Many organizations have made an effort to diversify their workforces and have consequently invested in diversity training. But there’s little evidence that these training programs accomplish their goals of increased fairness. In their book, “Make Work Fair,” Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi offer new ways to embed fairness into organizational systems and structures. Bohnet, Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government at HKS and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP), and Chilazi, senior researcher at WAPPP, wrote the book by building on insights from their behavioral economics background to examine what workplaces that work for everyone might look like.
We asked them about the practical framework introduced in the book, how this builds on existing scholarship, such as Bohnet’s previous work “What Works, and how to think about this goal in the current social and political context in the United States.
Q: “Make Work Fair” takes on some of the same issues of bias, and has the same data-driven, systems-based approach to tackling these issues as “What Works.” How do you think about the new book in relation to “What Works”?
Iris Bohnet: As a sequel. Our new book is grounded in evidence on what works and what doesn’t to advance fairness, but it also asks how to make fairness happen in organizations. So, while the “what” was central in “What Works,” the “how” is at the core of “Make Work Fair.” For example, we describe how the BBC made its programming more representative of the world and how Harvey Mudd College changed its computer science teaching to make it accessible to all students. The key is to embed fairness into the things we’re already doing at work.
Q: The book title, “Make Work Fair,” is action-oriented, and you introduce a framework for how anyone can take actions that advance workplace fairness. How did you come up with the framework?
Bohnet: Partly through teaching. Our students kept asking us about how to make fairness happen in practice. And Siri had worked with various companies and learned about the barriers to change in organizational settings. So, we felt compelled to meet people where they are: As employees, managers, senior leaders, students, policymakers, advocates, academics, and more. In the book, we offer a three-part framework suggesting that to make work fair, we need to make it count, make it stick, and make it normal. As you would expect, “counting” is all about using data to diagnose what is happening and then to evaluate whether our actions have the intended impact. But counting also involves other data-driven tools of management: goals, incentives, accountability, and transparency. To make fairness stick, we need to embed it into our practices and procedures, so the middle part of the book is all about how we hire, manage, develop, support, evaluate, and promote people. In the last part, we tackle possibly the hardest challenge, namely, how to make fairness normal. Not surprisingly, this has a lot to do with social norms but also work arrangements and broader questions of organizational culture.
“The key is to embed fairness into the things we’re already doing at work.”
Q: How can people put this framework into use?
Siri Chilazi: We love the story of how organizational change happened at the BBC when one journalist started to “count.” Ros Atkins, the host of a daily primetime news program, realized that he did not know whether the people he featured on his show were representative of the general population. He and his team started to track the gender of their featured contributors and realized that women’s voices were underrepresented. He got to parity with his own team first, then inspired hundreds of other content-creating teams at the BBC to join, and eventually the so-called ‘50:50 The Equality Project’ spread to more than 150 other organizations. This is just one example of counting, comparing, and goal setting, which are all important for behavioral design to ‘make work count.’
Bohnet: Everyone can be a behavioral designer to make fairness stick. Here’s one example: one of my favorite studies in our book was conducted by a team that included two former research fellows at WAPPP, Ariella Kristal and Oliver Hauser, which showed how we present information on our resumes matters. They showed that when women and men present their work experience by the number of years worked rather than the actual dates of their employment, they are more likely to be invited to a job interview. Why? Because this design masks so-called “career breaks,” which employers tend to penalize (and which women are more likely to have due to caregiving responsibilities).
Chilazi: Finally, one way to make fairness normal is to remind people of desired behaviors. Inspired by an old study documenting the impact of reminding people to wear their seatbelts immediately before driving, we tested whether reminding managers of the importance of diversity in hiring just before they short-listed candidates might help them make better decisions. Our paper, with coauthors Cansin Arslan, Edward Chang, and Oliver Hauser, was published last month in Science, and it shows that this type of behaviorally designed and timely training can help organizations benefit from a larger talent pool.
“Unless we fix our systems and truly level the playing field so that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, meritocracy will remain a myth.”
Q: You present hundreds of real-world examples of individuals and organizations implementing changes to make work fair. Were there any results or findings that were particularly surprising or fascinating to you?
Bohnet: I feel a bit like a child waiting to unwrap a present when I know results from an experiment are about to come in. One study we share in the book that I think had really interesting results was a randomized controlled trial we ran with one of the largest employers in Australia. We wanted to solve a puzzle: among employees who had applied to a leadership position but were rejected, men were about twice as likely as women to reapply. It turned out that adding one sentence to the typical email sent to rejected job seekers did the trick. In addition to thanking them for their application and inviting them to reapply to similar positions, we (truthfully) informed the applicants that they were in the top 20% of the pool. Reducing this sort of ambiguity closed the gender gap in reapplication rates.
Q: We are currently in a moment, at least in the United States, where there seems to be a move away from diversity, equity, and inclusion and a focus on meritocracy. Are these ideas really at odds with one another?
Chilazi: We argue that there can be no meritocracy without fairness. For example, a recent meta-analysis examining over 300 audit studies conducted on hiring shows that when employers receive two identical resumes with only the race of the candidate being different, white applicants are more likely to get invited to an interview than applicants of color. That’s not meritocracy. Merriam-Webster defines meritocracy as a system “in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.” Unless we fix our systems and truly level the playing field so that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed, meritocracy will remain a myth. Fortunately, research helps us identify what works and what doesn’t to make measurable progress—and that’s why we wrote “Make Work Fair.”