
“When designing
solutions, the smallest characteristics” to judge individuals. These stereotypes limit women’s options. If women
details matter.” act according to gender stereotypes, people don’t see them as leaders. If women break
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from gender expectations, people often see them as less likable. The mind applies “social
categorization.” And people give greater weight to appearance than to verbal attributes. Yet
people also stereotype themselves. In tests, women show gender bias about women.

Asking people to seek fair solutions in a negotiation doesn’t work if “self-serving bias”
comes into play: Self-interest overwhelms explicit instructions. Informing people about

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 different kinds of bias helps them avoid some stereotypes. This works better at helping
people see others’ biases than at getting them to see their own. People are often unaware
of the “halo effect,” in which one aspect of a person – like beauty – affects someone’s
getabstract perception of other aspects. The halo effect persists even when people receive a warning
“Expectations about it.
became self-fulfilling
prophecies: Women
were more likely to trust For “de-biasing” to work, it must move through several stages. People must learn that bias
other women, and were
rewarded in return for is possible; see how it distorts judgment; provide feedback to those experiencing bias; and
such cooperation.” receive training, coaching and analysis. Most people don’t try to change their behavior.
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Often, diversity training programs don’t work or have no relationship to a company’s
diversity. Some data show they even can be associated with a small drop in diversity, or
they can lead to “moral licensing” in which people feel they can do something bad because
they’ve done something good.

In “perspective-taking,” common in negotiations, people put themselves in each other’s

place or imagine someone else’s feelings. This helps people act more ethically. Providing
models of the desired behavior on radio or TV can work. Training people to think more
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“People are quite ready clearly also fosters equality. Companies can try to change employees’ thinking by using
to see biases in others, an “unfreeze-change-refreeze” framework, in which they guide trainees to become aware
but they overlook the
very same biases in of their biases, teach them how to change their behavior and help them settle into new
themselves.” behavioral patterns.
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Salary Negotiations
In general, women aren’t as comfortable negotiating as men are. People in negotiations
respond differently to men and to women. In salary discussions, men seldom face penalties
for asking for more money, but people generally react negatively to women who ask for
more. In hiring discussions, men are likelier to negotiate starting salaries than women, who
are also less likely to apply for jobs where the compensation isn’t stated clearly. Women’s
getabstract failure to negotiate means men start new positions earning 8% more than women and rise
“When we build
teams, we look for up the career ladder more quickly. When women do negotiate, they ask for less than men.
complements, not Some firms, like Google, address this by inviting women to seek promotions. Negotiating
substitutes. The
diversity of viewpoints
on others’ behalf can help women speak up: Saying “we” instead of “I” can help. Women
may trump average worldwide – even leaders – speak up less than men.
excellence when we
have to solve problems
collectively.” Sponsorships and Data
getabstract Some efforts to help women backfire: Women get placed in development programs while
men get actual jobs. This can be especially disheartening since no one knows if leadership
programs work. More focused programs, like those matching female faculty members with
mentors in their field, can help, but tend to generate modest benefits.

Sponsorships might be more useful than mentorships. Women’s mentors often lack seniority
and limit their actions to guidance and coaching. Men’s sponsors seek opportunities for
getabstract them, get people to notice them and negotiate for them. When navigating the hierarchy,
“Successful unfreezing
happens when people women and minorities often hit information deficits, such as a lack of role models.
start to question their Newly hired men have many models, but female hires have fewer. They receive limited
current strategies and
become curious about signals about effective behavior. To address this deficit, companies can create gender-
alternatives.” specific courses, and encourage women to engage in active goal setting and to form
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mutually supportive relationships. To improve decision making and to address “systematic”
unconscious bias, organizational leaders must base their decisions on evidence. Companies
that collect data use analytics to predict markets, respond to customer wishes and minimize
risk, but few firms use this information to improve how they deal with people directly.

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 Google uses big data to predict how likely employees are to leave. Asking a few questions
lets the company identify which issues will result in departures. Google changes its practices
accordingly, working to make HR decisions with the “same level of rigor” it applies to
getabstract engineering. Often, firms don’t collect the data they need. No one asks for them. Yet
“Good design often
harvests low-hanging once data collection starts, firms can consider questions and patterns realistically and base
fruit, left on the tree decisions on data rather than assumptions.
not so much because
of bad intentions but
rather because of the “Unconscious Fallacies”
mind bugs that affect
our judgment.” People use a number of unconscious fallacies when thinking about other people and
getabstract themselves. One of these is the “representativeness heuristic.” This applies when hiring
executives look at promotion candidates in isolation, which happens roughly 30% of
the time in larger US companies. Men are more likely to be hired or promoted for
tasks that seem masculine, like doing math. Women are more likely hired for tasks
associated with female stereotypes, like verbal skills. When evaluators look at candidates
comparatively, this bias goes away and they select people based on performance. When
possible, evaluate applicants blindly, without demographic information. Plan structured
getabstract interviews in advance. Determine what you want to learn before the interview, and ask all
“Norm
entrepreneurship applicants the same questions in the same order. This diminishes the halo effect. Compare
can help these applicants’ answers one at a time.
organizations embrace
diversity not just as
a principle but as a Redesigning Work and School
practice.”
getabstract Hundreds of studies show women are more risk-averse than men. Women are less likely
to guess on tests, and they make more risk-averse choices in a lottery. Environments that
reward risk-taking favor men over women. Sometimes, redesigning the environment can
remove this emphasis. Men are more likely to answer questions when they don’t know the
answer. Men will run for office when they have no chance of winning; women need to
know they have a chance. In The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates argues that
the gender-based risk aversion difference has a biochemical basis. Successful male traders
receive a boost of testosterone, which leads them to take more risk. This doesn’t always
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benefit a firm. Shaping a workplace where people with different risk-aversion levels are
“When thinking comfortable benefits performance and equality.
about diversity, we
must understand why
sometimes people are The SAT, a standardized college-entry test intended to measure “innate intelligence,” once
drawn to homogeneity.” penalized students who gave wrong answers. Female students tended to leave questions
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blank if they were unsure. Male students tended to answer them, especially if they could
eliminate one possibility, thus earning higher test scores. When test redesign removed the
penalty for guessing, all test takers answered all the questions.

The way employment ads are phrased matters. An organization wants to reach the people
it seeks to hire and to avoid discouraging them. Sometimes this is easy: For example, a
company can remove biased language from a job description.

getabstract Some efforts to improve one group’s status makes another group suffer and generates
“While we are not
inclined to seek no benefit. And sometime the necessary benefit is hard to define. It turns out that the
diversity unless we have most powerful way to improve school performance in developing countries isn’t through
to, there would be lots
of advantages if we providing textbooks or scholarships, but through “deworming.” Children miss school when
did.” their health is poor.
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Role Models
Role models shape expectations. Seeing others who are like themselves opens people’s eye
to their own possibilities. If they don’t see other people doing something, they tend not to

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 imagine doing it themselves. Companies need to raise the profile of people and behaviors
they wish to encourage.

India did this in 1993 when it passed landmark legislation amending its constitution to
getabstract reserve one-third of all village council seats for women. This provided evidence that quotas
“Without explicit can work. It also provided examples of women succeeding as political leaders. Women in
invitations, or external
legitimization, it turns villages where other women served on the councils were more likely to run for office or
out even women in speak up in meetings.
leadership positions
speak up less than their
male counterparts, and Students with teachers of the same gender were more likely to close their educational
for good reason.” performance gaps. Kenyan women in an experiment were more likely to cooperate with
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other women because they expected men wouldn’t cooperate. Similar selection patterns
appear in game shows, where women trust other women to cooperate more than men.

“Social Norms”
Leaders can enhance group performance by creating teams with diverse perspectives
and abilities. Be careful, though, because if you sprinkle members of underrepresented
populations into majority population groups, they can become isolated and serve as tokens.
Leaders and groups alike can make teams more likely to hear different perspectives by
getabstract how they craft “group process,” such as requiring unanimity. Social norms guide people’s
“Any organization
that hopes to learn actions. People like to be part of groups and act according to shared norms of behavior.
and improve needs to Most people respond to knowing what others are doing and modify their behavior to align,
base its decisions on
evidence.”
but people who aren’t in the know may apply stereotypical assumptions.
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“Norm Entrepreneurs”
Those who support new gender norms can become norm entrepreneurs who champion
gender equality via norm-based tools. They make people’s success at embracing these new
norms matter more. They use ranking systems to get people to compete in this area. They
use laws, rules and “codes of conduct” to establish expectations for behavior.

Transparency shapes people’s actions. Making clear, understandable information openly

available is useful. For example, when governments started evaluating restaurant sanitary
conditions and requiring restaurants to post their “A, B or C” letter grades, diners used this
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“If I could send you information to decide where to eat – and restaurants worked harder to earn higher ratings.
off with one big take- When the European Union and the United States required labels on appliances that indicated
away, it would be this:
We can reduce gender their energy efficiency, manufacturers designed more energy-efficient products.
inequality.”
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“DESIGN”
To create change, remember the DESIGN acronym. Seek “data,” then “experiment” and
– as you learn – place “signposts” to guide people. Worthy design starts with data. Study
the area that concerns you. Does gender inequality exist? Where is the lack of balance, and
which people know why? Start experimenting. Keep everyone posted about what is going
on and what you learn.
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About the Author
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A native of Switzerland, Iris Bohnet, PhD, is a behavioral economist at Harvard University. She is a professor, the
director of the Women and Public Policy Program, and co-chair of the Behavioral Insights Group at the Kennedy
School of Government.

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