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COMMENT IRIS BOHNET


13.04.16 www.thebookseller.com


A hire education


For many companies, an unbalanced workforce is a direct consequence of unconscious bias manifesting itself in its recruitment policies, Iris Bohnet argues


T


oday’s globalised markets are fiercer than ever. Of the Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955, 88% had disappeared by 2015. Organisations need to recruit the most


talented people not only to remain profitable, but simply to survive. Talent can come from anywhere, but sometimes our unconscious biases prevent us from finding it. How can you avoid unconscious bias when hiring, in order to make sure your organisation benefits from 100% of the talent pool? Start by avoiding one common mistake: overlooking half of the population. Many HR departments advertise positions that unintentionally turn off applicants by falling prey to gender bias. Consider, for example, a primary school that would like to diversify its roughly 90% female teaching staff to provide more same- sex role models for boys. What would happen if they advertised a teaching position by specifying that they are looking for “a committed teacher with exceptional pedagogical skills to work in a supportive, collaborative environment”? An experiment using Canada’s leading job-search website can give us some clues. The researchers in this experiment classified job


advertisements using “gendered wording” to see how applicants would respond to different styles of job ads. “Masculine” ads used words such as competitive, assertive, individualistic, leader and ambitious; “feminine” ads included the words committed, supportive, interpersonal, compassionate and understanding. The study found that the more heavily


One last tip builds on the basic insight that we often learn


from others about the value of a commodity, or even a job. And it seems as though women are more affected by this than men. Researchers at Tufts University collected data from LinkedIn to figure out how jobseekers respond to different defaults on the website. In an experiment, applicants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the treatment group, which could view the number of people who had started applications for a given job; and the control group, which could not. It turns out that this makes no difference for male applicants, who will apply for the job either way; not so for women.


Their likelihood of applying goes up by 10% when the information is displayed. Knowing about others provided information about the quality of the job to women who generally tend to be more


averse to ambiguity than men. CHAIN REACTION “gendered” the


advertisement was, the less appealing the position was rated by applicants of the opposite gender. Candidates used the wording to infer whether they they would fit in at any given company. The school’s advertisement for a committed teacher to work in a collaborative and supportive environment would inadvertently tell men that the school was not the place for them. In other words, people self-select. Do not make them select out of your company! Using inclusive language in job advertisements is just one of the evidence-based interventions that your organisation can put into practice, cheaply and quickly, to increase your talent pool. Another example draws on research about gender differences in attitudes towards risk. Women have been found to opt out of variable pay schemes due to their more pronounced risk aversion. Instead, they prefer schemes like hourly pay or pay-per-unit, which leave less room for discrimination.


If this feels complicated, don’t forget: companies have an even more difficult time handling the wrong hires than recruiting the right ones. We are notoriously bad at making difficult people decisions. Zappos, an online shoe retailer based in the US, used an innovative solution. After a number of weeks on the job, the company offered new hires the opportunity to quit. If they did, they received a full month’s salary in addition to what they had already earned. Only those who truly were a good fit chose to stay, and Zappos saved the additional costs associated with employees who either were discontent or needed a lot of extra effort to succeed in the company. Intelligent designs such as these help us harvest some of the low-


Iris Bohnet is a behavioural


economist at Harvard University and the author of What Works: Gender Equality by Design (Harvard University Press)


hanging fruit in the search for talent. They provide ways to design our way out of our own biases and create equal opportunities for all. Consider implementing behavioural design in your workplace because it is easy and inexpensive, because it is the right thing to do and because we have lots of evidence that it actually works. Attracting the right people typically is easier than trying to change the wrong ones. 


Bohnet will speak today at the seminar “What Works: Gender


Equality by Design: How to Eliminate Gender Bias in our Industry”, at 2.30 p.m. in the Olympia Room Grand Hall


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