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Life is sometimes unfair.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Good people can step up to difficult conversations and listen to each other with the intent to learn rather than to rebut. And in the workplace, where many people spend most of their waking hours, it’s important to create systems, processes, and cultures that bring out the best in all the players. Solid data can help.

That’s the view of Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi, co-authors of Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. Bohnet, a business professor, is co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Chilazi is a senior researcher in the program.

Of course, what one person regards as “fair,” another person may regard as biased or unjust. So how can that conundrum be navigated?

By letting the data speak, Bohnet says. “Imagine that you and I are applying to the same job,” she says. “Further imagine that we have the exact same résumé. The only difference is our names. Now, a human or an algorithm screens our résumés. Fairness would mean that you and I have the same chance of making it to the next round. We know this is not typically the case as we have more than 300 studies where two identical CVs that only differed in one aspect were sent to employers. Irrelevant factors such as inferred religion, age, gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, etc. affect the likelihood that someone is invited to an interview. That’s unfairness (or discrimination).”

Bohnet and Chilazi say that to achieve fairness in the workplace, the focus should be on behaviors, not attitudes.

“Decades of research suggest that it’s incredibly hard to change attitudes,” Bohnet says. “But we can change behaviors without changing attitudes.”

She elaborates: “People respond to their environments. They might enjoy driving fast, but if the likelihood of getting a hefty fine is high, they will be less likely to do so. So, we are not changing how people feel about speeding but we’re changing what they actually do. This also applies to fairness. Hiring managers might have more positive attitudes toward applicants who look like they do or share the same hobby. But if they have to evaluate applicants, say based on the code they write or some other work sample test and don’t have any other information available, they can’t act on their in-group preferences.”

Dr. Iris Bohnet

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For a while, many organizations were jumping on the diversity, equity, and inclusion bandwagon. Now, many of the early adopters are scrambling to dismantle their DEI programs. What happened?

“To start with, some of these efforts were only performative—a statement that was cheap talk or a new program that mostly served to virtue-signal,” Bohnet says. “For example, the evidence is rather overwhelming that the traditional diversity training programs do not impact behavior and sometimes lead to backlash. But then, there are also organizations that really did want to promote change. They might have experimented with removing names from résumés to help them assess talent based on merit. Or they collaborated with us to examine their performance appraisal processes to see whether there were differences in employee ratings that could not be explained by performance. Or they introduced a ‘virtual-first’ rule as they had learned that in hybrid meetings, it was hard for those who called in to participate. Going forward, I hope an increasing number of organizations will base their efforts to equalize the playing field on approaches grounded in evidence.”

What does Bohnet say to people who believe DEI programs often come across as promoting the bias and unfairness they purport to eliminate? In other words, prejudice under a new name?

“The data tells the tale,” she says. “I encourage everyone to measure and see.”

Bohnet notes that gender equality is a two-way street. While opportunities for women are still relatively limited in some workplaces, she says that in some ways men are also experiencing inequality in the workplace. How? Why?

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“Stereotypes about what makes for a good elementary school teacher or a good engineer are still alive and well,” she says”. Thus, it’s harder for men to get jobs as teachers and for women to get jobs as engineers Boys are increasingly falling behind in school and need men as role models. And we need more women in STEM. Women such as the Swedish engineer, Astrid Linder, have much to contribute to the world. She helped develop the first car crash dummy based on a woman’s body to make cars safer.”

What’s Bohnet’s advice to people who want to help produce change at work, but they don’t have the advantage of position or title?

“Start with what you can impact,” she says. “Perhaps, the art up on your walls, the content on your webpage, a meeting, a product, for example, an algorithm or personal protective equipment, PPE. Many of us learned during Covid that PPE was not made for all body types and sizes. And talk to your boss, HR or an ombudsperson when you detect unfairness, say in the treatment of junior colleagues, the support people get to succeed or the allocation of work that does not advance a career—think note-taking and the like.”

In Bohnet’s view, how does the concept of fairness relate to the concept of meritocracy?

“Without fairness, there is no meritocracy,” she says. “According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a meritocracy is, and I quote, ‘a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit.’ I fear literally thousands of studies show that this is not the world we live in. So, let’s level the playing field first.”

What can leaders do to advance genuine fairness in the workplace without coming across as social engineers or ideology cops?

“We have to realize that all processes in our organizations are ‘engineered,’” Bohnet says. “Take the résumé. Research suggests that much of what we include in our résumés is not predictive of future performance. Is it social engineering when we redesign the résumé or base hiring decisions on more predictive factors such as work sample tests that assess the skills and competencies people have? Is ‘virtual first’ social engineering, just because we give those often overlooked a voice and as such increase our collective intelligence?”

Fairness, Bohnet says, is not a program. “It’s a way of doing things.”