Measure what happened, adjust your hypotheses, and do it all over again until you get it right. It describes a new metrics-based approach that pulls from the lean start-up playbook: Collect detailed data about whether gender bias plays a role in daily workplace interactions identify company-specific ways to measure its effect create hypotheses about what “interrupters” might move those metrics and then throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. This article is intended to help tech companies-and others-fix those systems. When an organization lacks diversity, it’s not the employees who need fixing. They’re out to change the world, with corporate mottoes like “Don’t be evil” and “Move fast and break things.” One thing I hope they’ll break with is the “diversity industrial complex”: the standard approach of making token hires, offering sensitivity training, setting up mentoring networks, and introducing other incremental changes that focus on altering women’s behavior to, say, make them better negotiators.
As they so often remind us, they’re not about business as usual. On the other hand, if tech’s senior leaders are serious about gender diversity, they could be perfectly positioned to lead change. Moreover, 40 years of social science have taught us that such biases will be perpetuated unless they’re intentionally interrupted, and people who think they work for meritocracies are less likely to do what it takes to interrupt them. Subtle biases against women are clearly at work here. Castilla and Stephen Benard has shown that when an organization’s core values state that raises and promotions are “based entirely on the performance of the employee”-in other words, when a company sees itself as a meritocracy-women are actually more likely to get smaller bonuses than men with equivalent performance reviews. A key feature of the tech culture-the shared belief that it’s a meritocracy-may work against change. Make no mistake: Improving those metrics will be challenging. It’s remarkable that the sector is finally stepping up to the plate on diversity-and refreshing that its focus is on metrics rather than rhetoric. When Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Facebook disclosed their woefully low levels of female employment in the summer of 2014, admitting that they had a lot of work to do to improve them, they signaled a shift for the technology industry. Bias needs to be disrupted constantly, and the iterative interrupter approach may well be the way to do that.
They can be as simple as adding “salary negotiable” to want ads-which closed the pay gap between men and women by 45% in one study.ĭoing anything once will not change organizational culture. Companies need to understand how, and then thwart these biases with “interrupters,” small changes to business systems that stop patterns of bias.
All four affect hiring, work assignments, evaluations, and promotion and compensation.
Working women face four kinds of bias: prove-it-again (continually being asked to prove their competence), tightrope (backlash for being too assertive or too nice), maternal wall (erroneous assumptions about mothers), and tug-of-war (pressure to distance themselves from other women).
#Stick em up hacked how to
The author suggests an approach that borrows from tech’s own playbook on experimentation: Collect detailed data on bias in your organization, identify company-specific ways to measure its effect, create hypotheses about how to move those metrics, and then throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. But if tech firms want to get serious about hiring, retaining, and promoting more women, they’ll need something more effective than sensitivity or mentoring programs that “fix” individual behavior, and longer lasting than cultural change programs. The technology industry has a big problem with diversity, one that seems to be getting worse: In 1991 women held 37% of computing jobs today they hold only 26%.
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