Why DEI efforts are not helping women get ahead—and what needs to change so they do
By Andrea Kramer and Alton Harris
Initiatives to strengthen diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are ubiquitous. According to Gallup, most companies (85%) have anti-bias training, nearly three-quarters (73%) have focused DEI training for managers, and more than half (52%) have mentoring and sponsorship programs. Yet, despite the time, resources, and attention devoted to DEI, very few organizations have made meaningful progress toward increasing the proportion of women in their senior leadership ranks, much less building truly inclusive workplace cultures.
The problem is that most organizations’ efforts to end workplace gender inequality are misdirected. Indeed, there is a fundamental misconception at the heart of the great majority of DEI initiatives.
A flawed approach
In many training courses, workshops, videos, role-playing exercises, prescribed reading, and moderated discussions, DEI programs assume that workplace gender inequality is a problem caused by individuals’ biased decision-making and behavior. Because of this, these programs in various ways seek to make people more knowledgeable about the nature and extent of discriminatory effects of these biases; aware of their own (generally unconscious) biases; and on guard against the biases influencing their decisions and behavior.
In other words, the fundamental assumption underlying these programs is that by making individuals knowledgeable about and aware of the discriminatory biases, individuals will decide to behave in fair, objective, and inclusive ways—and women will cease to encounter the gendered barriers they now face in seeking to advance in their careers.
The obvious problem, however, is that this effort to “debias” individuals has accomplished little in reducing workplace gender inequality. A quick look at the scant progress that has been made in increasing the proportion of women in positions of senior leadership should make this all too apparent. As Sheen Levine and her colleagues recently observed, “researchers have documented surprisingly feeble outcomes associated with diversity-training sessions, initiatives to reduce prejudices, and implicit-bias training.”
These outcomes have been “feeble” because gender inequality is not primarily a problem driven by individuals’ biases; it is a systemic problem driven by the discriminatory operation of the day-to-day, taken-for-granted, “normal” operation of companies’ personnel management practices. The unequal career outcomes experienced by women and men are due to gendered norms, values, and expectations underlying these personnel practices, what Sapna Cheryan and Hazel-Rose Markus call “masculine defaults.” As they write, in our workplaces, “characterizations and behaviors typically associated with men are . . . considered standard practice.” As a result, “the doors are often presented as open for both men and women, which makes it seem like there’s equal opportunity; but the workplace rewards and favors standard stereotypically masculine characteristics and behaviors.”
Because of these masculine defaults, personnel decision-making operates (typically implicitly) on the false assumption that men are better than women at performing demanding workplace tasks, fulfilling challenging responsibilities, and exercising stressful leadership roles. Cecilia Ridgeway calls these assumptions “status beliefs.” That is, beliefs in the essential superiority of men to women with respect to all things relevant to career advancement.
Organizations cannot eliminate gender inequality in their workplaces unless they directly challenge the masculine defaults and status beliefs embodied in their personnel management practices. This means that organizations need to shift the focus of their DEI efforts from training individuals to be less biased to directly countering the structural discrimination inherent in these practices. In our forthcoming book, Beyond Bias: The PATH to End Gender Inequality at Work, we present a four-prong program—PATH—for doing precisely that.
- Prioritize elimination of exclusionary behavior.
- Adopt bias-free methods of decision-making.
- Treat inequality in the home as a workplace problem.
- Halt unequal performance evaluations and leadership development opportunities.
In the book, we lay out a comprehensive set of actions organizations can take to counter the masculine defaults and status beliefs that create gendered obstacles that are holding women back. Thus, organizations need a new approach to DEI, an approach that will make their workplaces more fair, equitable, and inclusive for everyone.
A new approach
Personnel decision-making—including hiring, allocating responsibilities, staffing projects, setting compensation, and deciding on promotions—is perhaps the most obvious source of women’s and men’s unequal workplace authority, resources, and status. PATH, therefore, identifies seven decision-making techniques organizations can use to assure their personnel decision-making is highly resistant to the masculine defaults and status beliefs—systemic discrimination.
1. “Screen” social identity.
Perhaps the simplest change that companies can make to eliminate the possibility of masculine defaults and status beliefs influencing personnel decision-making is to “screen” decision-makers from information that they should not consider in making such decisions. For example, by removing all information about the social identities of employees being considered for a particular position—their gender, race, ethnicity, parental status, age, sexual orientation, and so on—these characteristics cannot influence the final decision.
The effectiveness of this technique is illustrated by a study that found that when résumés included information about applicants’ social identities, only about 20% of non-white, non-male, and non-able-bodied applicants made it to the first-round interview. When social identities were screened off from decision-makers, however, 60% of these non-advantaged applicants made it to a first-round interview.
2. Specify objective evaluation criteria.
When personnel decisions must be based on and justified in terms of clear, specific, and objective criteria, those decisions are highly resistant to irrelevant and discriminatory factors. In contrast, when decision-makers have only vague, ambiguous, or highly subjective criteria on which to base their personnel decisions, they are forced, as Stanford professor Shelley Correll and her colleagues observe, to engage in “a sense-making process in which widely shared [status] beliefs frame their observations, interpretations, and valuation of employee behavior.” This sense-making process often results in different evaluations of similar performances, depending on whether the performers are men or women.
3. Nudge slow thinking.
When decision-makers use what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “slow thinking,” they are unlikely to fall back on masculine defaults or status beliefs. This is because slow thinking involves careful, deliberative, and objective consideration of relevant information.
Fast thinking, in contrast, is automatic, effortless, and done without conscious awareness. We think fast most of the time, and normally it serves us quite well. The problem with fast thinking, however, is that when we use it to evaluate performances or to make personnel decisions, our evaluations and decisions are likely to be systematically biased, reflecting whether we like or dislike, approve or disapprove of, and are comfortable or uncomfortable with the people under consideration. Fast thinking, therefore, is the enemy of fair personnel decision-making.
There are a variety of techniques that organizations can use to nudge their decision-makers to think slow when making such decisions. For example, organizations can require that personnel decisions be made collaboratively by two or more people, on an explicitly comparative basis, or in writing, with the justification for the decision reviewed by a third party. These are all decision-making processes that demand slow thinking.
4. Limit discretion.
Limiting discretion in areas that might be influenced by masculine defaults or status beliefs is another technique that assures an increase in fairness. For example, companies could stipulate that:
- all teams must be composed of, say, at least 30% women,
- all employees at specified career stages must receive similar types of projects and responsibilities, and
- all candidate pools for promotion must consist of, say, at least, 50% women.
While these stipulations still leave decision-makers a considerable measure of autonomy, they assure that the ultimate decision will include the consideration of women.
5. Separate personnel evaluations from personnel decisions.
Organizations can also reduce the influence of discriminatory factors by separating personnel evaluations from personnel decisions. Although Google is struggling with diversifying its senior leadership and workforce, we think Google’s hiring process could be on the right path.
Initial interviewing of prospective candidates is done by diverse teams of employees drawn from across the company. These teams then prepare written reports of their assessments of candidates’ strengths and weaknesses. Google’s hiring committee then uses these reports to make final hiring decisions. The goal of this process is to make sure that interviewers’ subjective, possibly biased, reactions to the candidates—whether because of personal affinity, masculine defaults, or status beliefs—do not influence the ultimate hiring decisions.
6. Use diverse teams of decision-makers.
Organizations with diverse and inclusive leadership teams are more innovative, better able to reach solutions to complex problems, and more effective in dealing with unanticipated situations than are homogeneous leadership teams. Likewise, diverse and inclusive teams are more likely to make fairer and more objective personnel decisions than homogeneous teams. Organizations can significantly limit the influence of masculine defaults and status beliefs by ensuring that the teams making personnel decisions have a balance of men and women.
7. Monitor decision-making patterns.
When decision-makers know that their rationales for making personnel decisions will be reviewed, they are far more likely to make those decisions in thoughtful, evidence-based, and unbiased ways than they would be if their decisions were not being reviewed. When decision-makers know that their decisions will be evaluated by a third party—say, a chief diversity officer or diversity committee—they will inevitably seek to be seen as thoughtful, principled, and fully in line with the organization’s objectives. In our work we have found that all of us want to be thought of as fair and objective decision-makers.
Eliminating discrimination
All of these structural constraints on personnel decision-making are designed to prevent the decision-makers from considering factors that they should not consider in making those decisions—factors susceptible to triggering masculine defaults, status beliefs, and other discriminatory factors. In this way, organizations can ensure that these decisions are made on the basis of the factors that should be considered.
By focusing on structural issues, we are not saying that DEI programs should ignore individuals’ unconscious biases. Of course, these biases must be recognized and countered, but this needs to be done other than through anti-bias training. By neutralizing the systemic discrimination inherent in workplace systems, processes, and practices, companies can change the context within which individuals evaluate, make decisions about, and behave toward other workplace participants. And in such a changed workplace context, decision-makers’ decisions and behaviors are far less susceptible to the influence of masculine defaults and status beliefs.
When companies change their personnel decision-making processes to eliminate the possibility of structural discrimination, they also eliminate the workplace context that fosters individuals’ biased behavior. In other words, organizational change leads to behavioral change; the two go together, and one cannot happen without the other.
Andrea Kramer and Alton Harris are communication and gender bias experts. Their new book, Beyond Bias: The PATH to End Gender Inequality at Work, will be released by Nicholas Brealey this May.
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