Gender bias: Common practice versus best practice

The idea that there are fundamental and universal differences between the sexes is an extremely popular one – and it’s one that underpins gender bias both in the workplace and far beyond. We’ve all heard that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus, and that men don’t listen and women can’t read maps. We’re brought up to believe that our brains are even wired differently: that we think and communicate in different ways and have different yet conveniently complementary skillsets. The assumption is that the sooner we recognise these differences and appreciate that men and women bring different things to the party, the happier we will all be.

The research, however, provides little evidence to back this up. A study of 1.1 million people across 26 countries found no differences between men and women on personality dimensions, while a further study of gender similarities and differences used data from 46 meta-analyses to demonstrate that males and females are in fact highly similar. Nevertheless, assumptions of profound differences between the genders remain a major factor behind gender inequality and gender discrimination in the workplace today.

Gender diversity isn’t just a ‘nice-to-have’ or good for PR – it’s also been shown time and again to have an impact on the bottom line and on organisations’ ability to attract and retain talent. McKinsey’s wide-ranging study of diversity and inclusion in the workplace found that businesses in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 25% more likely to have increased profitability than companies in the fourth quartile, while a 2017 survey by PWC found that 61% of women said that the gender diversity of an organisation’s leadership team would influence whether or not they applied for a role there.

Gender pay gap equality and a commitment to flexible working, worker well-being and good support for parents continue to rank consistently highly on women’s employment wish lists. So given all of these obvious benefits to gender diversity, why is it that organisations have made so little progress to date on achieving gender equality?

Stereotypes are one of the forms of our unconscious bias. They come from a variety of different sources – such as the media, our friends and family, our cultural background and our personal experiences – and are essentially a type of cognitive shortcut that enables us to categorise the world, saving us from having to interpret every interaction from scratch.

However, while this ability to sort people into categories might have helped our caveman ancestors build social bonds and tell friend from foe, today it’s a major contributing factor to the development of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination. Extensive research has shown that in terms of intellectual capabilities, there are no significant differences between men and women, yet it’s still the case that certain professions are overwhelmingly dominated by one gender or the other and that women are under-represented across the sectors in senior roles.

A 2015 report by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed women making up just 24.7% of computer and mathematical occupations and only 15.1% of architecture and engineering occupations, despite constituting nearly half (47%) of the total US workforce. By contrast, women accounted for 74% of human resources managers and a massive 82% of social workers, yet only 27% of chief executives.

The differences are indeed stark, but there is a lack of scientific evidence to show that these are down to any inherent difference in intellectual capability. The differences that emerge appear instead to be a result of stereotyping and social conditioning that begins very early in our lives. Boys are naturally ‘expected’ to be better at maths and sciences, are actively encouraged in these fields and are given more opportunities to develop their skills. Boys are also expected to be ‘brave’ and ‘assertive’, and these traits are rewarded. Girls, on the other hand, are expected to be ‘emotional’ or ‘good communicators’ and it is their verbal and creative skills that are encouraged. They are also expected to be ‘caring’ and ‘gentle’ and are rewarded for these behaviours.

These stereotypes persist into adulthood, with both men and women facing social penalties for going against the expectations of their gender. Positive gender stereotypes can be just as damaging as negative ones – and because they are positive, they are even more likely to be accepted as being ‘true’. The belief that women are naturally empathetic, for example, can serve to reinforce our belief that empathy is a desirable trait in all female employees, and as a result, we may overlook other qualities that don’t tick the ‘female’ box. Similarly, we may not appreciate ‘female’ traits such as empathy in men, because we aren’t programmed to value them as highly.

The gendered roles in work and society that we see today are not the product of inherent differences between the genders, but a social construct – and history shows that things were very different in the past.

Prior to the industrial revolution, men and women performed a wide range of mutually interchangeable roles, from masons and brewers to carpenters and hoteliers. Even in 18th century Europe, 9% of girls in England and 19% of girls in Geneva went into trade apprenticeships. Compare that to the US today, where only 2.6% of trade jobs are held by women. As little as 100 years ago, nursing – today seen as a predominantly female occupation – was done almost exclusively by men, and articles were written in the popular press decrying the attempts of women to enter the profession.

So what changed?

As the separation of ‘work’ and ‘home’ after the industrial revolution became more entrenched, so did expectations around women staying at home as primary caregivers and men going out to be the breadwinners. New technology came to designate the status of certain roles and the division between ‘male’ and ‘female’ roles became more pronounced. This state of affairs continues today, with roles involving new technology and investigation being seen as typically ‘male’ while social, creative and administrative roles tend to be regarded as ‘female’ – usually carrying with them lower pay and lower status.

Gender bias can be pervasive, deeply entrenched and difficult to resolve. In a competitive workplace setting with time pressures and heavy workloads, biases tend to thrive and multiply and when bias begins to inform our decisions, fairness and objectivity become jeopardised.

Gender bias at work can lead to women:

• receiving less critical performance feedback
• not having access to professional networks
• having less influential mentors and sponsors
• getting fewer career-enhancing opportunities
• being paid less for the same roles as men.

Gender bias also affects how men and women in the workplace are viewed once they become parents.

Typically, when a man becomes a parent, he is still regarded as being ‘competent’ but gains perceptions of ‘warmth’ as he will be seen as more gentle and caring as well as being mature and ready to take on new responsibilities. When a woman becomes a parent, however, she is typically seen as losing ‘competence’, and while she will retain and possibly enhance her qualities of ‘warmth’, this is not valued as highly in the workplace.

When it comes to requesting parental leave, flexible or home-working to accommodate caring responsibilities, both men and women can be disadvantaged. However, men are typically disadvantaged to a greater degree than women, as they are seen to be going against expectations of the male being the ‘breadwinner’ and may be considered less committed by their employer. Women are typically viewed more favourably when they request flexible working practices after maternity leave, as it is seen as more acceptable for them to be the ‘care-giver’ in the family, although it will still impact negatively on perceptions around their commitment to their employer and may ultimately affect their career progression in the long term.

Some of the most common approaches to tackling gender disparity in organisations are setting gender targets, implementing gender-diverse interview panels and creating gender- diverse talent pipelines, but these approaches have largely failed to deliver the desired results.

The idea: To address a lack of gender diversity, we will set gender targets for our business, which will translate to more women in senior roles

The reality: As much as gender targets may sound like a great idea in theory, setting a quota on the number of men or women you hire can easily encourage tokenism. Questions often arise around whether a woman has been promoted because she is competent and valued, or simply to balance the scale, leading to a ‘stigma of incompetence’. Norway has adopted this approach with their 40/40 rule, which stipulates that at least 40% of board members must be men and 40% women – and while on the surface this may seem like a good idea, if we dig deeper a different picture emerges. With this method, change is seen only at board level – positions below board haven’t changed, and there is no opportunity for a trickle-down effect. Secondly, most of the positions on the board held by women are in fact non-executive positions, meaning that these individuals have no responsibility for the day to day running of the business – so true power still does not lie in the hands of women.

The idea: If we have more women on talent pipelines, we will have a more diverse and balanced pool of talent to draw from, which will in turn increase the chances of women being promoted into more senior roles.

The reality: When it comes to promotions, ‘scarcity of resource’ prevents women from moving upwards. The Shifting Standards Model, coined by Biernat and colleagues, found that when there is competition for limited resources – exactly what happens during a promotion process – the standards used to assess women shift. To get on to the pipeline, the reference point is who are the most competent women, however, to get promoted, the reference point shifts to who is the most competent. Due to stereotypes, when considered in amongst men, women are typically viewed as having less competence. The standard being applied shifts and we judge women to be lacking in the core traits needed for successful leadership. As a consequence, having more women on the talent pipeline is unlikely to lead to more women in leadership roles because when it comes to the crunch, stereotypes still guide us toward men.

The idea: If we have a gender-diverse interview panel we will promote greater levels of fairness and reduce bias, meaning that more women will be hired and gender diversity will increase.

The reality: When thinking about gender disparity, there’s an assumption that the fault lies with men. But what if women are complicit in their own subordination? Psychologist Herb Goldberg ran a series of studies where female participants were asked to read and evaluate a number of articles. Goldberg found that the women judged the articles written by men to be of better quality than those written by women, and our own research at Pearn Kandola confirms this.

Another way in which this inherent bias can be seen is in Implicit Association Tests, in which women typically associate men more easily with competence than they do women. Gender-diverse interview panels are essentially ineffective because group membership (i.e. being a woman), does not protect a woman from stereotyping, which means they are as much at risk of making decisions that favour men as male members of the panel. What we need to be doing is tackling the stereotypes that are driving decisions and causing the disparity.

So how can organisations start addressing and eliminating gender bias and improving gender diversity?

1. Give everyone access to bias training opportunities

The first thing we can do is to reject the belief that men and women are different in terms of their skills and abilities. Bias can have a strong influence on how we assess people’s skills, strengths and potential, so learning to recognise our biases around gender, constantly reviewing the decisions we make and forcing ourselves to be objective, rather than relying on convenient stereotypes, will greatly increase the likelihood of the organisation securing the best talent and everyone getting the right development opportunities.

Online bias training enables you to provide quality training at scale, ensuring that you can reach as many people in your organisation as possible. Technology can help us to reduce our biases and stop us from forming these ‘habits of the mind’. Our digital solution K+NEGATE enables users to intervene and stop bias at its source by challenging our implicit associations and stereotypes around gender identity and helping us to form new associations in our memory.

Implicit Association Tests (IATs) are also phenomenal insight tools that can be used by organisations to help their employees identify their unconscious biases. IATs measure how closely our brains associate different words and concepts and in doing so help to uncover biases that may lead us to discriminate based on gender.

2. Implement gender-neutral recruitment practices

Having standardised interviews in which all candidates are asked the same questions, anonymising resumes and having name-blind evaluation processes can all help to eliminate bias from selection and recruitment processes.

Bear in mind that job advertisements that use gendered language can actually put people off applying for a role – research has shown that adjectives such as ‘competitive’ and ‘strategic’, for example, can deter women from putting themselves forward for certain roles, as they are seen as being more ‘masculine’. Job specifications that contain gendered language can also prejudice recruiters in favour of men or women before they even reach the interview stage. It’s also worth remembering that the gender of the people already doing a particular job in an organisation will tend to prejudice recruiters in favour of recruiting people of the same gender – not to mention the fact that the standards required for the job will probably be higher for members of the opposite gender who apply.

3. Review salaries and standardise pay

On average, women in the US are paid 20% less than men, meaning the average woman misses out on more than $400,000 over the course of her career – and this gap yawns ever wider the more high-level the role. An essential part of achieving gender equality is to ensure equal pay by regularly reviewing salaries for gender parity and ensuring transparency around pay and remuneration. When recruiting, it’s a good idea to set the pay range offered on the basis of experience as opposed to on how well the candidate negotiated their last pay package, and to be clear about whether or not a salary is negotiable. Research shows that women are just as likely as men to negotiate their salary if they know it’s negotiable but are far less likely than men to do so if this isn’t made clear, for fear of being seen to be behaving in a ‘pushy’ or ‘aggressive’ manner and violating gender behaviour norms.

Interested in finding out how tackling gender bias could be a win not just for the women in your business, but for your business as a whole? Contact us today to find out how Kandola+ digital learning programmes can help you tackle bias in your organisation and reap the benefits of gender diversity.