Summary Series: Behavioural Design & Gender Equality
The momentuous waves of behavioural economics have hit the shores of <traffic congestion, savings, environmental degradation, tax compliance, savings> and what-not. The efficacy of these interventions can be accredited to their groundedness in specificity and empiricism. And this happens policy makers stop following assumptions and start asking What Works. It therefore should not come as a surprise to see behavioural economics tackle another monolithic problem sitting in many societies: Gender Inequality.
Granted that this issue has so many facets and takes on different forms in different areas (like education, politics and employment), it would take a very comprehensive and detailed book to compile most of the problems we attribute to gender inequality.
Fortunately, someone has done that for us.
Meet Iris Bohnet, a behavioural economist at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
In 2016, Bohnet wrote the book What Works: Gender Equality by Design. It\ summarises the works of academics, policy makers and political leaders to present research-based solutions that are
“the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and the lives of millions”.
As someone who had not given gender inequality proper thought, it was a refreshing way to re-think the issue. As students passionate about all things BE, it was exciting to see what insights and ideas it could offer. But above all, its strength lies in evidence-based solutions, tangible and workable solutions for multiple aspects of the problem.
While its rigorous research and tedious testing of ideas and problems definitely merits it a read, it’s frankly a tough book to get through. It took time to wrap our heads around the identification of obstacles and current measures put in place, much less recall the takeaways we could receive or the interesting anecdotes Bohnet had kindly placed along the way.
Hence, this series of summaries.
We’ll be dishing out chapter summaries periodically that capture the main ideas and interesting research presented by Bohnet to hopefully give our readers something more portable and digestible that they can always look back on. It is our hope that important (and interesting, sometimes humorous) bits of wisdom can be dispensed in forms and frames for everyone to learn.
So look forward to Chapter One: Unconscious Bias is Everywhere coming your way soon!
