Dr. Sun Young Lee: How We Can Tackle Gender Bias In Work and Academia
Across the globe, women are underrepresented in academia, particularly in senior academic positions. For example, in business and management fields in the UK higher education, only about 20% of senior academics are women. Through my research, I have tried to shed light on how to increase diversity and encourage less biased decisions at work.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Sun Young (Sunny) Lee. She is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the UCL School of Management. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of interdependence (e.g., competition, cooperation) among organizational members on individuals’ perceptions, behaviors, and performance. She is a passionate advocate for gender equality in education and believes that removing biases in the system may not be enough to achieve a truly equal gender balance.
Thank you for joining us Dr. Lee! Why did you pursue this career path?
In my teenage years, I loved observing how people interacted with others and asking questions to myself — why do some teachers believe there is only one (fixed) moral lesson for an Aesop’s Fable? Why does my high school make girls play badminton and boys play basketball?
I was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea, a country that has gone through extremely fast economic and societal growth over a very short period of time. People’s values and life styles have changed a lot under the influence of Western Culture, which highlights the importance of individualism, equal rights, and democracy. The new ideas have clashed with our traditional values of collectivism, social harmony, and social hierarchy. As a teenager, observing the emergence, decay, and clash of old and new values and life styles, I often experienced inner chaos and wanted to understand what lay beneath it, my felt chaos.
My interest in the human psychology deepened in my 20s when I was exposed to a different level of diversity in people and their values and life styles. Doing a master’s degree in Chicago, I met 110 classmates from about 30 countries including Singapore, the U.S., Argentina, and Egypt. One simple microeconomic concept turns out to have had different meanings to these students. During my five years as a management consultant at Accenture and Hewlett Packard, I saw how people, depending on their positions, evaluated the same sales projection very differently. The more experience I had, and the more people I met, my interest grew more in the psychology beneath people’s behaviors, particularly the ones that cannot be explained by human rationality.
To pursue my unquenchable curiosity about the human psychology, I left my smooth-sailing corporate job in 2008 and spent the next 6 years as a Ph.D. student in organizational behavior at the London Business School. While discussing papers about humans’ fundamental motives or widely spread stereotypical beliefs with my professors and fellow students, I became convinced that this was the field where I wanted to belong for the rest of my life. In the summer of 2014, I started my first faculty position at the UCL School of Management, and since 2019, I have been an associate professor here. For the past five years, I have been teaching negotiation courses to masters’ students as well as a broad audience including MBA students in Peking University and senior officers at the Metropolitan Police. I also have led the Athena SWAN application on behalf of my School; and this May, the UCL School of Management got our first Bronze Award in recognition of our commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Can you tell me about your research? What has motivated and inspired you in your work?
My research focuses largely on two topics: gender differences in the workplace and biased decision-making at work.
Going beyond the question of whether men and women are treated differently in the workplace, I have examined whether men and women might respond differently to the same work events such as workplace competition, failures, rejections, and networking. For example, in my recent publication, I found that women, compared with men, after competing with their coworkers (particularly the same-sex coworkers), felt more distressed, even finding that their work relationships were damaged by the competition. This gender difference in response to competition might exacerbate extant gender disparities in the workplace by discouraging women from competing, which is an essential activity of modern organizations.
For the second stream of my research, I have mainly looked at how evaluators’ stereotyping based on a person’s race, age, and appearance can bias their recruitment or promotion decisions. Across lab and field studies, I have found that people rely on their stereotypical beliefs even when objective information is present. For example, in personnel decisions, evaluators still believe male candidates are more competent than female ones, whites are more persuasive than East Asians, and younger employees are more agile than their older counterparts. I reveal these stereotypes not to encourage them but to help managers avoid making biased and thus sub-optimal decisions when they hire or promote their employees.
Can you tell us about your work on gender diversity within high education? How do you think professionals in academia can work together to tackle gender bias?
Across the globe, women are underrepresented in academia, particularly in senior academic positions. For example, in business and management fields in the UK higher education, only about 20% of senior academics are women.
Through my research, I have tried to shed light on how to increase diversity and encourage less biased decisions at work. About two years ago, I became involved in an initiative — applying for the Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) Award on behalf of my school — that helps increase gender equality in higher education in a more direct and practical way.
Since 2005, the Athena SWAN Charter has recognized departments in science and engineering fields that promote gender equality among their academic staff. In 2015, the Charter expanded to include the fields of business and management and to address gender equality issues among all staff and students.
Throughout our application period, based on a data-driven self-assessment, we added more female members to our senior management team and set up a dedicated diversity and inclusion unit. From 2019, we have highlighted our devotion as an Equal Opportunities Employer in all recruitment advertisements. As a result of a thorough assessment and measurable action plans, this May, my school received a Bronze Award, being one of only a few business schools to receive this award in the U.K.
I believe that institution-level recognitions, such as Athena SWAN, can encourage more universities and departments to introduce policies to increase gender equality. For example, my school, like several other UK universities, has made it obligatory for our staffing committees to be at least 30 % female and has also arranged regular “unbiasing” training sessions for decision-makers involved in recruitment or promotion decisions.
I would also like to highlight that women can help themselves by more willingly seizing chances for career progression and more actively promoting their work outcomes to others. My research has shown that women might regard competition as something bad and greedy; however, if a qualified female researcher delays applying for promotion simply because she does not want to “feel greedy”, it can be a huge loss not only to herself but to the organization as such a delay might constrain growth in the field. Of course, individual efforts (e.g., changing personal attitudes) can increase gender balance in academia only when there are institutional policies and arrangements that fairly structure an institution’s staffing system.
What is your proudest moment?
This is my fifth-year of teaching, and I still love every moment of it. My negotiation course includes weekly negotiation simulations, where students negotiate with their classmates, sometimes to sell a high technology product to a large company, other times taking the role of a board member to negotiate with multiple parties for a policy change. These simulations give students a wonderful opportunity to apply concepts/strategies taught in class to different negotiation settings. As I moved around the lecture theatre observing their negotiations, I also get to know each of them. I usually remember all my students’ names and faces from the second week, and I enjoy chatting with them outside class, often through emails, but sometimes over a coffee. Not surprisingly, around the middle of the term, I get to know how each student’s personality and other characteristics interacts with my teaching and shapes their negotiation styles.
I feel proud when I see my students improving in their negotiations. I still remember a student who had told me, prior to my course, that she was too shy to negotiate over anything. I disagreed and kept encouraging her to speak up and try at least one new tactic in each exercise without fear of failure. Around the end of the course, she became one of the five top negotiators in her cohort. Afterwards, she sent me an email saying that she had successfully landed a job in a top management consulting firm thanks to what she had learnt in my course.
I also feel proud when my students (the masters’ ones I teach and the two doctoral students I have supervised) are having fun in their learning. I believe in Albert Einstein’s idea that a teacher’s job is to “awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge”. There can be many ways to spark joy in the students. To me, one key is to go beyond filling the students’ minds with one-way teaching but rather to teach them how to think on their own. I encourage my students to challenge me as well as each other, and I am not afraid of making fun of myself at the right moment. Contrary to the image of the authoritative and serious-looking teachers in my home country, I approach students with a smile and modesty. Different from my high school, which tried to predetermine our preferences (in sports), I try to let my students’ different characters and backgrounds infuse my teaching. In the last session of each course, I am usually sure that my approach has not been wrong — — the applause, smiles, and sometimes hugs from my students are so rewarding and refreshing.
What is the biggest challenge you have faced so far and how have you overcome it? What are your hopes for the future and what advice would you give to managers in a post COVID-19 world?
The current pandemic is one of the biggest challenges for me on both a personal and professional level. This might be the case for anyone who has been directly affected by the COVID-19 as well as most of the post-war generations.
With a series of changes the crisis has brought to my life (e.g., a lack of social life and some degree of worry constantly lingering in the back of my mind), I felt at a loss for a while, imagining that the values of my extant research and teaching might be at worst trivial or at least depreciated in a post COVID-19 era.
For the past decade, I have developed my knowledge and skill-sets to understand human behavior in typical workplaces and to help people succeed in negotiations in normal work settings. Although humans will not lose their fundamental motivations and behaviors even after the pandemic, I believe that during and after this crisis, novel changes will emerge in our values, work-styles, and lifestyles. Many employees might be permanently turned into remote workers. Some jobs (e.g., supermarket staff) are suddenly spotlighted as essential and key roles. Children might develop serious levels of distress from the lack of opportunities to socialize.
I am still in the process of understanding the implications of the current crisis in our daily and work lives, including the new needs people might develop to survive and thrive in the post COVID-19 world. Hopefully, I can share more insights in a future interview with you.
If you could tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?
Dare to be different! There may be many ways we can take to reach one destination.
And take time to help others! This pandemic has made us realize how we are connected with each other.
Thank you for this interview, we wish you continued success!
