The Experimenter Series: Gender Equality with Siri Chilazi
The experimenter series is a collection of interviews with people pioneering experiments in organisations. This time, we speak to researcher and speaker Siri Chilazi from Harvard Kennedy School about achieving equality in the workplace with behavioural science.
Siri is a Research Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School and specialises in helping organisations achieve gender equality. She co-designed the Gender Proportionality Principle, which is described in this HBR article. She also led the academic study on the influential 50:50 project at the BBC.
“We have to study and understand what works and what doesn't to advance D&I and equity in order to maximize our progress.”
— Siri Chilazi
Gus: Hi Siri, lovely to be speaking with you! To kick things off, let’s talk about the fact that a lot of organisations want to do the right thing when it comes to D&I and often try this by setting targets. Why might it be hard to hit those, and why should we also focus on smaller interventions?
Siri: Targets are a form of outcome goals. They are set by the company themselves, so there’s no external party involved and there's no external accountability or punishment. If the organisation doesn't meet its targets, the only one who's going to suffer is them. That distinction is important because there's a lot of backlash and opposition to quotas, which are mandates set by a legislator outside the organisation, and this creates opposition because organisations feel like their business is being meddled into. But when we're talking about targets, that's similar to the way companies manage core aspects of their business already, in a metrics-driven way. If you're a company that offers any kind of service or product, you will have revenue and profit targets. If and when setting D&I targets evokes some hesitancy, it says a lot about how we approach inclusion, and perhaps why we haven’t been making the progress we’d like to see in the D&I realm. It’s because we haven't approached it with the same seriousness and with the same evidence-based rigour that we approach other parts of business.
To answer your question, the research identifies two types of goals, both of which are very effective to drive performance. The first being outcome goals, which are what we often think of. ‘We need to reach X percent women in senior leadership, so we need to reach X percent of mean hiring.’ We focus on a specific outcome we want to achieve, and set a specific target around that outcome.
Process goals, however, are also shown to drive behaviour change. They are constructed around things like hiring, performance evaluation and promotions, which places them closer to the individual sphere of influence. An example could be aiming to have 50% of the final slate of candidates considered for an open position be women. Such process goals can be easier to tackle in the short term, particularly in large organisations. You, as a single manager, might look at this big organisation where they have a D&I target and think: ‘Oh, we need to get to 50% women in senior leadership. I'm only one manager out of thousands, what can I possibly do to help us reach that goal?’ It can seem very far removed from you. Whilst when you are making the final hiring or promotion decision, adhering to a D&I process goal is much more achievable as an individual manager.
“We haven’t been making the progress we’d like to see in the D&I realm. It’s because we haven’t approached it with the same seriousness and with the same evidence-based rigour that we approach other parts of business.”
G: That’s a fascinating point, I suppose you bring it to the forefront of people’s minds and make it part of their daily work experience in this way, right?
S: Yes, and it makes the connection between a big outcome that you want to see and the many smaller action steps that we do to get there. It’s like the weight loss analogy: if you want to lose a certain amount of weight, you have to change your behaviour in other areas to make it happen. Maybe you start drinking more water, you start exercising more, you change what you eat. Those things are connected, but you won't be able to get to your end goal on the scale without tackling some of those behaviour changes and taking concrete steps. The process goals help us stay focused on the right behaviour changes that could then get us to the end goal.
What we can also see in organisations is that they sometimes solely focus on process goals because they seem safer than outcome goals. I wouldn’t advise this either, as it signals that the organisation is not taking D&I very seriously. Ultimately what we care about are the outcomes. The process changes are a necessary step to get there, but we don't just want interviewees to be 50% women for the sake of doing it. We want to interview them so that we hire more women.
G: That’s fair. Speaking of steps to get there, what is the Gender Proportionality Principle (GPP) and what should organisations learn from your research on it?
“The biggest objection we get from organisations is: ‘We’d love to hire more women, but we just can’t find them.’
Well, I don’t believe that because the data is clear that they are in the pipeline, i.e., at the lower levels of organisations. The GPP highlights and addresses that. All you need to do is develop, grow, and promote your women. ”
S: The idea behind the GPP is that most organisations, especially when it comes to gender representation, have this pyramidal shape where there are more women at the bottom levels, and then the representation of women drops every level you go higher. The proportionality principle is one simple goal that organisations can set to increase gender equality and the representation of women, regardless of where they start. The idea is that over a certain time frame, which each organisation will set based on their numbers, each higher level or rank should match the gender diversity of the level below. It should be attainable because the lower level is your promotion pool; the people are already there. The biggest objection we get from organisations is: ‘We'd love to hire more women, but we just can't find them.’ Well, I don't believe that because the data is clear that they are in the pipeline, i.e., at the lower levels of organisations. The GPP highlights and addresses that. All you need to do is develop, grow, and promote your women.
The GPP also helps to draw organisations’ attention to the fact that career development is at least as big a piece of the puzzle as hiring. It's not enough to get people in the door. You must actually keep them, and you have to pull them up through the organisation to the top levels. That's where, historically, organisations have focused less attention on. Thinking about the GPP helps to really put the emphasis on that internal hierarchy because that's fully within your control.
G: Interesting! And how can companies apply the GPP to attain their outcome goals?
S: One example is giving managers information about the gender track record of their past promotions compared to the available pool of employees – in other words, are they promoting women proportionally or not. I worked on an intervention like this in a large multinational company with Iris Bohnet and Oliver Hauser. We hypothesised that if you give managers information about the gender track record of their past promotions right before a decision, it might increase the salience of gender equality. Iris’ past research with Max Bazerman and Alexandra van Geen showed that when we're making multiple decisions simultaneously and evaluating different options jointly and comparatively against each other, we generate more diversity in our decisions. So if we could make those promotion decisions a little bit more comparative, managers’ views could become more holistic. They may think about not only whom are we promoting now, but also what is that group compared to who we promoted last year or last time and the time before that to get more a more holistic picture.
G: For people outside the behavioural science field, why is it important to bring behavioural science and experimentation to the field of D&I?
S: For me, there is a very practical reason, which is that our resources are limited. Our time, our attention, our effort, our money, our human power. To make the most amount of progress in the limited time that we have, we should focus those limited resources on things that are going to work best and be most effective.
To do that, we have to study and understand what works and what doesn't to advance D&I and equity in order to maximize our progress. To me, that’s what it’s really about because organisations right now are spending all this time and money on things that don’t work and talking about things that are peripheral. It’s a wasted opportunity and blocks us from making the progress that we need to make, so we cannot afford to waste more time. That’s the reason to experiment, to generate the evidence that will allow us to use our scarce resources most effectively.
Many thanks to the incredible Siri for sharing her research and insights on how to achieve equality in the workplace, we hope to make fast progress on this by experimenting more. Siri is part of the Inclusion Lab, where we work on testing interventions to make the workplace more inclusive. We are looking for new organisations who want to join and take a more robust approach to D&I. Read more about the lab below.