Go Beyond Bias to Achieve Equality

What DEI trainings get wrong and how to effect systemic change

Anti-bias training might mean well, but it doesn’t work. Even if training brings attention to it, bias is still unconscious in the moment, say gender bias experts Andie Kramer and Al Harris. Instead, to eliminate bias in decision-making, organizations need to revamp the systems that allow bias to creep in and change the context in which decisions are made. Their third book together, “Beyond Bias: The PATH to Ending Gender Inequality and Work,” examines why debiasing doesn’t achieve the goals it sets and what methods would work instead. They sat with BOSS to discuss their findings.

“No study has ever confirmed that teaching people to be more aware of their biases in any way improves their behavior in the sense of leading it to become less biased,” Harris said.

People are simply not aware of when bias is influencing a decision. We have a thought and we act on it, we don’t slow down deliberation enough to trace the origins of that thought. The solution, then, is changing the input.

The Status Quo

Every publicly held corporation in the U.S. is required to give the Securities Exchange Commission the names and some identifying information of CEOs, CFOs, and the next three highest-compensated employees in their organization. Of these named executive officers, only 12% are women, which provides a snapshot into the state of gender inequality at the highest rungs of the corporate ladder.

“Corporations, law firms, the medical profession all made enormous progress during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s,” Harris said. “Since the 1990s, however, there’s been little or no progress. We are sort of stuck.”

On average, women are just as task confident, task competent, and just as assertive as men in the workplace. So, it’s clear bias is at play in decisions about who moves up. In analyzing practices at a law firm where she worked before starting her own, Kramer found that senior attorneys evaluating junior staff characterized the same behaviors differently depending on the gender of the employee. When evaluators use open-ended questions to judge performance, they get very different impressions than if they ask about core competencies. Something as simple as changing the questions used in evaluations can give a much clearer picture of who the top performers are without allowing bias to color things differently.

Too often, we put the onus on women to figure out how to overcome the inherent disadvantages they face at work, she said. Even Kramer and Harris’ first two books were aimed at women, providing a pathway to getting around the biases of others.

“It’s not the women’s problem at all,” Kramer said. “This time we thought, ‘We’re tired of talking about what women can do. It’s time really to talk about what organizations need to do.’”

PATH to Equality

In the new book, Kramer and Harris lay out four changes organizations can make in their approach to equality.

• Prioritize Elimination of Exclusionary Behavior: “The issue there is that very often, even if you try to have a diverse workplace, if women are feeling excluded and not part of the solution, then they get very isolated and discouraged and don’t stick around. So, one of the things is that you really have to focus on exclusionary behavior,” Kramer said.
• Adopt Bias-Free Methods of Decision-Making: “How do we make sure that women and men get the same opportunity to even have an interview?” Studies have shown that if given the exact same resume, once with a man’s name on it and again with a woman’s name, the man gets invited back more often, offered a higher salary, and is welcomed with more mentoring opportunities.
• Treat Inequality in the Home as a Workplace Problem: That doesn’t mean making private decisions for couples about whose career they should emphasize over the others, but it does mean acknowledging that women tend to shoulder more of the burden of domestic work and thus miss out on opportunities for career advancement. Flexible schedules, childcare options, and paid parental leave can make a world of difference. “We’re not talking about something for women. We’re talking about something for everybody, and if the men actually do start rowing the boat in the same direction as their wives or significant others, miraculously you could see some real significant changes.”

• Halt Unequal Performance Evaluations and Leadership Development Opportunities: This covers things like the above examples of objectively focused performance evaluations and blind resumes. It also includes opportunities for advancement. “Very often men are told, ‘Hey, you really ought to go for this new position that’s offered, you’re ready for a promotion.’ Women do not get that same advice. They are not considered in the leadership training programs or otherwise.”

Concrete Steps

“What I do want to say, though, is that we’re very careful to make it clear that even small wins, little, tiny steps forward can make significant differences,” Kramer said.

So, if your company isn’t in a position to offer subsidized childcare or months of paid parental leave, that doesn’t mean you can’t make progress toward gender equality. Rather than leave it up to managers to assign projects with no specific criteria, organizations can set evidence-based criteria for doling them out. Or they can make those assignments in a collaborative process with two people explaining their reasoning for picking who gets the project and making a joint decision.

When it comes to new hires or promotions, organizations can screen information about employees’ social identities. In other words, decision-makers see the accomplishments and qualifications of the applicants but not their names or other identifying information.

“If we think about prioritizing exclusionary behaviors, a concrete step that organizations can take would be to convene a committee of their employees that would formulate a policy, a specific policy that would specify the types of behavior that would be unacceptable in their workplace,” Harris said. “That is, to get people to start actually specifying what kind of behavior don’t they want to see their organization engage in. And when people do that, then have a chance to look at that, criticize it, and adopt it, lo and behold, people in fact get on board.”

Empowering and encouraging employees to call out examples of inequality makes for a better workplace for all. The big challenge here is that people in general don’t like change and are hesitant to embrace it.

One of the ways to change minds is “the constant demonstration of how much better the world looks if the changes that we’re talking about are made than it does right now.”

As examples pile up, that 12% figure can go up and we can get back to progress.