In your view, what female stereotypes still prevail in our society? What are the perceptions of women in business?

Well, I think the stereotypes have changed very much. We all stereotype—and both men and women stereotype women. I want to be really clear that the evidence—empirical evidence in research—suggests that it's not that men see us one way and women see women in different ways; we see each other the same way; we've been socialized in the same system of social norms and mores, and as a result the behaviors that are often identified as making it difficult for women to succeed flow from perceptions of both men and women about women.

Do you think that there is still gender inequality in business organizations?

Yes, but I typically see the gender inequality based on a sense of organizations or individuals needing to keep women in their place. This overt sexism—“women don't belong here”—is actually relatively rare. Of course there are always a few very visible exceptions—there was a recent Newsweek article about what Silicon Valley thinks about women, focusing on the lack of women in venture capital firms—but let's put that aside for a minute (Burleigh 2015).

Gender inequality is more likely to flow from the imposition of nonconscious biases that are much more subtle, but their presence makes it systematically more difficult for women to get promoted. And we have lots of empirical evidence to support the contention that these systematic biases reduce the likelihood that women will advance in organizations—not because of their performance, but because of their gender.

One of the most powerful examples of this was a study that was published in the American Economic Review by Goldin and Rouse in 2000. They looked at the hiring process of symphony orchestras. Why would the leaders of a symphony orchestra care whether it's a woman or a man playing the violin; what they care about is the quality of the music. So because the music, the performance, of the person is what's important, you might expect the impact of gender discrimination to be minimal. What these researchers found was quite the opposite. When aspiring musicians auditioned behind a screen, women were 50 percent more likely to move to the second round of auditions and were 1.6 times more likely to win an orchestral position compared to women who did not audition behind a screen.

The evaluators judged the female-generated music as less worthy when they knew it was a female. When they did not know the gender of the musician, it dramatically changed how women's performance was evaluated. Making the gender of the musician unknown changed the outcome.

Second, men and women are treated differently in evaluations. Consider the tenure process at universities. There are standards of performance. Using sports metaphors, we often question where the candidate “cleared the bar.” If someone's record reveals that they are so far above the bar that the bar is really irrelevant, then male or female, it doesn't make any difference—we're going to tenure that person. If their record indicates that they cannot clear the bar, don't make it to the bar, then we're not going to tenure them—male or female. The issue is what happens when they are right at the bar. Now it is a judgment call. Here is where we run into trouble. If we hold the standards very tightly for women, we say, “Well, she didn't actually clear the bar so we're going to deny her promotion.” But, because we have a lot more experience with men, some of whom received tenure and went on to outstanding performance, and some who were tenured and went on to mediocre performance, we are more likely to give him “the benefit of the doubt.” When we do that, if you play that out systematically, what happens is you create the exact organization that we find ourselves with at the moment—where there's lots of women in the lower ranks, and there are very few at the top. It doesn't take much; all we have to do is to make a slight adjustment in leeway around how we apply the standard—and we get the effect. So the question is Are we giving people an equal benefit of the doubt?

What are the strategies that women can use in the workplace to increase their power, navigate their way through the organization, and ultimately thrive in the workplace?

We can look at strategies that are macro strategies and micro strategies. The macro strategy requires us to consider the criteria that organizations use to screen applicants: for example, do criteria discriminate poor performers from good performers, or do they discriminate on something other than performance? Consider what happened at Carnegie Mellon University (Fischer and Margolis 2002). Computer science majors were overwhelmingly male—and the university administration and faculty were trying to figure out why. One of the things they realized was a criterion for admittance to the program was that a student had to have extensive computer and coding experience. They asked themselves, Is this experience really necessary for performance in the major? Can't we teach coding? Can't we provide internships for experience?

When they revised the criteria for admissions to reflect the set of demands that the people must meet to get into the major, within a very short period of time, 40 percent of the majors were women. And they didn't suffer in terms of quality—they didn't say that they're lowering the bar—they were just saying, “Can we teach this?” And the answer was, “Yes, you can teach that, it doesn't need to be an entry criterion.”

So with a very disciplined eye, assess the criteria you are using to move people into the organization or up the organization. Ask yourself, Do we use that criteria because we've always used that criteria? Or are the criteria we use, in fact, the criteria that discriminate between successful and nonsuccessful performance?

So that's one of the strategies that we can use as employers, or as organizations. How do you feel about things like positive discrimination or quotas? Do you think they have a place in promoting women?

The first thing I'd want to do is make sure that the criteria we use in our organizations are valid. That is, they reflect the skills, knowledge, and abilities that we need for successful performance. Then, you don't have to positively discriminate. You just take out the criteria that are discriminatory—if you think about this, women have been the majority of our college graduates (I don't know if this is global but it's true in the United States) for the last 20 years. And so the question is Are you really lowering any criteria, or are you benefiting one group to the exclusion of the other? If you have the criteria correctly identified, then you dramatically improve the likelihood that you will identify qualified talent, regardless of their race, gender, or age. It turns out that Stanford actually overadmits women from the MBA pool in comparison to the percentage of women in the MBA pool. You might call this an example of positive discrimination. And I have had people ask me, “Does that mean that Stanford is admitting women who are less qualified?” And the answer is no—for two reasons. First, we have over 5,000 applicants for 400 positions. We could reject the bottom 3,500 and then just randomly select 400 people from the remaining 1,500 and get a great class.

So if you have the luxury, as Stanford does, of having so many people applying, then you can pick the class in a way to make the class better off. And that is the second point. There is a consistent finding that adding women to teams makes the teams more effective at collective action—and it turns out there is a lot of research that says that when classes are in teams—it's at team level—when teams are functioning in socially diverse environments, their performance is better (Wooley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, and Malone 2010). So having more women on teams seems to make the teams more effective. So let's design for innovation and effectiveness rather than for homogeneity.

The interesting thing is that if you look at organizations—most organizations are at, or close to, parity at the lower levels. But the demography looks quite a bit different at the executive levels. That is where the huge disparity exists. In many respects, you already have the pool (the lower level); so let's now talk about what an individual can do.

I would recommend your readers go to the New York Times, where there's been a series of interesting thought-out pieces by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg. They talk about how to get your voice heard, and they have nicely written, research-based discussions about the challenges that women face. In particular, they suggest strategies that a number of us have been using to help women get their voices heard in their organizations and getting credit for the insights that they bring to the table. There's a big problem in that women are more likely to be interrupted when they speak, and that any ideas generated by a women aren't given equivalent consideration as those very same ideas voiced by a man.

One strategy that an increasing number of teams and organizations are adopting is the “no interruption” rule.

What happens, oftentimes, is that a woman will begin to speak—and she will be interrupted before she can complete her thought. Let this happen often enough and even the most extraverted among us will simply give up trying to be heard. And so the idea of the “no interruption” rule is that everybody gets to get their idea out before there's an interruption. Very simple and actually quite a bit more civil than the testy retort of “Let me finish my thought.” Certainly, I could have held my ground and as you interrupted, begin speaking louder and maybe even observe stridently, “Hold on a second, I'm not done!” But women are socialized to be more polite, so this is difficult to do time and time again. But with the “no interruption” rule, we now have a standard of civility that applies to all team members. It is not about women; it is about the ideas.

A second strategy relies on my teammates. If I say, “I have this really great idea,” or I volunteer an idea and it doesn't get traction, it may be very difficult for me to argue, “That was a really good idea, you need to listen again.” If I do, I am likely to get a negative response from my teammates for being so pushy. But if you and I are in the meeting, and you say, “What a great idea Maggie had—and I don't think we really heard it. So, Maggie, could you restate it again so that we can get the full sense of it?” You now get credit—and so do I. You get credit as someone who is paying attention and getting folks engaged in the conversation—so you're in a kind of leadership facilitation role that you get credit for—and I get credit for my idea. So part of this is like having a posse: have people there who, when you have a good idea, can support you. And it's not only another woman—men can do that too, and in fact it's effective when a man says to the team, “Hey, look. Maggie just said that, and I think we need to look at what her perspective is on that.” So you are the champion for other people, and they are the champions for you. And you both get credit for it. And the point is that you get the benefit of being supportive of others. If I extol your virtues, that is certainly an acceptable behavior for me to engage in—I'm being supportive of my colleagues, I am helping the team, it's perfect—much better than acts of self-aggrandizement! And so I think we need to have those kinds of ideas in mind and be quite generous with the allocation of credit to other folk when it's deserved. And don't forget, this is all deserved. It's not like if it's a stupid idea I'm going to support it—then we'd both be diminished. But what I can also say is, “Wow! That sounds like just what Maggie said! So now I think we're getting a consistency—we've got Steve and Maggie suggesting the same course of action.”

So these small changes can have a big impact. What is important to understand is that, in the evolution of today's organizations, we rarely fight the battle of access. What we are fighting now is the unintended consequences of good intentions. To do so requires discipline, vigilance, and leveraging our support networks.