Now reading: What Works: Gender Equality by Design by Iris Bohnet
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51072612-what-works
“Blind” orchestra auditions reduce sex-biased hiring and increase the number of female musicians.
But also see:
"I agree that blind auditions can make sense—even if they do not have the large effects claimed in that 2000 paper"
Also to set the state: the hungry Isreali judges (less lenient right before lunch).
Which has not totally held up…
This book's goal is to offer good designs to you; designs that make it easier for our biased minds to get things right p.4
There is no design-free world. p5
We are biased
We can design around it
In Ivory Coast; Men grow coffee, cocoa & pineapple; women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts & vegetables.
In years where 🚹 crops have high yields: households spend more money on alcohol and tobacco. When 🚺 have good harvests; more money is spent on food.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=552103
one simulation found that a bias accounting for only 1 percent of the variance in evaluation scores led to only 35 percent of the discriminated against group being represented at the top. Without the bias, each group would have held 50% of these seats
Building on what works, behavioral design creates better and fairer organizations and societies.
It will not solve all our gender-related problems, but it will move the needle, and often at shockingly low cost and high speed.
p14
S Fiske: "social categorization is a necessary, if unfortunate, byproduct of our cognitive makeup." Matching people to existing social categories helps us quickly make sense of the world, sizing up & classifying ppl based on our experiences
We are economizing our cognitive effort
People who make more gender-stereotypic associations on the IAT (Implicit Association Test; http://implicit.harvard.edu) have been found to laugh more at sexist jokes
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513809000683
I hope behavioral science helps us change gender relations, but some atrocities require a hammer instead of a nudge
2️⃣ De-Biasing Minds Is Hard
Experience alone is insufficient to correct biases p47
Awareness alone also not enough
Large meta-studies show no/small effects for D&I training
Baruch Fischhoff: 4 steps for de-biasing to have any meaningful impact:
1️⃣awareness of the possibility of bias
2️⃣understanding of the direction of the bias
3️⃣immediate feed back when falling prey to the bias
4️⃣a training program with regular feedback, analysis, and coaching
refocus the training on capacity building and adopt the frame work unfreeze-change-refreeze
You should not just focus on raising awareness, but also offer specific tools that help people make better decisions.
3️⃣ Doing It Yourself Is Risky
Women ask less and get worse offers in negotiations.
Also within households, so “we cannot rely on the family to correct imbalances in society” (Duflo)
Disappears when 🚺 negotiate for someone else
4️⃣ Getting Help Only Takes You So Far
Mentoring, sponsorship, and networking initiatives are a first step (…) But more systemic interventions are required to de-bias the system.
p99
5️⃣ Applying Data To People Decisions
We should make more use of data and data analysis
p122
His organization could never use the word "experiment"; would suggest managers didn't know what they were doing
Exactly the point! People think they know what they are doing-based on a mixture of intuition, best practice, tradition, and industry norms. But only evidence can tell
Unfortunately, not all experiments are to be trusted. Bohnet mentions the sign-at-the-top research which has some serious flaws:
[98] Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Field Experiment About Dishonesty
6️⃣ Orchestrating Smarter Evaluation Procedures
If you currently use panel interviews, where a group of interviewers meets w/ a job candidate all at the same time, stop. Instead, the ideal is independent, uncorrelated assessments, uninfluenced by what the other interviewer thinks
When candidates were evaluated comparatively, not only did the gender gap vanish completely, but basically all evaluators now chose the top performer
The right thing turned out to be the smart thing, too
Review 85 yrs research & 19 selection methods:
Unstructured interviews should not be your evaluation tool of choice. Structured interviews do much better, particularly when paired with a formal assessment of intelligence or general cognitive ability
Create smarter evaluation procedures
Use a checklist for structured interviews (cf Atul @GawandeUSAID Checklist Manifesto)
Or @beapplied (BIT spin-off)
7️⃣ Attracting the Right People
the fraction of gender-stereotypic words (in job ads) was even correlated with the proportion of men and women in a given profession.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0022530
Sorting: people self-select into jobs based on their preferences and their beliefs about whether or not they belong
Sorting mechanisms are powerful and often overlooked
Scrutinize the messages, overt and biased, conveyed in communications. The wording used, incentive schemes employed, work hours required, or even the number of others applying may unintentionally attract some but not others
8️⃣ Adjusting Risk
An analysis of the Fall 2001 mathematics SAT scores shows that women's tendency to skip more questions can explain up to 40 percent of the gender gap in SAT scores. p169
9️⃣ Leveling the Playing Field
Larger goal, both societal & within organizations, is to encourage the right people to participate in competitions-not the overconfident ones but the most able ones
Good feedback, compared to others can do this for your organization
p191
Not sharing biased self-evaluations with others and offering feedback to the under- & overconfident to help them make more accurate assessments are attractive designs that help equalize the playing field people with different degrees of self-confidence and comptetitiveness.
Experiments: all better off if one person volunteered, but volunteering is costly.
Women volunteered more and men less.
Everyone (M & F) assumed women would volunteer more than men
Prevent gender bias from having impact: use gender neutral designs
Mitigate impact of gender bias on self and others; do not share biased self-assessments with supervisors; give feedback to help people correct their biases
Compensate for differential impact due to gender bias
🔟 Creating Role Models
One multinational I advise gathered in room when reaching important promotion decisions; walls decorated w/ portraits previous CEOs (all male)
this was hardly conducive to triggering counterstereotypical associations between gender and leadership
p203
In this study, the more daughters a Danish CEO has, the better his employees are paid.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839212466521
1️⃣1️⃣ Crafting Groups
A meta-analysis of more than 500 studies and over 700 independent samples shows that contact typically reduces intergroup prejudice, supporting what in psychology is known as the intergroup contact theory
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-07099-004
Across all studies (meta analysis of 140 studies) it finds a small positive relationship be tween female board representation and company profitability (accounting returns).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/corg.12165
When we build teams, we look for complements, not substitutes.
If you cannot include more than one woman, keep groups homogenous. Creating token member is in nobody's interest.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-25992-001
1️⃣2️⃣ Shaping Norms
Includes Cialdini and opower examples
1️⃣3️⃣ Increasing Transparency
People care about what others think, and so do companies. This is the power of transparency.
And the more behaviorally smart the shared information, the more likely it is going to move the needle toward increased transparency and gender equality.
Information disclosure can make us healthier, safer, wiser, and more responsible
It has the potential of reaping large benefits at relatively low cost, it remains an attractive tool for policy makers & regulators
is now increasingly being used to make organizations more diverse
comply-or-explain approach, government in effect sets a soft default for companies
Defines what it considers desired course of affairs & asks companies opting out to explain why. While not restricting choices, soft defaults create reference point that people dislike leaving
We need to help companies overcome the intention-action gap. Information disclosure, smartly designed, can help organizations act on their virtuous intentions to treat men and women equally & provide equal opportunities. Providing simple, salient, & comparative information helps
Generally, essays that had an Ashkenazi name were evaluated more favorably than those with a Sephardi name-with one exception: when raters knew they were to be held publicly accountable for their evaluations, the pro-Ashkenazi bias disappeared.
Accountability more likely to attenuate bias when ppl confront audience that is well informed, interested in accuracy, & w/legitimate reason to probe
It works because people care about what others think
works better when people know beforehand that they will be held accountable
Designing Change
collect data to understand whether and why there is gender inequality;
experiment with what might close gender gaps;
and informed by behavioral insights to create signposts, nudge behavior toward more equality
Oorspronkelijk getweet door Wilte Zijlstra (@wilte) op 15 september 2022.
wilte 