Outsmart Gender Bias through Design
By Annie Neimand, Ph.D., Lauren Parater and Eugenia Blaubach
UNHCR’s Innovation Service believes that diversity of thought — the cognitive diversity that benefits from different experiences and perspectives — leads to more creativity and innovation. Over the past two years, we’ve undertaken an exploration of diversity and inclusion to help us better understand how these issues intersect and impact humanitarian innovation. This research is the latest addition to our continuous work on these issues and the UN Refugee Agency’s collaboration with the Center for Public Interest Communications.
You can discover the first article of this series, “How to Design for Diverse and Gender Inclusive Humanitarian Organizations” here.
To design interventions to address gender discrimination in the workplace, the humanitarian sector must understand the behavioral, social and psychological drivers of bias in order to design interventions that account for how the human mind works. In a previous article, we discussed the challenge of addressing gender bias in the humanitarian sector and how bias happens. Here we outline evidence-based strategies from academic research for outsmarting gender bias in the workplace. These interventions include:
- Reduce ambiguity
- Be intentional with how you communicate for recruitment and hiring
- Move beyond bias trainings to focus on small wins
- Create criteria for fair evaluation
- To be inclusive, move beyond just focusing on women
Reduce Ambiguity
More than three decades of research on gender bias in the workplace shows that stereotypes held about men and women (what they can and can not do and how they should act) lead people to evaluate men and women differently, particularly when criteria for evaluation is ambiguous. Correll (2017) writes, “when individuals lack clear criteria about how to evaluate individuals or when performance information is minimal or ambiguous, gender stereotypes fill in the gaps in knowledge, leading decision-makers to rate men and women differently.”
Furthermore, organizations working toward a more inclusive work environment may fall short if they do not explicitly include diversity and inclusion efforts in job descriptions or in how staff are evaluated. Scholars recommend building diversity and inclusion requirements into the job description of managers, supporting them by providing specific actions they can take to implement a policy and evaluating them on those efforts. Doing so reduces ambiguity and embeds diversity and inclusion into the workflow.
For example, Caroline Harper Jantuah, UNHCR’s Senior Advisor for Inclusion, Diversity and Gender Equity, noted in an interview for this project that it is often hard to get buy-in within an organization because people think there will be too much to do and that they are too busy to be effective. She says organizations need to make it easier for people by reducing ambiguity and providing specific actions or ways of working that they can engage with.
Organizations need to move beyond simply informing staff of a new policy, which is essentially raising awareness about the new policy (which we know raising awareness does not work), and instead work with managers to identify and implement specific behaviors into their teams practices. These behaviors need to be monitored and evaluated to motivate a particular group of people to see this work as part of their job, and know exactly how to do it.
Be intentional with how you communicate for recruitment and hiring
Gender bias manifests in hiring and recruitment. Recruitment efforts include subtle and not so subtle cues as to whether the organization will be inclusive. Wynn and Correll (2018) found that at recruitment events for tech companies, recruitment materials often include pop culture images, references, and interests that would resonate more with men. For example, one American technology company advertised workplace amenities commonly associated with young male university culture: football and beer refrigerators. Other companies referenced a stereotypical geek culture, including the science fiction stories Star Trek and Star Wars.
“Even when it has no direct relevance to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields [STEM], seeing these generic gender stereotypes in the room can have a negative impact on women’s interest, performance and sense of belonging in STEM fields,” Allison Wynn, Diversity & Inclusion Postdoctoral Fellow with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, said in an interview for this project. “It’s really important for companies not to draw on gendered or sexualized images and references where they’re talking about their work.”
Researchers say there is coded language in job postings that influence whether or not a woman might apply. Researchers argue that agentic phrases, like “superior ability to” and “self-reliant,” can be off-putting to women. Using language that balances agentic and communal phrases, like “be a team player,” “collaborate on,” or “interpersonal,” can alleviate this issue (Gaucher, Friesen and Kay, 2011).
Furthermore, job listings with shorter qualification lists may be more attractive to female applicants. Women tend to view desired qualifications as requirements on a checklist, becoming less likely to apply if they don’t meet all the criteria (Sandberg, 2013). Men, on the other hand, tend to apply despite not meeting all the qualifications (Sandberg, 2013). It’s recommended to only list qualifications that are essential to the job.
Move beyond bias trainings to focus on small wins
To address bias in the workplace, many organizations often turn to trainings to help staff understand how unconscious bias works and to examine themselves for biases. Researchers have found mixed results for these sorts of trainings. Some have found them to be effective at changing perceptions of bias and a good first step toward shifting behavior, while others have found that they can backfire (Girod et al., 2016). For example, in a series of experiments, Duguid and Thomas-Hunt (2015) show that messages emphasizing the idea that everyone is biased can normalize and even increase bias. They also found that it is possible to avoid creating this harmful norm by pairing the “everyone is biased” message with a statement explaining people’s commitment to overcoming their biases.
While training can be used as a tool to build an understanding of how bias works, it is not a stand-alone solution because its effects tend to wear off over time. “Bias training — when done correctly — is necessary but not sufficient to creating sustainable change,” said Correll. She added that trainings must be accompanied by specific actions staff can take to address bias, such as developing consistent evaluation criteria to eliminate ambiguity or creating uniform questions for interviews to apply criteria consistently.
To transform an institution requires more than a day-long training. Efforts to address implicit bias must be sustained and evaluated overtime. To do so, interventions should target places within an organization where bias takes place with specific actions staff can take.
Correll encourages organizations to adopt her “small wins” model for change. As reported by Stanford news, this model “focuses on educating managers and workers about bias, diagnosing where gender bias could enter their company’s hiring, promotion or other evaluation practices and working with the company’s leaders to develop tools that help measurably reduce bias and inequality.”
Specifically, this approach follows five steps: educate a group about unconscious bias through training, diagnose bias within an organization, develop tools with the staff such as scorecards or concrete criteria for evaluation, intervene by implementing tools within groups to increase peer accountability and evaluate the staff’s effectiveness.
For example, after implementing bias training at a science nonprofit organization, Correll and the organization’s leadership team worked with HR to adjust their recruitment and hiring processes. Together, they designed job ads that would attract a full range of candidates and implemented a systematic evaluation process. These small actions generated big results, increasing the number of female scientists hired from about 15% to 45% in just two years. (Correll, 2017)
This process is different from other interventions as it moves away from trying to change individuals, and instead focuses on changing organizational processes. Correll writes, “Key to this model is that researchers [or facilitators] work with teams of managers to produce concrete, implementable actions that produce visible results…small wins motivate further action and are the building blocks to larger organizational transformation.”
This strategy increases the likelihood that top-down initiatives will be adopted at the grassroots level because managers will have had a say in developing them (Correll, 2017). And, having received proper bias training, managers will be less likely to introduce bias into the tools they create.
Correll explains that the “small wins” approach creates a favorable “contagion effect,” inspiring the adoption of other gender inclusive practices down the road. She writes, “when a small win is achieved, it often creates new allies and makes visible the next target of change.”
Similarly, sociologists who study social change by targeting social norms suggest working with well-liked people within an organization to adopt new behaviors is an effective way to build and diffuse new norms and influence culture and behavior (Paluck, Shepherd and Aronow, 2016). In spreading diversity and inclusion efforts within an organization, Caroline Harper Jantuah, UNHCR’s Senior Advisor for Inclusion, Diversity and Gender Equity, suggests that it is important to identify the few critical individuals who are highly networked — not necessarily those with the most power, seniority or celebrity, but those with the strongest ties. She suggests working with these individuals to model new desired behaviors and communicate what they are doing across the organization. Working with these people on small wins can help spread the behavior within the organization.
Create criteria for fair evaluation
To design inclusive and fair evaluation processes, research suggests that people should establish clear, specific criteria before evaluations and apply them consistently across all candidates. Studies show that merely reading a person’s name can trigger gender and racial stereotypes and shift the criteria people use to evaluate applicants. For example, in her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, Harvard business scholar Iris Bohnet shares a study on how music directors were able to increase the number of women in orchestras. Before the 1970s, women made up only 6 % of the members in major U.S. symphony orchestras. Music directors were known to handpick musicians from a pool of mostly male candidates (Goldin and Rouse, 2000). To overcome this issue, orchestras began holding blind auditions. By placing a curtain in front of musicians, evaluators were able to rate people strictly on the quality of their performance without the influence of stereotypes. In a study conducted on five of these major orchestras, Goldin and Rouse (2000) found that the switch to blind auditions helped increase the percentage of women in orchestras from 6% in 1970 to about 25% in 1996.
Some organizations have achieved similar results by removing names and other identifying factors of gender and race from resumes during the initial screening of applicants. In one study, doing so increased the likelihood that women and minorities would move on to the interview stage of the hiring process (Aslund and Skans, 2012). In her work with tech companies, Correll found that anonymized resumes were particularly useful for companies in the early stages of adopting gender-inclusive practices. Seeing the positive effects of anonymous resume screening helped increase buy-in from decision-makers and gauge the extent of the problem within the organization.
Through machine learning techniques and diversity and inclusion methodologies, UNHCR’s Innovation Service is working with UNHCR’s Division of Human Resources (DHR) to build a more effective and inclusive process for screening-in candidates to its Talent Pool. For example, the team worked closely with UI/UX designers to understand if characteristics such as gender or the nationality of applicants were displayed for recruiters, how this information is displayed to better support inclusion, and diversifying approaches to the machine design to better combat cognitive biases. UNHCR, then, built a system that was designed to be inclusive. The system takes in all the information from applicants’ work experience and letters of interest, searching for terms and analyzing language to pre-screen candidates who may fit UNHCR’s Talent Pool profile. Instead of spending days going through applications on a search for keywords, recruiters can spend more time in the other parts of the applicant vetting process.
The approach that the team took when designing the artificial intelligence components of this project was to develop a set of unbiased data points with the recruiters that could then be used for training and evaluating the newly arriving applicants. Recognizing that the artificially intelligent processes will likely not replace human HR processes, the project aims to reduce data processing that would normally take hours to screen, in a matter of just minutes. By modifying screening processes, we can better target the type of people, experiences, and expertise needed in the workforce.
The anonymous resume method ensures that initial hiring decisions are based on merit. However, if organizations are actively seeking out candidates with diverse profiles, anonymous resumes may hold their efforts back, preventing evaluators from favoring candidates with diverse profiles (Behaghel, Crépon and Le Barbanchon, 2014).
In most cases, such as interviews, promotions and job assignments, it is impossible to anonymize gender, race or other bias-triggering indicators. To control for bias and hold all candidates to the same standards, researchers suggest establishing clear evaluation criteria, agreeing on the ranking of criteria beforehand and applying it consistently (Bohnet, 2016; Correll, 2017).
For example, researchers have identified a motherhood penalty, where women who are mothers are seen as less competent, less productive, and are offered smaller salaries, as compared to men who do not experience the same discrimination (Correll, Benard, and Paik, 2007). A study from the Equality and Human Rights Commission in the UK found that 46% of employers think it is acceptable to ask women if they have young children during the recruitment process. A third of the employers believe that women who become pregnant or are new mothers are less interested in career advancement. And, 41% of employers agreed that pregnancy puts a cost burden on the workplace.
In a study analyzing the effects of structured interviews on bias against pregnant applicants, researchers found that asking all candidates the same questions and using an agreed upon rating system resulted in more consistent ratings for both pregnant and non-pregnant applicants. By ensuring that all candidates were evaluated using the same criteria, the overall bias against pregnant women was reduced (Bragger, Kutcher, Morgan and Firth, 2002).
Correll explained that formalized evaluation procedures are most effective when the tools used to implement structure (i.e. uniform questions, criteria checklists, scorecards) don’t have bias built into them. “If, for example, the criteria you put in place is more likely to be held by men than women, it can potentially introduce bias,” she said in an interview for this project. Using the “small wins” model, Correll suggests working with managers to establish criteria that avoids abstract language like “innovative” “go getter” or “phenomenal” and instead define the desired characteristics using examples. In her 2017 study, she shares an example from working with a mid-size tech company to develop a process for evaluating performances. She writes,
“We began this process by interviewing 23 employees who had been involved in identifying the leadership values that were currently used to assess employee potential. We wanted to understand the motivation for identifying these particular values, the relative importance of each of the values, and how managers operationalized them for assessment purposes. We also wanted to gain buy-in for making change from these critical players in the organization. When we shared what we learned from the interviews, it became clear that some of the leadership values, such as ‘be phenomenal,’ were hard to define and measure, so they decided not to include these values in the new assessment tool they created. They decided to create a ‘scorecard’ that managers would fill out for each employee and bring to the annual calibration meeting. For each company value, the manager was prompted to ‘provide specific examples of what [the employee] did or how [the employee] did or could have done better’ on a given value.
We also urged them to appoint a ‘criteria monitor’ or someone charged with ensuring that criteria were being equally applied during the calibration process. They instead decided to encourage managers to voluntarily serve in this role. I honestly did not think a volunteer system would work, but in our observations more than 40 percent of the senior leadership team served as de facto criteria monitors, speaking up when a new criterion was raised for only some employees and raising criteria that were being overlooked when evaluating others. They also decided to use a timer so that a consistent amount of time was allotted for discussing each employee.”
Reducing ambiguity leaves less room for bias to creep in. “When you sit down to evaluate people and you have a very clear checklist, it saves time, makes your job much easier and ensures that you’re being fairer,” she said.
To be inclusive, move beyond just focusing on women
Of course, focusing on efforts that are inclusive of women can result in policy and practices blind to race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status and disability differences (Crenshaw, 1991; Carbado, 2013; McCall, 2005). When policies are designed to address differences in gender, race or sexual orientation, white women, black men and white gay men are often the assumed representatives from each group (Carbodo, 2013). As a result, policies are not designed to reflect the experiences and needs of those not in those groups- primarily men and women of color, people of color who identify as LGBTQ, undocumented people, refugees and people with mental or physical disabilities.
To build an inclusive workplace, policies and procedures need to be designed to include diverse populations that have historically been excluded.
For example, when working with universities to identify student candidates for positions, UNHCR’s Innovation Service found that they were mostly pre-selecting white students from high socio-economic backgrounds that are American. The team worked closely with Stanford University to change the candidate pool by working with their scholarship program managers. UNHCR’s Innovation Service welcomed Stanford being more intentional in how they selected candidates to various scholarships programmes. It was an opportunity for the Innovation Service to learn how internship selection processes could be more inclusive and to potentially include more diverse voices into the team.
Additionally, Stanford University organized bias training for the intern selection committee and worked hand-in-hand with the team to understand the candidate pool better, taking on a diversity lense that spanned from socio-economic background to personal experiences of being displaced. Moving forward, the Innovation Service is actively looking outside the West to universities that are geographically and culturally closer to populations it serves such as Kepler University in Rwanda.
Those working in the humanitarian sector also note that local women, those from communities affected by displacement, are often not taken into account in organizational practices despite the fact that experts believe they are more effective in peace building, disaster preparedness, and crisis response.
Harper Jantuah suggests that organizations should ask themselves, at every decision point, “Have we taken into account diverse groups of people? Have we thought about the potential impact on different groups of people?” UNHCR has developed a flow chart that maps out every decision that needs to be made in hiring and recruitment. Harper Jantuah works with teams to identify places where they can take action for diversity and inclusion.
Moving forward
To design gender diverse and inclusive workplaces, organizations need to identify areas where bias is likely to creep in. As Eleanor Gordon, international development expert, specializing in security, justice and human rights issues, shared in an interview with the scholar and policy group Monash Gender, Peace and Security:
“Those organizations in which gender equality could be improved should reflect upon what barriers are in place and endeavour to remove those barriers: are recruitment, retention, promotion and training policies gender sensitive and do they promote gender equality? Is the organizational culture conducive to gender equality? Do the training, restroom and office facilities provide for the safety of both men and women? Are crèche and childcare facilities available? Are there policies and practices in place to enable staff who are caregivers to work flexibly and receive the support they need?”
Furthermore, organizations should explicitly and systematically build in efforts to increase diversity and inclusion within the organization. Organizations should invest in evidence-based interventions across multiple demographic differences to ensure efforts do not backfire.
Organizations can also develop a monitoring system to identify patterns of segregation by gender and race, tracking for hiring, advancement and pay differences. They can regularly survey their employees to measure and analyze perceptions of workplace culture and barriers to advancement. Doing so will allow organizations to identify blind spots and opportunities for growth, as well as changes in perceptions over time. And lastly, organizations can attach specific policy actions to manager responsibilities and evaluate them on those actions (Biebly, 2000).
The ideas shared here require organizations to design for gender diversity and inclusion. If organizations are not proactively working to counteract social and psychological tendencies that lead to gender bias with evidence-based insights, they may build organizations conducive to bias. Organizations, teams, and advocates working in the space can use these ideas as a launch point for brainstorming their own strategies, sharing what works with their peers to help build more diverse and inclusive workplaces.
Thank you to Carolie Harper Jantuah, Dr. Shelly Correll, and Dr. Allison Wynn for their time and insight for this project.
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About the project
In an effort to move past communication strategies that simply “raise awareness” of an issue, the UN Refugee Agency and the University of Florida partnered to better understand how science can connect individuals with calls to actions that will result in lasting difference on the issues that matter most.
This research project shares theory and science that helps us understand how people think and act, and is designed to help you incorporate those insights into your work. Each article theme has robust empirical and theoretical findings and debates. We’ve sought to include the works of prominent scholars to get you started, and hope to spark your desire for further exploration. You can discover more about our collaboration and additional research on topics such as xenophobia and climate change displacement on our website, “Bending the Arc”.
More Resources
We encourage you to explore the work done by The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. For more on gender bias, check out these resources.
We also encourage you to read What Works: Gender Equality by Design, by Iris Bohnet, and Framed By Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World, by Cecilia Ridgeway.
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