What to Do If You Experience Gender Bias

By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Oftentimes, the problem with gender bias is that it acts like a filter, affecting how we see people, what we notice about them, and how we interpret their behavior. If you’re human, you have biases, and like other stereotypes, assumptions about a person based on their gender are made automatically. Both men and women are guilty of bias, but in the workplace it’s women who pay the ultimate price for these biases.

According to Iris Bohnet, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and the director of its Women and Public Policy Program, even those with the best intentions who don’t want to discriminate are likely to fall prey to stereotypes they’ve come to believe are emblematic of how society works.

“In today’s society seeing is believing, so if you don’t see women in leadership positions, you don’t naturally associate women with leadership,” Bohnet said.

Because hidden gender bias is automatically triggered, it should be thought of as a negative impulse that you fight to control. Bohnet has made an interesting connection between gender bias and studies concerning image, nutrition, and saving money: things that require intention: things we know we should do, but we don’t do because it’s easier not to – like being on a diet.

“The key to fighting gender bias is changing the environment so that being biased becomes more difficult,” Bohnet said. “When you’re on a diet, you’re not going to keep ice cream in your refrigerator. If bad food is available, you will eat it. Changing the environment so that it becomes more difficult to eat poorly or so that it becomes more difficult to discriminate against women can make all the difference.”

According to Bohnet, doing the right thing and creating the right environment requires a “nudge.” Bohnet took inspiration from the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which focuses on choice architecture – how outcomes might be influenced – or nudged – by how choices are presented.

Nudging the Gender Gap Shut

Bohnet believes that nudges can be used to help close the gender gap and combat gender bias. For organizations that are interested in changing but aren’t interested in regulatory or market interventions, a change in environment is proving to be very beneficial. Bohnet’s study, When Performance Dominates Gender Bias: Joint vs. Separate Evaluation [PDF], revealed that when multiple options are presented simultaneously and evaluated comparatively, people tend to rely less on cognitive short cuts, or stereotypes, to make decisions.

Bohnet and her coauthors, Alexandra van Geen and Max Bazerman, wrote that in the study, when evaluating one candidate at a time, “the interviewers were much more likely to base their decisions on the candidate’s gender, with male candidates preferred for mathematical tasks and female candidates preferred for verbal tasks – regardless of how the candidate had performed in the past. In contrast, when a man and a woman were evaluated at the same time, the interviewers were more concerned with their past performance than with their gender. The gender gap completely disappeared. This meant the more qualified candidate was chosen, regardless of gender.”

According to Bohnet and her collaborators, evaluating male and female candidates together can make a huge difference when it comes to promotional decisions. “When candidates are evaluated for leadership positions one at a time, we expect to see gender gaps in the promotion of equally qualified candidates, at the expense of qualified women,” she wrote. “Less qualified candidates will be promoted more often due to insufficient attention to quality, leaving both the highly qualified women and the company worse off.”

What You Can Do

All of this is beside the point, of course, if you’re experiencing gender bias in the workplace – and not just during a promotional interview. One of the goals of the Women and Public Policy Program is to help women become more “gender intelligent,” which means understanding gender stereotypes and learning how to navigate the system despite their existence.

“This is always an uncomfortable conversation because it seems like it’s about fixing women, but it’s not. The system is the problem, but we have to be pragmatic. This is the way things are now. We have to both operate within it and figure out how to fix it,” Bohnet said.  “Our chances have never been better than today. The business case for gender equality is mounting with more and more evidence showing that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones. Gender equality is the right and the smart thing to do.”

If you are experiencing gender bias in the workplace and want to do something about it, Bohnet recommends going to the person at your company who is responsible for holding others accountable, such as a diversity officer or women’s initiative leader, and speaking to them about the issues you’re experiencing. If no such person exits, go to human resources, but make sure that you don’t discuss the problem as if it’s a personal issue just affecting you.

“The biggest mistake you can make is making it seem as if the issue of gender bias is one that is only affecting you or it’s just a problem you’re experiencing. You need to talk to other women first to find out whether this is a shared experience,” Bohnet said. “Then, you can point out that it’s a company issue, an issue that is affecting women who work in the company more generally. When you make it clear that what’s happening to you is a symptom of a larger problem, those in charge will be more likely to hear you and take action.”