HKS Affiliated Authors

Co-Director, Women and Public Policy Program
Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government
Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, HBS

Excerpt

When Performance Trumps Gender Bias. Joint Versus Separate Evaluation. Iris Bohnet, May 2016, Paper, "We examine a new intervention to overcome gender biases in hiring, promotion, and job assignments: an “evaluation nudge,” in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance. Evaluators are more likely to focus on individual performance in joint than in separate evaluation and on group stereotypes in separate than in joint evaluation, making joint evaluation the money-maximizing evaluation procedure. Our findings are compatible with a behavioral model of information processing and with the System 1/System 2 distinction in behavioral decision research where people have two distinct modes of thinking that are activated under certain conditions." Link