Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back and de-biasing minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Behavioral design offers a new solution. Iris Bohnet shows that by de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts—often at low cost and high speed.

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Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back and de-biasing minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Behavioral design offers a new solution. Iris Bohnet shows that by de-biasing organizations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts—often at low cost and high speed.

The promise of behavioral design

Today, women compose more than 35 percent of the most acclaimed orchestras, and they play great music. This did not happen by chance. Rather, it required the introduction of blind auditions. The Boston Symphony Orchestra was the first to ask musicians to audition behind a screen, and in the 1970s and 1980s most other major orchestras followed suit. When they did so, usually in preliminary rounds, it raised the likelihood that a female musician would advance by 50 percent and substantially increased the proportion of women hired.1Read more

Bias is built into our practices and procedures, not just into our minds.Read more

This book’s goal is to offer good designs to you; designs that make it easier for our biased minds to get things right. Based on research evidence, we can change the environments in which we live, learn, and work. My principal focus here is the stubborn, costly problem of gender inequality, but the recommendations I make stem from a wealth of research about decisions and behavior that go well beyond gender.Read more

Much like interior designers or landscape architects, behavioral designers create environments to help us better achieve our goals. They do not define goals, but they help us get there. Referred to as “choice architecture” in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s path-breaking book Nudge, behavioral design goes beyond law, regulation, or incentives, although it acknowledges that these are and will remain important.Read more

We do not always do what is best for ourselves, for our organizations, or for the world—and sometimes, a little nudge can help.4Read more

There is no design-free world. Organizations have to decide how to search for and select future employees. How they advertise open positions, where they post the job openings, how they evaluate applicants, how they create a short list, how they interview candidates, and how they make their final selections are all part of choice architecture. Why not design a bit more thoughtfully, increasing the chances that the best people are hired?Read more

How your company hires and promotes might well determine bottom-line performance. By changing the design, we change the outcome: good design can lead to positive outcomes—nudge by nudge. We begin by uncovering the root causes for certain behaviors and designing interventions accordingly. These root causes include one difficult truth: no one is immune from biases.Read more

Stereotypes serve as heuristics—rules of thumb—that allow us to process information more easily, but they are often inaccurate. What is worse, stereotypes describing how we believe the world to be often turn into prescriptions for what the world should be. Much psychological research shows that we cannot help but put people (and other observations) into categories. It rarely is a conscious thought process that informs our thinking about demographic groups. Rather, when we learn the sex of a person, gender biases are automatically activated, leading to unintentional and implicit discrimination.5Read more

On a micro-level, women have been found to put money to more productive use than men in several cases. In Ivory Coast, for example, there are “male” and “female” crops. Men grow coffee, cocoa, and pineapple; women grow plantains, bananas, coconuts, and vegetables. In years where the men’s crops have high yields, research shows, households spend more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have good harvests, in contrast, more money is spent on food.Read more

micro-evidence on the relevance of women’s inclusion stems from laboratory experiments measuring a group’s “collective intelligence” across a variety of tasks. Gender-diverse teams scored more highly on collective intelligence than all-male or all-female teams.Read more

While the macro- and the micro-evidence hold the promise of a business case, gender equality is not a magic bullet automatically leading to economic progress. This is why, at the end of the day, the case of gender equality must rest on a moral argument. It just is the right thing to do. Full stop.10Read more

Many games are positive sum, and here behavioral design is less like playing chess and more like dancing. We can improve girls’ health, education, and opportunities in India without harming those of boys. And we can select job candidates in organizations across the world based on individual performance rather than group stereotypes, increasing both efficiency and equality.Read more

At all levels, we need to create learning environments where people are encouraged to try out something new, possibly fail, and then learn from it.Read more

Governments and corporations must create safe spaces for experimentation where mistakes are taken as an opportunity to learn.

This fear of trying new things and failing is a real constraint. It is also the one that I had underestimated most. Learning is my business and, naively, I expected everyone to be keen on uncovering past mistakes and improving their decision making. However, in some organizations, acknowledging past errors is risky. Thus, while the CEO or the president might be enthusiastic about discovering mistakes and piloting a new idea, managers at all levels might well feel threatened. To circumvent this, governments and corporations must create safe spaces for experimentation where mistakes are taken as an opportunity to learn.Read more

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.Read more

Part 1: The problem

1 - Unconscious Bias Is Everywhere Read more

What is celebrated as entrepreneurship, self-confidence, and vision in a man is perceived as arrogance and self-promotion in a woman.Read more

Women can’t win. If they conform to the feminine stereotype of nurture and care for others, they tend to be liked but not respected.Read more

Women who violate norms pay a social price.

If women like Heidi demonstrate that they can do a “man’s job,” they no longer fit our mental model of the “ideal woman.” They violate norms, and people do not find norm violators appealing. Put differently, women who violate norms pay a social price.Read more

Erica Hall and collaborators suggest that a person’s gender profile is composed of the “genders” of a person’s sex and race and that we should take this gender profile into account to better understand gendered perceptions of occupational “fit.”3Read more

Women, thus, are in a double bind that men are not. They are perceived as either likable or competent but not both.Read more

“it is only women, not men, for whom a unique propensity toward dislike is created by success in nontraditional work.” This quote, from Madeline Heilman, one of the leading researchers in this field, can be rephrased more bluntly. Because of our biases, we tend to react to successful women much like we react to dishonest men: we do not like them and do not want to work with them.7Read more

A review of the evidence concludes that both women and men tend to be discriminated against in jobs that are associated with and dominated by the opposite sex. Men were discriminated against when seeking jobs as secretaries and women discriminated against when seeking jobs as engineers.8Read more

Glass ceiling effect

In their book Through the Labyrinth, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli discuss how gender stereotypes constrain women’s access to leadership roles. In particular, biases affected evaluations of women vying for the very top positions, or what is commonly known as the glass ceiling effect. In contrast to the entry level, there is no closure of the gender gap at the top in sight.10Read more

Female lawyers found it hardest to climb up the career ladder in countries where stereotypical thinking about gender roles was most pronounced, such as in the Russian Federation, Singapore, or Thailand, based on both survey data from the World Values Survey and the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index as well as data concerning each country’s gender gap in political representation. The playing field for female lawyers was more even in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, or Sweden.Read more

The authors identify this phenomenon as gender hierarchy threat. Female (but not male) subordinates whose objective performance was strong were punished by male (but not female) evaluators for violating gender norms.Read more

The bias against female upper-level managers is in our heads—or, to quote from one of my favorite textbooks on organizational economics by two Stanford economists, Paul Milgrom and John Roberts: “even if the beliefs are completely groundless, no disconfirming evidence ever is generated because women never get a chance to prove the beliefs are wrong. Thus, the baseless beliefs survive, and with them, the unjustified discrimination.”13Read more

Our minds are not well equipped to deal with what is commonly known as survivor bias.

Our minds are not well equipped to deal with what is commonly known as survivor bias. We constantly make inferences based on biased samples. The archetypal example is a study of World War II bombers. With the hope of making them safer, the planes were examined for weaknesses after they returned from their bombing runs. But, of course, these were the wrong planes to examine. They were just the ones that made it back. To learn about weaknesses, one would have had to examine all the planes—or, as Abraham Wald, a mathematician at Columbia University, concluded at the time, the scientists should not have looked for the bullet holes the returning planes had, but for the bullet holes they did not have. It was these other “holes” that determined whether a plane made it back or not.Read more

Some intuitive judgments are based on accurate stereotypes that reflect the true distribution of a given group’s characteristics.Read more

About one third of all surgeons in the United States are female, so it is not that surprising that when we think of “surgeon” we also first think “man.” Economists refer to this as statistical discrimination. People base their assessment of an individual person on group averages. They do this intuitively, as in the above example. They also do this to help them in situations where they do not have complete information about an individual’s relevant characteristics.Read more

We clearly use group characteristics all the time when judging individuals. These judgments have real consequences—no less real than those resulting from unconscious biases.Read more

The child salary penalty is a well-known statistical fact for women, as is the child salary premium for men. Some of this is due to statistical discrimination, with employers expecting that mothers will be more likely than fathers to cut back on their hours and, maybe, leave the workforce altogether.Read more

In his 2011 masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, helps us understand how this works. He introduces the reader to two modes of thinking, System 1 and System 2, a distinction often used in psychology. Our intuitive System 1 runs automatically, without much effort or control. It assesses information quickly. Some might say it makes snap judgments and employs a number of mechanisms to deal with life’s complexity. It uses heuristics, or rules of thumb, to interpret the world and relies on categories represented by archetypes. The deliberative System 2, in contrast, is based on conscious reasoning, requires effort, and is controlled.Read more

Most of us form first impressions based on social categories, such as sex, race, age, or social class.Read more

Matching people to existing social categories helps us quickly make sense of the world, sizing up and classifying people based on our experiences. In short, we are economizing our cognitive effort.Read more

Depressingly, unlearning is basically impossible

Depressingly, unlearning is basically impossible. Once an initial category-based assessment has been made, thereafter new information is interpreted in a biased way, favoring consistency with the initial impression, a process known as confirmatory categorization.Read more

Unfortunately, perfect competition hardly exists, and relying on it to eliminate taste-based discrimination will not succeed. Other hammers will remain important, including laws giving everyone equal rights, protecting people from discrimination and exploitation, and deterring wrong-doers by making the cost of doing so greater than the benefits.Read more

Far from all gender inequities are the result of unconscious bias, which is only one of the culprits unjustly disadvantaging some and benefiting others. And behavioral interventions are one instrument in our collective toolbox to correct for these injustices. Biases are, however, a clear cause of inequality, and behavioral designs can accomplish things that hammers cannot. There is no better tool in that toolbox to harvest some of the lowest hanging fruit. Women should not have to choose between competence and likability, nor should organizations and society be deprived of their best talent.Read more

2  - De-Biasing Minds Is Hard

2 De-Biasing Minds Is HardRead more

The price of succumbing to self-serving bias can be high. It tends to prolong disputes, make the parties more hostile, and lead to impasses or costly resolutions in court. Wouldn’t it be better if we could de-bias people before they begin negotiating and help them form more accurate judgments? What if we could assist people in overcoming unconscious biases, leaving stereotypical thinking behind and becoming less prejudiced?Read more

There is evidence suggesting that bias awareness can help overcome the need to conform to stereotypes by triggering what psychologists refer to as stereotype reactance.Read more

It may be that bias awareness works when the bias can be attributed to others, similar to stereotype reactance where people respond to others’ biases.2Read more

People are quite ready to see biases in others, but they overlook the very same biases in themselves.Read more

They simply asserted their impression of his appearance, believing inaccurately that whether or not they liked someone held no influence.Read more

People routinely fall prey to the halo effect. A term coined by the psychologist Edward Thorndike, this effect occurs when an initial positive impression of a person impacts how favorably the person is subsequently perceived.Read more

When asked how susceptible they think they are to biases or stereotypical judgments, study participants conclude routinely that they are less biased than the average.3Read more

In extreme cases, instructions to resist stereotypes had the opposite effect, making stereotypes more salient and leading to an increase in biased judgments.Read more

The same is true of hindsight bias. Sometimes referred to as the “knew-it-all-along effect,” it says that people tend to see the present as more predictable than it really was.Read more

Baruch Fischhoff, an early contributor to this research, argued that for de-biasing to have any meaningful impact, it must involve at a minimum the following four steps: awareness of the possibility of bias; understanding of the direction of the bias; immediate feedback when falling prey to the bias, and a training program with regular feedback, analysis, and coaching.Read more

Often, we do not realize that we are biased, and even more often we do not receive feedback in time to link a specific decision or behavior to our bias.Read more

changing behavior means work that the vast majority of us are not motivated to do.Read more

People who are already cognitively busy have been found to make more superficial judgments and use sexist language. It may be that people were too depleted to exert the self-control that is required to create a truly inclusive work environment.Read more

Diversity training programs may lead to moral licensing, where people respond to having done something good by doing more of something bad. A particularly noteworthy experiment illustrating this point was conducted in Taiwan. Some people were told that they had been given multivitamins while others were told they had received placebos. The people who thought they had taken the multivitamin were found to be more likely to smoke and less likely to exercise or choose healthy foods.Read more

At this point we have to conclude that diversity training either does not work or, at the very least, that we do not have enough evidence to know whether and under what conditions it does any good. Read more

You might have heard of perspective-taking. It is advice that you will get in almost any negotiation course. To negotiate more effectively, this advice runs, you should try to walk in your counterparts’ shoes, take their perspective, understand where they are coming from. Although it turned out not to have a big impact in the legal dispute case that opened this chapter, perspective-taking has been shown to impact people’s beliefs in other contexts.Read more

Empathic perspective-taking will prove to be an important element of successful diversity training

Perhaps empathic perspective-taking will prove to be an important element of successful diversity training.11Read more

They experimented with what many perceive as the most general-purpose de-biasing strategy, namely a consider-the-opposite approach. This process encourages participants to play devil’s advocate with themselves and come up with arguments for why their thinking, including their conclusions, might be wrong.Read more

meta-analysis on automatic stereotype reduction suggests that a similar technique might also work for gender. Instructing individuals to “think counterstereotypical thoughts” about the social category or making counterstereotypes salient through exposure helped reduce automatic stereotypes, although the effect sizes were rather small, and it remained largely unknown how long the effects would last.12Read more

Considering the opposite is part of how to think strategies that also include logical reasoning and statistical methods.Read more

A person’s judgment can be improved even without outside forecasts by thinking up several forecasts, picking the average, and in effect benefiting from the crowd within. Read more

Research suggests that using this crowd-within approach significantly improves judgmental accuracy.15Read more

Finally, there is evidence that there is a different sort of wisdom that arises from a crowd, wisdom that could prove useful to problems broader than employee diversity training.Read more

Maybe the pathway to behavioral change is not a change in individual beliefs but instead a change in the socially shared definitions of appropriate behavior. Read more

Given all the evidence, what should an organization determined to run a diversity training program do? I urge companies to refocus the training on capacity building and adopt the framework unfreeze-change-refreeze, based on a method of one of the pioneers of applied social and organizational psychology, Kurt Lewin, and borrowed from my friend Max Bazerman, who together with Don Moore uses it in their wise book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. You should not just focus on raising awareness, but also offer specific tools that help people make better decisions. Finally, think of ways you can refreeze the new insights gained and the new behaviors learned.17Read more

Successful unfreezing happens when people start to question their current strategies and become curious about alternatives. Experiencing one’s own biases, in an IAT for example, can be one such wake-up call. You should start your trainings with an unfreezing exercise. Unfreezing was also the goal of the previous chapter. By experiencing some of our own biases and learning that we are all in this together, we become curious about what went wrong, why, and what we might be able to do about it. The promise of behavioral design is that it offers an unobtrusive, low-cost way of changing behavior.Read more

Leaving the known, the status quo, for the unknown future bears risk. To make matters worse, a review of the status quo might reveal that past practices were inadequate and possibly counterproductive. Such learning can be painful, even threatening.Read more

I cannot overstate the importance of testing and measuring what works and what does not.Read more

Designing Gender Equality

Designing Gender Equality—Change Practices and Procedures Stop simple diversity training focused on raising awareness. Follow an unfreeze-change-refreeze framework. Train people in more reasoned judgment strategies, such as consider-the-opposite or the crowd-within approach.Read more

3 - Doing It Yourself Is Risky

3 Doing It Yourself Is RiskyRead more

women were less likely to negotiate than men, and if they dared to negotiate, people in my role would like them less.Read more

we were a group of social scientists determined to unpack why it was that women did not seem to have a comfortable seat at the negotiating table and what to do about it.Read more

Much of this chapter draws on this research and the follow-up investigations it helped spur.1

Over a series of four experiments, their work explained women’s disinclination to negotiate forcefully on their own behalf by showing that “asking” penalized women in a way it did not harm men. The first experiment focused on hiring and used undergraduate students role-playing a bank manager. The participants were presented with a request from a job candidate setting out a number of demands. The job candidate was given a gender-neutral name. The study found that participants’ negative reactions to the demanding job candidate were much larger when referred to throughout as “she” than for the candidate referred to throughout as “he.”Read more

While most evidence on discrimination suggests that the sex of the evaluator is less important than the sex of the evaluated, it is not uncommon that lower-status individuals, in this case women, are more concerned about violating norms when confronted with a high-status individual, in this case a male evaluator.Read more

Willingness to negotiate also affects career advancement, as a former student of mine, Fiona Greig, found in a US investment bank. Women bankers again proved less likely to negotiate than their male peers. And those more willing to negotiate advanced more quickly in the firm than their less assertive colleagues. There is more. Greig demonstrated that a candidate’s assertiveness had nothing to do with his or her performance, meaning the more assertive employee, but not necessary the best performer, was being promoted.3Read more

Not only did employers counter women’s already lower demands with more stingy counter-offers, they responded less positively when women tried to self-promote.Read more

Neither disregarding nor exploiting gender norms is wise, let alone fair. What then should managers do? Before telling you what strategy I followed, it is important for you to be broadly familiar with the evidence.Read more

Work Rules. Analyzing their data, they had found a gender gap: women were less likely to nominate themselves for a promotion than their male counterparts.Read more

Council of Women World Leaders: “Women when they display anger come off as too aggressive. You know there’s an old saying: men are too aggressive when they bomb countries, women are too aggressive when they put you on hold on the phone.”Read more

Women do not simply prefer saying less. Rather, in response to their environments, they understand that the “male way” might not work for them and so behave differently. This encapsulates the gender inequality bind that women find themselves in. The “male way” is the accepted way of advancement, but it not only doesn’t work for women, women who adopt it are penalized for doing so. Women cannot break the ice on their own.11Read more

Everyone would have benefited if men and women, and in particular the top women, had offered their opinions more often. But even in the safety of anonymity, even the most informed women held back. They fell prey to self-stereotyping.Read more

So, on becoming dean, I decided to do a few things differently: first, I watched who asked. It was very tempting to infer from the act of asking that the person wanted something very badly and thus was also the most motivated to do the best job. Familiar with evidence refuting that assumption, I worked to keep it in check. Second, I kept track meticulously of what people asked for. It is very difficult to avoid being affected by the demands put on the table, and I did not want to respond to just these requests. Negotiation scholars call this anchoring. If men ask for more than women, then the typical negotiation dance in which the parties move closer to decrease the gap between demands and offers yields a gender gap in pay. Thus, rather than focusing on my counterpart’s demands, I anchored myself at the going market rate and internal comparators. Third, I invited my counterparts to ask for what they wanted and needed—obviously, without promising that I could deliver. I tried to be as transparent as I possibly could about what was negotiable. Finally, I monitored the Kennedy School’s compensation packages, promotion rates, pay raises and other relevant data by gender (and other characteristics) to make sure we did not inadvertently discriminate against a particular category of people.Read more

The negotiation dilemma completely disappears when women negotiate for someone else

One additional and important piece of evidence I always leave my students with is that in many negotiations we negotiate on behalf of others. For me, this is one of the most empowering research findings. The negotiation dilemma completely disappears when women negotiate for someone else. This has no influence on men, but it gives women a great boost.Read more

However skilled you might be, overcoming biased environments on your own—in the workplace and at home, in Zambia or the United States—is hard and risky. In the spring of 2014, the failed attempt of an academic at negotiating a tenure-track job offer made the news in the United States. After she had made a few demands, the college withdrew the offer. A New Yorker article commenting on the case was aptly entitled “Lean Out: The Dangers for Women Who Negotiate.”Read more

The labeled cash transfer equivalents to helping women negotiate more effectively are transparency, relational accounts, and negotiating on behalf of someone else. While the latter two are helpful strategies that women should adopt, transparency is the design feature that countries and organizations should implement immediately. Read more

Redesigning the context in which women and men negotiate works in the same way. The labeled cash transfer equivalents to helping women negotiate more effectively are transparency, relational accounts, and negotiating on behalf of someone else. While the latter two are helpful strategies that women should adopt, transparency is the design feature that countries and organizations should implement immediately.Read more

Increasing transparency is low-hanging fruit. It is an easy and practical de-biasing design. Failing to do it is not just ethically dubious, it is very much like leaving the most fertile plot you own undertilled.Read more

Designing Gender Equality Read more

Create Equal Opportunities for Negotiation

4 - Getting Help Only Takes You So Far

4 Getting Help Only Takes You So FarRead more

With biases being so deeply ingrained in our unconscious minds, trying to de-bias people via diversity training has proven to be challenging. Asking women to do it themselves has been difficult and often risky, for women leaning in can experience backlash. If women cannot quite do it on their own, can they be much more successful with help?Read more

Designing Gender Equality—Build Capacity Read more

Notes extracted and edited with Kintrospect