The How-To Guide to Gender Equality Every Workplace Needs | A Review

I once sat in on a faculty leadership meeting where bets were taken as to whether a female professor would come back from sabbatical pregnant so that she could take “more time off”.  All I did in the moment was bite my cowardly tongue. It was at that moment, though, that it became crystal clear how hostile workplaces can be for women. These days I’m more vocal about outright sexist comments, and I recognize that the issues are deep and systemic and that we need a simple, evidence-based “how-to” guide to fix them.

The closest thing to a how-to guide on gender equity in the workplace is here.  Recommended by a lab instructor from Harvard, I’ve immersed myself in Dr. Iris Bohnet’s “What Works: Gender Equality by Design.” It’s clearly written, easily digestible and well researched. As an engineer, this book resonated because it frames the issue of gender equality as a problem of measurement and design. Actionable takeaways are found in bullet-points at the end of most chapters. It’s evidence-based, with nearly 20% of the book devoted to citation-filled notes.

So what are the general takeaways from this book? First, get other people to read the book.  Without allies, any unilateral actions you take will likely fail. This is group work and you’ll need buy-in from others in your organization. Second, most current diversity training systems are too simplistic and don’t work. In a twisted way, people give themselves permission to commit biased actions because they got the training, arguing “Who me? Biased? No way. I took the training and know what to look for. I’m so objective.” Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. Bohnet points out that training involving more reasoned judgement, like “consider the opposite” and “crowd-within” methods, can be more effective. Third, if you want to make meaningful changes, you first need insight. Insight comes from data. Data comes from tests and measurements, and these require that key metrics be defined.

In the chapter “Crafting Groups”, Bohnet explains that to move beyond tokenism and towards effective gender equality you need a critical mass of women. In relative terms, this means that at least 30% of the group needs to be female. Less than 30% and they’ll be marginalized. I’ve seen this in action, when comparing classrooms of electrical engineering students (<25% women) and biomedical engineering students (>35% women) -- it’s incredible to see the difference.

How do we achieve at least 30% women in the office? Once again, Bohnet gives many evidence-based suggestions. Start by getting rid of gendered language in job ads. Make the job application process transparent and reduce risk in the negotiation stages. Use structured interviews to reduce the effects of bias. Group interviews are a bad idea as bias-laced groupthink can dominate.  On page 144, Bohnet gives a short-and-sweet interview checklist that is a no-brainer to implement.

The best part about many of these suggestions is that they’re not zero sum. They will have little to no negative consequences to the men applying but they’ll have noticeable positive consequences for women. This is counter-intuitive but the evidence bears this out.

In Chapters 12 and 13, Bohnet emphasizes issues with transparency and changing norms.

Some major ideas around how to move towards gender equality in the workplace include:

• Finding ways to motivate individuals to join the push towards gender diversity.
• Tying an individual’s success to the organization’s diversity goal.
• Using rankings as motivational tools, add rules to express new norms.
• Setting achievable short-term goals.
• Making goals and their measurement transparent.
• Holding people and groups accountable for follow-through.

Was there a gender parity milestone set for this year’s round of hiring? Were any of the hiring committee members held accountable when they reported, again, that no women applied? Multi-faceted motivational factors, employing both carrots and sticks, are advocated for in the book.

So why is this book important? Because it’s an honest and practical take on what to do about the gender equality issue with immediate applications to recruitment, including in the academic space. The message that runs throughout the book is that people are imperfect, we’re not objective and our day-to-day decisions are biased, whether we like it or not. In that honest admission is the possibility that we can change things. Moving beyond possibilities requires evidence, and there is plenty of that. But honesty, possibility and proof are insufficient. Where this book really shines is in how Bohnet distills most chapters into a three-part bulleted list of actions workplaces can take. In my own workplace, I can see how these action lists will be shared with colleagues as we plan and roll out the changes we need to see put in place now.

If you’d like a more in-depth look at Bohnet’s thoughts on gender equality, check out this recorded talk she gave at SXSW in 2016!

This is a draft of a review that was to be posted on Medium as part of the Engineering Change Lab initiative.  Thanks to Stephanie Rozek and Jerome James for feedback and editing.

James Andrew Smith is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department in York University's Lassonde School.  He lived in Strasbourg, France and taught at the INSA Strasbourg and Hochschule Karlsruhe while on sabbatical in 2018-19 with his wife and kids. Some of his other blog posts discuss the family's sabbatical year, from both personal and professional perspectives.