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We're in a period right now that gender scholars have called
the Stalled Gender Revolution.
And what this means, if you look at all kinds of data,
what you see is in the 1970s we started to see a rapid closing,
and narrowing of gender inequality.
So the gender wage gap, for example, starts to go down rapidly in the 1970s.
More women are flooding in the paid labor, women are being promoted.
You get to the 1980s, progress is still being made.
Although it's a little bit slower, and by the time we hit the mid 90s,
change has kind of flattened out.
So things aren't getting worse, but
we haven't seen a lot of progress in the move towards gender equality lately.
So we're a bit stuck and
my take on that, the reason that we're stuck is that we haven't effectively
changed work enough to accommodate who's actually in our workplaces today.
And then,
once we do that we're going to see a jump start towards more gender equality
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One thing that we know is stereotypes do limit women's advancement.
But they do so not because people necessarily have explicit stereotypes
about men versus women, but that they have more unconscious or
implicit kind of associations about what men are like and what women are like.
And those implicit associations then affect how we see someone's performance,
how we judge their behavior and can creates sort of slight differences and
the ways that we've been evaluate men and women in the workplace.
So this unconscious and explicit advice is I think are one of the biggest barriers
that we're still up against today,
when we think about how we can move more women into leadership.
Often we have two narrow of a conception of leaders.
Leaders are these autocratic kind of to risk taking sort of people, and our
stereotypes of that leaders about leaders overlap with our stereotypes about man.
Such that men often look naturally more leader like to us, but
if we broad in this stereotypes of leadership, that creates a more expansive
view of leadership and one in which women are likely to be seen as more successful.
So if stereotypes are causing us to see some people as more talented than they
are and other people as less talented than they are, it's interfering with
the goal of being truly meritocratic and is blocking innovation.
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In what ways can we introduce policies, and procedures, and
tools into the workplace that cause people, once stereotypes creep
into their head, to be aware of that, and stop and move beyond the stereotypes?
So the goal is rather than relying on some stereotype about how men and
women are, we would instead have some sort of procedure in place,
that would allow us to more effectively evaluate the true talents and
abilities of people and therefore block the effects of bias among judgments.
We have to help people first see biases.
So I do a lot of work with teaching people about the way that stereotypes work.
Because until you see how stereotypes work, you're not going to be aware of how
it could be affecting your judgement, and I should just add, just to be clear here
is that the stereotypes affect all of our judgments, women as well as men.
We see that very clearly.
You've rarely find that a situation where men are lot more biased than women.
These are unconscious stereotypes.
We have to help people see them first so that seeing bias is kind of key.
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One of things that has been really encouraging to me in this work is how many
really well intentioned people there are out there.
Men and women who want to get beyond bias.
So the question is can we help them do that?
So what I've been doing is working with
a lot of different companies to help them create tools.
And so, we have some ideas about the kinds of things that work in general.
So for example, we know that when people have clear criteria for
say a promotion decision, that's very clearly articulated.
And I read and study that criteria before they evaluate job applicants,
stereotypes are much less likely to affect their judgments.
One thing that we noticed that when people are making decisions
is sometimes the criteria they use to judge people will shift around
depending upon whether they're evaluating a woman or a man.
I saw a great example that comes from psychology, shows that when people
were evaluating psychology faculty they were way more likely to say, well,
I would need to see if she was a good teacher before I could hire her.
But that criteria hadn't been raised when they were evaluating a man so
it's a perfectly legitimate criteria.
You would want a professor to be a good teacher, but
it was being applied much more heavily to women than to men.
So one of our tools is for
someone in the group to be noticing when new criteria are being raised.
And to say something like, if we're going to consider teaching I
think we should go back and consider that for all of the candidates.
So that we're using the same criteria.
That too blocks the use of stereotypes.
So there's a variety of kinds of things like that, that we can do to not eliminate
the unconscious stereotypes that are happening in our heads but
to block their negative effects and
to be sure that we're evaluating people by criteria and not by stereotypes
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Imagine a company wants to say do better on its diversity and
inclusion indicators and the CEO comes out and says,
this is one of our main priorities, and we're really want to work hard on this.
And that's great, they had that kind of support from the toughest essential, but
what we find is that support from the top kind of trickles down.
And it's affecting sort of managers at kind of higher levels, but
once it gets to kind of the mid level of the organization, it often gets stuck.
So we got this CEO supporting change at the top,
you've got people at the bottom that are agitating for change, but
you get to that middle level, and that's what we called the frozen middle.
It's a place where organizational change often gets stuck specially in diversity
and inclusion.
And so, our goal in working on these projects,
is to really try work at that frozen middle.
That is to develop these tools to block bias
by working directly with people managers.
And by working directly with people managers, what we are hoping to do
is enlisting down and the support of creating the tools helps create buyer,
at that level we're changed, otherwise get stuck.
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There's something that's actually really quite easy to do and
that is we can share the accomplishments of other women in our networks at work.
One thing that we know is that stereotypes cause women to be seen as less confident
than they actually are.
And that's what limits women's advancement.
Women can't fix this problem themselves.
You can't as a woman, if people aren't noticing your accomplishments,
you can't just say, I'm brilliant, for example.
There'd be all kinds of backlash directed at you.
But one thing that we can do is taut other women's accomplishments.
So I think being very mindful of giving attention the accomplishments of women in
the organization is hugely important.
So individuals can do this.
Organizations as well, I think.
Announcing through department newsletters and things like that,
the accomplishments of their women employees are crucially important for
raising those women's status and for starting to fracture the stereotypes that
we have that are leading us to cause us to see women as less competent then they are.
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